Torres del Parque

Salmona had spent nine years in Le Corbusier's Paris atelier before returning to Bogotá in 1958, and Torres del Parque, designed with the engineer Domenico Parma and the architect Urbano Ripoll, is the project where he broke most decisively with what he had learned there. Construction began in May 1968 on a site beside the Plaza de Toros de Santamaría, whose circular mass the three towers curve around and echo, their silhouette also answering the line of Bogotá's eastern hills. Salmona chose fired brick over concrete or glass for reasons he stated in plain terms: it is made from clay, it employs many hands, its colour shifts through the day, and brick architecture sits naturally beside vegetation. Ramps, spiral stairs and open terraces do the work that corridors and elevators do elsewhere, treating circulation as inhabited space rather than leftover space, and three-quarters of the 4.3-hectare site remains garden and plaza rather than building footprint. Completed in 1970 with 294 apartments across the three blocks, it was declared a National Monument of Colombia and stands as the clearest founding statement of what critics later called Bogotano brick architecture.