Rogelio Salmona Mordols (1927.2007), recognized as one of the most important architects in Latin America, developed an architecture of a deep synthesis rooted in its social reality and its environment.
His work has received, among other awards, the 1990 American Workshop Prize, Latin Award, Prince Claus Award and the Alvar Aalto Gold Medal 2003 for ‘the implicit message in his work that reinforces the essential values of architecture '.
This research aimed to gather all Rogelio Salmona´s file in a reasoned catalogue of all his work, although studied and published partially, it lacked of an overall vision. Its 150 projects were analyzed contextualizing in his career while making diagrams that showed us their logical structures through topological relationships. In parallel, all briefs used by the author, the work done by researchers on their work, especially developed by teachers Germán Téllez and Ricardo L. Castro and unconditional collaboration of the architect and landscape designer Maria Elvira Madriñán, Salmona´s wife and collaborator since 1980.
Not only an amazing set of projects were discovered but also a configuration of an architectural work in which, for more than five decades, Salmona developed some proposals of universal character committed to their local environment. This discovery exceeded the limits of cataloging extending them to new readings and interpretations of their interventions. Thus arose Re-creation as a tour of those architectures that influenced him and of which he made a selection of knowledge. Referents as those teachers whose experiences excited him and which tried to make them his own, highlighting the influence of the work of Le Corbusier during his apprenticeship in his atelier (1948.1957). Communicating vessels-simultaneity as an approach to his architectural context, the so-called Second generation of the Modern Movement. Architects from different fields and backgrounds with who there was a determined coincidence of thought and work. To arrange a linear narrative structure I chose a thematic classification of his work as conceptual framework of interpretation. The analysis of projective strategies applied to the work of Salmone was established in three sequences: contact with the ground (artificial topographies and staggering), the relationship between open spaces and built spaces (central patio, concatenated patios and enclosures) and horizontal / vertical relationship (planimetric fans, towers and extrusions).
Salmona´s creative philosophy is based on the notion of place as interlacement of the environmental, historical and social environment. The site enriched with the good architecture built with local materials and construction systems create the place. Created and built a place that many places retraced. In his works, materials become important: brick, concrete and stone which were handmade and plastically used. Natural materials or foreign region making viable and enriching the constructive act. Moreover, he works with not always tangibles materials, elements such as light, water, vegetation, nature accompanying his spaces enriching them emotionally. Tropical intensity light emphasizes its expressionism in open spatiality. Luminosities in their interiors, chiaroscuro intentional, dense shadows telluric, contributions colorful changing, light energy under strict control by ethical imperative, water shimmering reflections playing on gear. Vital light and water in Salmona’s architecture imbued with natural, inseparable, their endless wanderings. In the city, one of his major concerns, he creates open and public spaces that encourage meeting and the citizens´ ownership, in the conviction of his transformative role. Social experiments in the relationship between city and countryside. Salmona inquired, with intelligence, restraint and poetry, in the pursuit of lasting essence of architecture with an ethical, political and aesthetic commitment that is embodied in a modern architecture, a personal, pragmatic and poetic path with memories of echoes of various pasts. Essential American spatiality intertwines architecture, city, landscape, nature, and always, the human being, for which it creates its harmonious spaces.
With this thesis, the existing documentation of Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona´s work was rigorously catalogued and it has been used in the development of the webpage of Foundation Rogelio Salmona; it is expected to have expanded the understanding of his trajectory; it is intended to serve as a basis for further research and, ultimately, it aims to show the essence of an infiltrated architecture of nature.