Once a year, the Barranquilla Carnival enlivens the Colombian city of its namesake with four days of festivities and parades. Now, a new building – La Fábrica de Cultura – promises to make the annual explosion of color, sound and form a permanent and highly visible urban object.
Barranquilla, an industrial coastal city that has long struggled to define itself in relation to its charismatic and much older neighbor Cartagena and the great port city of Santa Marta, has turned the carnival – the largest in the Caribbean – into his special event. Located primarily in a working-class neighborhood, the festivities attract tens of thousands of visitors but have little economic impact during the rest of the year. La Fábrica—a workshop and school housed in a concrete frame filled with colorful tile and spiral ramps—will serve as a place where local residents can learn the skills needed to stage, direct and perform in the carnival and its ancillary activities. Organizers of the new facility hope that residents can then apply those skills to develop their arts, crafts and business skills in other areas. Also, the building where the school/incubator is located is an open structure, which in itself is part of the process of institutionalization and activation of the carnival.
The project, initiated by the former mayor of Barranquilla, Elsa Noguera, began as a carnival museum. She turned to Hubert Klumpner and Alfredo Brillembourg, a professor and a former professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, respectively, and former partners in the architecture firm Urban-Think Tank. Brillembourg and Klumpner had settled in Venezuela before moving to Switzerland a decade ago. They specialize in developing projects based on infrastructure and self-build – ranging from the tram with community centers they designed in Caracas to the “tin shack” neighborhoods in South Africa – stemming from close collaboration with activist groups .
When Brillembourg and Klumpner arrived in Barranquilla, they found that the strongest and most effective partner was not the amorphous carnival organization or the city, but the state-sponsored Escuela Distrital de Artes y Tradiciones Populares, a craft-based school that used garages and school . halls around town for its activities. Although not directly related to the carnival, the school offered itself as a place where neighborhood groups and individuals could develop their crafts and turn their experiences into more permanent sources of income.
Working with schools and neighborhood groups, Brillembourg and Klumpner developed a scheme for what Klumpner calls “central infrastructure for education” as an open and flexible scaffolding. The structure would also serve as an anchor that would help keep the existing small fabrication shops and housing stable in the face of the creeping entertainment moving from the city center and wealthier neighborhoods.
The result is a six-story, 80,000-square-foot concrete grid that is largely open to the mild climate and diverse uses. It contains several more or less conventional air-conditioned classrooms, as well as a large semi-underground auditorium that can be rented out to provide income for the new institution. Similarly, EDA hopes to develop the unfinished roof into a restaurant. Construction costs of just under $2 million were paid for by the city with help from the Inter-American Development Bank and several grants from the Swiss government.
Rising as an enclosed and slender volume on a street filled with factories and low-rise workshops, the building allows visitors to enter between its columns and into a courtyard where the new structure faces a renovated former factory building single storey. The floors of the new structure pile up behind movable perforated louvres and around a central spiral staircase mounted somewhat improbably above the arched roof of the auditorium.
That central stairwell is the hub of La Fábrica’s show. The staircase itself, built by a local shipbuilder, wraps around a lazy set of loops that connect the floors and provide a stage where performers can strut their stuff or rehearse their moves, and students can watch or just hang out. . The tiles covering the walls and roof of the auditorium were also locally made. Klumpner worked with local artists and craftsmen on design and production, supporting the development of skills and techniques in a way that the team hopes will enable those manufacturers to produce building components for other countries.
In many ways, La Fábrica – centered on its grand processional staircase that serves as a place to see, observe and gather – is a fairly conventional building. Rising from a courtyard where access is controlled, towering over its neighbors and circling around the baroque circulation junction, it is known as a palace of culture. What sets La Fábrica apart from the traditions it nods to is the rawness of its actual spaces, the abundance of tilework and the compression of curves and colors. Like the carnival it uses archetypes developed from baroque theater in Italy and Spain – mixing them with African and Afro-Caribbean mythology and patterns, and then wrapping the whole ghost around cities built in colonial patterns dominated by abstract geometry and repeating elements – weaves La Fábrica vibrates, shakes and rotates through a concrete grid stretched to the height of what in Barranquilla counts as a medium-sized building.
Opened just this fall, La Fábrica was just starting to fill up with classes and workshops when I visited in late August. Through its visibility and association with the carnival, it has attracted many sign-ups to its offerings, although it is still too early to say whether it will live up to expectations. The solidity and monumental presence that the building presents also belies the openness and sense of being not only for but also for the carnival that early renderings of the designers promised. In turn, the school is already planning satellites in fast-growing neighborhoods on the outskirts of Barranquilla that are housing residents forced out of the central city by gentrification.
The most hopeful aspect for me about La Fábrica is the extent to which it remains an open frame and a translation of carnival combined in one building. That facility can now serve the arts and crafts of Barranquilla and thus provide educational and economic opportunities to the city’s less economically favored citizens in a way that preserves local culture. If it can be a model for branches and the local community – and well-known craft-based institutions elsewhere – it will have served its purpose by being a beautiful building.
The views and conclusions expressed by this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or the American Institute of Architects.
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