51-1 Arquitectos, from Peru, and Colombian Ctrl G, have won a competition to design an extension to the Modern Art Museum of Medellin, Colombia. It will be built much like the brick structures of the local barrios, with stacked boxes. The architects explain:
"Like a “V”. Medellin is a very steep valley and the city settles on its slopes. You are always going up or going down. With the typical growth pattern of Latin-American cities, informal barrios settle in impossible geographies of very difficult access. Piled on top of each other, brick constructions from the barrios go terracing and generating thousands of public interstices and small squares where people exercise their urbanity in flexible and ingenious ways.
The program for the museum competition consisted of series of rooms without any relationship among them. For us the relationship between the exterior public spaces that would activate the neighborhood seemed more important than the interior spaces. This condition allows to stop thinking of the project as with a conventional building. The organization logic is based then on the basic rules of each program component having an address to the circulation and the flexibility to growth over time (just like the barrios)."
