NOTE: Due to its critical posture, this project was rejected and disqualified in a public open call posted by Medellin’s City Hall. The architecture contest was looking for a building that would become a new cultural symbol of a regional and international character.
 
The wave of insecurity that emerged in the 80s beginning with the mafia phenomena produced the extermination of urban spaces in our city: an urbicide.  The street, the exterior and, in general, the public manifestations were eliminated, converting private interiors in unique, safe shelters: the outside, then, was reduced to a space of rapid, fearful transit between households.
 
The Liberty Pavilion replaces the originally requested Building + Plaza.  Its constitution as a passage establishes a simultaneous experience of interior and exterior; the program is emptied, the building disappears, the content is camouflaged, buried and/or elevated to permit a safe passage that recreated the memory of the curfew that we lived: the imposition of remaining inside.  A ruinous limit is established, a glass mask son the entire perimeter of the lot, permitting an interior walk, appeased by a guided tour that freezes a series of symbols, of icons, of subjects, of recognizable and aesthetically rejected visions, but that pretend to instruct, memorize and overcome the shameful history that these processes produced in our culture.  Our liberty is reduced to ascribe to these symbols new meanings, freeing them from their tragic content; the project, then, undertakes a process of re–semantisation: on the ruins, Paradise is drawn.
 
The sequelae of the narcotraffic period give rise to thinking about our city and our country in a different way.  The traditional notions of plaza (being), street (passing), housing (dwelling), factory (working), change beginning with this problem.
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This new search for something that reveals the city and makes it singular uses the strategy of uncovering this secret memory to free us from shame.  This project surpasses the sensations of fear, which appears on its surface in a state of detained and embellished decomposition.  This demonstrates our vestiges; its now – redeemed past in an aesthetic process that legitimizes it, that elevates it to the category of symbol to provoke directly a healing process of the mind, in the same way as the Jews permanently do with their Holocaust through museums, movies, documentaries or as the North Americans pretend to remember their 9/11 with a symbolic project at Ground zero … Eden is drawn on the ruins.
 
The proposal, then, seeks to reconstruct an interior as an alternative to develop the public.  It is not an open space, but a space defined and covered that empties inside to allow safe discourse.  It is tranquil for some fearful inhabitants; the building disappears and all that is left is a public space with memory.  The only things that remain are the limits that guard, that welcome, that receive; then the plaza is covered to protect its visitors.
 
This is a pavilion or a passage.  But it is not thematic; it is free and open, a place for concerts, for naturalists, for the displaced, for street trading, for exhibitions of horses, dogs, cattle, motorcycles, flowers; for religious processions, theatrical presentations, puppets, storytellers, fashion shows, to ...
 
The project is presented as a chronological line that shows the six dominant features of the socio – cultural conflicts that nourish their formalization; that is: Plant, Abound, Hide, Explosion, Ruin and, finally, Redemption, which is the outcome of the proposal.
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Proposal: Pablo Gomez Uribe, Esteban Restrepo (Escampa Collective)
Graphic Design: Juan Manuel Serrano 
Cad Drawing: Henry Oquendo