FMG, Esquema estructura. FMG,structural sketch.
SUSPENDED BLOCK, SEPARATED FROM THE PLATFORM
The building for the main offices of the Flota Mercante Grancolombiana, FMG, with 12 stories, two basements and commercial premises in the first floors, was designed and built by the firm Cuéllar, Serrano, Gómez -CSG -, integrated by architect Camilo Cuéllar, engineer-architect Gabriel Serrano and engineer José Gómez Pinzón, one of the firms with the greatest impact on the profession in the second half of the 20th century. After winning the private tender convened by the maritime transport company and financed by the powerful Federation of Coffee Growers, it was designed in 1961 and built between 1962 and 1964 by CSG with the participation of Hans Drews Arango. The structural engineer and consultant was Jorge Pinzón. The FMG is a compressed version of the elevated blocks that allow the continuity of the urban public space, popularized by Le Corbusier in numerous urban proposals. In this case, it suffices to remember the Unités and the redents proposed for the Pilot Plan for Bogotá in 1951, supported on pilotis to allow circulation under the blocks. At its modest scale, the FMG expands the space for collective use by making an ingenious typological operation: starting from a tower with a slab, its two components are split: the tower is kept on the building line and it is supported on a portico, parallel to its central strip, and the platform is pushed towards the back of the lot. This operation produces a large covered porch with 8-meter overhangs on each side of the portico and an uncovered strip given over to the premises of the commercial platform.
For the structure of the tower, a system was designed to minimize the quantity and mass of the vertical supports (see diagram), defining a central strip of services and circulations and keeping the typical office plan free of internal supports. In fact, it is not a tower, it is rather a block, since it goes from median wall to median wall, waiting for the neighbors to replicate the proposed operation, attaching itself to the division walls and extending as much as possible the block that floats on the public space, also continuous. The city forced the builders to give a “decent” finish to the two median walls, and that is why they are covered in Bogota stone or piedra muñeca. The message was clear: it was possible to propose an overall strategy that would organize, as a collective heritage, the public space of the International Center that was starting to materialize. Making the user of the commercial and service areas feel free to move while being secure by the distance from motorized traffic, would improve the profitability of the real estate operations necessary to achieve it. It doesn’t matter that the lesson of the FMG had a very limited effect even in the hands of the designers of the firm itself. The possibilities of acting in a coordinated manner clashed with the interests of the agents of each real estate operation. The International Center, expanded to the large blocks that surround it today, continues to be one of the sectors in which modern urbanism contributed in a concrete way to improve the spatial quality of the central area of Bogotá.
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