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Cartago´s Railroad Reusing

Part 2 Project 2001
Sebastian Restrepo
National University of Colombia - Manizales campus | Colombia
Building the city as an evolutive structure, make this proposition be an organism that try to keep the transformationals urban process that are stopped nowadays.

5 of the 10 Kms of railroad that belong to the Cartago District, are connecting the traditional downtown with the industrial areas and with the new residential zones, this is through a trail that with the disappearence of the railroad is now an empty division between urban and active zones.
The rest of the 5 Kms are passing by the growing zones acting as a promote of new and varied settlements.
The goverment is trying to reopen this railway and is giving posibilities for building a new and qualified urban space.

The C.R.R. defines a reading matrix that moves along the structure, the infrastructures and the utilities from the city, and as entity it relates: the symbolic, the built and the mobile.
The matrix turns out into a construction mechanism when it gathers devices [urban and programatic] that act as structure and knots in a topologic space allowing its free manipulation.

As a flexible structure is hurling part of the city, superimposing a transport system with alternative uses [culture, eduction, commerce] in a dosaged acting in 7 zones, to develope in a punctual way a [Z3] and with 4 big projects [ library, school, auditorium, museum] above the ancient buildings of the station.

This proposition tries to build a city as the "Unsafe Building" from M. Tafuri, to see his urban process "unfinished" as a phenomenon with strength continuity.

Sebastian Restrepo


The project presents an excellent theoretical reference background that allows the student to face the urban problematic in the city of Cartago. It consists in the urban lay fragmentation as a result of the railroad irruption in the city. This preexistence serves as a base for joining the lays again as of landmarks and panel points that will appear at the city limits as well as in its middle. It is here, beginning with the old station building (a national monument), that restoration, renovation, and reinsertion concepts are being worked out. This is the urban project's central and most important point. It is also there where the whole strength of the urban and architectonic design concentrates.

2001
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