V Bienal de Arquitectura LatinoamericanaBAL2017 en Pamplona

Résumé

The celebration last April of a new edition, the fifth edition of the BAL2017 Biennial of Latin American Architecture, brought together in Pamplona a selection of fifteen teams of young Latin American architects from seven countries. With the inclusion of the works sent by biennialists of previous editions, there were a total of thirty-two teams and eight countries represented, making Pamplona in a showcase of the best emerging Latin American architecture for a few days. The Biennial, which also offers its programs in Madrid and Barcelona, has two parts: one in which a guest country, Colombia in this case, stars in the conferences and debates that this time focused almost thematically on the well-known social achievements achieved in Medellín and Bogotá with the strategic use of architecture as an effective tool of social action, and a second where the selected teams presented their work. What has been seen has been a set of proposals of great interest and quality, with programs as small as single-family housing to as large as an intermodal center or a government building; with environments that range from the urban periphery, the historic center or the lush landscape. A set that conveys a feeling of optimism before an architecture with commitment, with reflection, with an ethical attitude in the proportion between the means and the ends pursued, with a constructive emphasis in the approaches. An architecture with a preferential option for the most with less that has a lot of common sense and a lot of ambition and intensity in the contents and that developed in an environment lacking the suffocating European regulations produces results that seen from this periphery are enviable.