DOCUMENTATION AND ANALYSIS: CASA BERMÚDEZ, 1952- 58, BOGOTA, COLOMBIA

Abstract

The present work aims at presenting and analyzing the documentary material about an important Latin-American modern piece: the house of Guillermo Bermúdez (1924-1995), designed and built between 1952-60 in Bogota, Colombia.

The construction is part of a sample of houses that exemplify the period of 1915-1960, studied by the author in her thesis called ‘The façades of the modern house’. The Casa Bermúdez was the only Colombian representative in the sample, which included houses from Europe, United States and Latin America. The analyzed material was obtained via the architect’s son, Daniel Bermúdez.

Guillermo Bermúdez’s work stands out due to the quality of the housing projects, among them his own house, awarded at the First Architecture Biennial of Colombia in 1962. The house was built in three phases: the first had two floors with domed ceilings and a frontal butterfly marquee, in contact with the street and the backyard; the second phase had the addition of a side strip to the lot and the house gained a longitudinal wing with one floor; the third phase was the addition of a service, longitudinal volume to the northeast of the building, with a single floor.

The goal is to analyze the rich documental material available, analyzing the several phases of construction from the architectural point of view, considering the program’s evolution, the volume, and the relationship to the place and to the main architectural manifestations of the time.