Architect Giancarlo Mazzanti’s Biblioteca España [RECORD, November 2008], completed in 2007, is one of the 10 “park-libraries” built as part of the social plan for the city’s most neglected sections. Standing as a powerful symbol of a new cultural era, the building’s three rocklike volumes visually dominate what used to be the most violent and stigmatized part of town. Nearby is Carlos Pardo’s Santo Domingo Savio High School, one of the five proposed schools for low-income sectors. Although not completely finished, due to budget cuts and irregularities in the original financial plan, the school, which overlooks Medellín’s barrios with terraces
Medellín, the second-largest city in Colombia, has been known and labeled for decades as a place of violence and anarchy related to the drug-trafficking conflict.