Paris1929- Bogotá 2007 Light, shadows, sound, echoes, shades, flashes, aromas, and silence are materials that architect Rogelio Salmona integrated wisely into the landscape. He built horizons and framed them between walls. He built them patiently, with materials from the Earth, which have the virtue of becoming animated when caressed by dusk¿s light. He built them to fulfill the essential task of containing life. The riveting surprise that inhabits hallways, patios, ramps, staircases, terraces, is Master Salmona¿s legacy to the world. The experience of crossing thresholds, entering, ascending, descending, choosing paths, peering into corners, listening to the rumblings of water, enriches our presence. His works are places designed for unexpected encounters, for the encounter of gazes, the fascination with sequences of perspectives that expand, break, thin out, bringing our senses in closer contact with the textures of the landscape. His was the work of a committed and persevering man who dreams of better cities, cities where places for people are of the greatest importance. He imagined sites of culture built to reconcile time as it is lived with the promise of a better future. His early studies at the Architecture School of the Universidad Nacional, with professors who belonged to the first Modern generations, marked him profoundly. His Parisian period, between 1949 and 1957, allowed him to mesh his professional initiation in the study at Rue de Sevres 35, under the gaze of LeCorbusier, with his lessons in the sociology of art, under Pierre Francastel, at the Sorbonne¿s School of High Social Studies. These two activities forged in Salmona a reflective habit that would help him investigate the components, the ideas, the forms, and, in particular, the intrinsic relationships between community, art, and history. Rogelio Salmona¿s return to Colombia happened as the euphoria of participating in a universe in daily transformation was bubbling up, a moment when opinions, ideas, and actions heralded direct action on the part of intellectuals in the opening of new paths. Salmona participated, opined, proposed. He freed architecture from conventional projective procedures. He transformed terrain, site, and landscape into referents ¿arguments for the dislocation of learned processes¿ on the basis of which it was possible to think about local architecture. Rogelio Salmona¿s urban proposals and his architecture, in their different periods, are well known. His reflections about compositional processes, scales, and architecture¿s impacts on communities and landscapes, have spurred different creative approaches. His proposals about the importance of the quality of civic space have transcended his own formulation to become integrated into various urban discourses. Latin American architects, called upon by Salmona, coincided in a debate around quality in architecture. In Salmona¿s hands, the pre-Hispanic world, Mediterranean cultures, and proximate historical regions come together and become a renewed source of aesthetic and environmental arguments. His work space, where he traced, reflected, and corrected, was filled with verses that inspired his vision of noble ruins, with literature that engaged and moved him, with the delectation of music, which made his soul sing. A lesser-known but very important aspect of Rogelio Salmona¿s activity was his work as a professor of Art and Architecture History and Theory. Immediately after returning to the country, he taught at Universidad Nacional and Universidad de los Andes. In recent years, he was connected to the Masters in Architecture program at Universidad Nacional. It is important to underscore this because it was there, in the conscious and systematic exploration of cultural history, in an approach to urban experiences, in a reflection about architectural composition, that Salmona truly fired up his students¿ imaginations. If his works convey the intellectual ach...