Rogelio Salmona

During the latter part of his life, Salmona gained renown thanks to awards like the first prize at the 1986, 1988, and 1990 Colombian Architecture Biennials, and the Alvar Aalto Medal in 2003.

Salmona was born in Paris, but moved at an early age to Bogotá, Colombia, where he studied at the French Lyceum Louis Pasteur.

Upon graduating, he enrolled in the architecture program at the National University of Colombia, then led by German and Italian architects Leopoldo Rother and Bruno Violi.

In France, he worked as draftsman for Le Corbusier for about a decade, assisting in the design of projects like the Marseilles block, the Pilot Plan for Bogotá, Notre Dame du Haut, and Chandigarh.

Though Salmona traveled widely, enriching his theory of architecture, he spent the rest of his life in Colombia, where he was commissioned to design many important projects (see Public Works, and Private Buildings, below).

[2] Other notable buildings include the National University Human Sciences Postgraduate Centre (1995–2000) and the Virgilio Barco Public Library (1999–2001), a landmark in the north of Bogotá.

Together with his wife and partner, María Elvira Madriñán, Salmona worked on a series of future projects, which include: --> The building has been inaugurated on September the 30th of 2010.

At the same time, since 2014 they have organized the Rogelio Salmona Latin American Architecture Prize, which seeks "identify and reward architectural works in Colombia, Latin America and the Caribbean, immersed in a particular urban context, that have evidently generated significant, open and collective spaces, which thus contribute to the creation or improvement of coexistence between inhabitants within your community or city".