Brutalism in Colombia

Colombian modernism took its own path in the postwar decades, favouring exposed brick in Bogotá but turning to raw concrete for major institutional work. Germán Samper, who worked in Le Corbusier's Paris atelier before returning to Bogotá, became one of the country's most influential architects; the Edificio Sena (1958) belongs to the early phase of this concrete institutional architecture. In the coffee region, Laureano Forero Ochoa designed the Palacio de la Gobernación (Gobernación Risaralda) (1974) in Pereira, a robust concrete seat of regional government typical of the civic brutalism that spread through Colombian provincial capitals in the 1970s.