Modernism Under Tropical Light

In downtown Barranquilla — where trade routes, tropical light and migrant cultures have long converged — the García Building stands as a quiet marker of the city’s mid-century awakening. It does not dominate the skyline so much as it participates in it: a measured, rhythmic presence embedded in the commercial pulse of the historic centre. 

Photos: Monica Barreneche ©.

Completed between the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of Barranquilla’s port-driven prosperity, the building was commissioned by the García family as a mixed-use commercial and office address. At the time, the city was projecting itself outward — toward the Caribbean, toward Miami, toward a broader idea of modern life shaped by business, music, migration and exchange. Architecture became one of the vehicles through which that aspiration took form.

The García Building reflects this cultural moment. Its modernist language — clean lines, horizontal bands and modular repetition — speaks of international influence, yet its atmosphere is distinctly local. Deep balconies cast generous shadows onto the façade, softening the tropical glare and giving the structure a lived-in depth. The building seems designed not only to house commerce but to stage everyday urban life: conversations leaning over railings, open windows catching coastal breezes, the slow choreography of a working city.

Light plays a central role in its identity. As the sun shifts, the façade transforms — at times dense and graphic, at others porous and airy. This constant modulation lends the building a temporal quality, as if it were calibrated to the rhythm of the Caribbean day rather than to static monumentality.

Like many commercial buildings of its era, documentation around its authorship remains partial. The project is widely attributed to the Cuban-born architect Manuel José Carrerá, whose work in Barranquilla helped translate international modernism into a vocabulary attuned to Caribbean climate and culture. His trajectory across the greater Caribbean basin situates the building within a broader network of architectural exchange, where European modernism was reinterpreted through heat, light and coastal urban life.

HUNTING THE SHADOW

Refractions and Reflections of Guillermo Arias’s Creative Mind

Curated by Mónica Barreneche

These large-scale, atypical geometric forms are characteristic of the work of Colombian architect Guillermo Arias.
Photo: Mónica Barreneche.

How can a space be made beautiful? For Colombian architect Guillermo Arias, the question is less about style and more about the invisible dialogue between light, form, and material. Born in Bogotá in 1960, Arias belongs to a generation of thinkers who see architecture as both an intellectual pursuit and a poetic act — where geometry becomes language and light its most articulate verb.

Guillermo Arias

The Architect as Alchemist

To understand Arias’s universe, one must first accept that architecture, for him, is a field of experimentation rather than repetition. Through his Bogotá-based studio Octubre, Arias has cultivated an approach rooted in curiosity, craftsmanship, and an almost spiritual fascination with proportion. His pieces — from monumental staircases and luminous niches to sculptural benches and hanging lamps — emerge as fragments of a larger idea: that the built world can serve as a passage into imagination.

Each object becomes a small architecture in itself, a model within which the user can mentally travel. The result is a body of work that oscillates between rigor and reverie, embracing imperfection as part of its truth.

The Grammar of Light

Light, in Arias’s practice, is not a mere afterthought — it is the raw matter that shapes everything. His architectural career has long revolved around how light hits a wall, spills over a stair, or becomes trapped in a polished surface. With Hunting the Shadow, Arias translates this obsession into a collection of collectible design pieces for La Casa Azul, the experimental platform of Bogotá’s NC Arte gallery.

Here, shadow becomes muse and medium. Marble blocks glow like captured embers; oxidized metals reveal their own patina of time; and recovered woods — their scars intact — turn into floating trees of light. The forms are deliberately asymmetric, their geometries slightly off-balance, challenging the bourgeois ideal of perfect symmetry.

With Hunting the Shadow, Arias translates this obsession into a collection of collectible design pieces for La Casa Azul, the experimental platform of Bogotá’s NC Arte gallery.

Pink Marble Desk Lamps, carved as amorphous stones, ignite when touched by artificial light, turning stone into fire.

The Substance of Memory

Arias’s work is as much about process as it is about outcome. Each lamp, bench, and table carries the weight of decades spent observing how materials behave — how marble fractures, how iron rusts, how wood bends when it meets humidity and heat. “Matter shouldn’t have a social class,” he says, insisting on using local granites and marbles as acts of cultural validation.

The Tree Lamp — suspended from ceiling to floor — reinterprets the geometry of growth in reclaimed wood. The Pink Marble Desk Lamps, carved as amorphous stones, ignite when touched by artificial light, turning stone into fire. Elsewhere, Imperial Black Marbles meet raw iron in bold contrasts, while the White Marble Benches rest delicately on wooden joints, their minimal gestures softening the industrial edge.

A Personal Lexicon of Design

At La Casa Azul, Arias’s objects form a landscape of personal archaeology — a map of ideas that connects architecture, art, and memory. The exhibition includes a large dining table that conceals its logic beneath its surface, and a curved metal bench that disguises its structural complexity behind apparent simplicity.

Every piece, every surface, seems to breathe with a certain rhythm — the rhythm of someone who has spent a lifetime listening to materials. “What we do,” he reflects, “is like interpreting a musical score. You can read the same notes, but each master decides how to play them.”

Guillermo Arias workshop

The Workshop and the Shadow

Beyond the gallery, Arias still spends long hours in his workshop in Bogotá’s Samper Mendoza district — a space filled with prototypes, marble dust, and unfinished ideas. There, surrounded by tools and light, he continues to blur the line between architecture and art, between the rational and the intuitive.

Born in Teusaquillo, raised by an engineer and astronomer father, Arias’s path was defined early by geometry and curiosity. After his studies at Universidad de los Andes and formative travels through Europe, he opened the first Octubre showroom, where experiments with Art-Deco mosaics and light installations began to shape his distinct visual grammar.

Decades later, Hunting the Shadow is less a retrospective than a revelation — a testament to how light, when crafted with care and courage, can transform not only matter but the way we perceive the world around us.

Geometry in Wood — The Quiet Sculptures of Diamantina & la Perla

In the quiet of Montería’s workshop, the raw material meets restraint. Here, reforested oak becomes geometry—perfect spheres, subtle conical forms, and rings that balance volume and void. Diamantina & la Perla’s Geometric collection reads less like décor and more like a language: an economical lexicon of shape, weight and shadow.

In an age of maximalism and ornamented surfaces, the Geometric series is resolute in its simplicity. Each piece is a meditation on form: the circle, the torus, the segment. In a single sweep of the lathe, the oak yields to something far more distilled than furniture or accessory—it becomes a statement. The hand-turned method leaves trace. Your eye follows the grain, notices a slight inflection, senses the maker’s presence.

The collection thrives on tension: between solid and void, scale and subtlety, mass and dematerialization. The sphere hovers lightly on a shelf. A torus frames an empty core, as much absence as presence. Together these objects curate negative space, giving interiors breathing room.

Material & Process

What feels elemental is in fact deeply constructed. The wood comes from reforestation projects in Montería, Colombia—local stewardship over distant sourcing. The workshop’s methodology emphasizes low waste and selective harvesting, ensuring the oak’s legacy is regenerative, not extractive.

Each form is achieved through a refined turning process. The lathe carves in continuum, yet pauses at micro-adjustments. The artisans coax texture and tone out of the oak, smoothing some surfaces to satin, leaving others slightly raw to emphasize the grain’s lineage. In the final stage, a matte natural oil brings out the depth of color without simulation—no lacquer gloss, no veneer disguise—just oak, turned, revealed.