Klumpner, Ceresuela-Wiesmann and Restrepo Raise a Timber Canopy for a Barranquilla Social Housing District

Villas de San Pablo is a new social housing district on the southwestern edge of Barranquilla, planned for more than 20,000 homes. Its residents are largely displaced families, migrants and low-income households. Housing at that scale arrives faster than civic life does, and the Villas de San Pablo Cultural Center is an attempt to close that gap. The project was led by Hubert Klumpner and Diego Ceresuela-Wiesmann of ETH Zurich and Urban-Think Tank_next, with Alejandro Restrepo Montoya of UPB Medellín. It was completed in 2025 for Fundación Santo Domingo after a seven-year process that included participatory workshops and a built prototype.

The building is 2,200 m², but the number is misleading. What matters here is a single gesture: a long, continuous canopy of repeated laminated timber and steel A-frames that shelters a public plaza, a set of small enclosed rooms and a stepped amphitheater. The architects describe architecture as a tool for equity. You can be skeptical of that kind of phrase, but the design backs it up in one specific way. Most of the floor area stays open, shaded and free to enter, and the enclosed rooms are the exception.

A Civic Roof in a Mega-Neighborhood

From a distance, the center reads as a white stroke laid across a field of repetitive housing blocks, with scrub and low hills beyond. The aerials show why the scale works. The roof is long enough to register as a public landmark against mid-rise residential slabs, and it stays low enough not to compete with them. It sits in a green corridor next to a park and a school, part of the foundation's push for a walkable neighborhood where daily services are about 15 to 20 minutes away on foot.

That planning context is the real brief. A cultural center in a district like this is not an amenity bolted on afterward. It is one piece of a civic spine that includes schools, a library, health and early childhood centers. The architects needed to make something people would recognize as theirs before the neighborhood had a settled identity.

Reading the Roof from Above

The overhead views make the roof's logic legible. A central longitudinal skylight runs the length of the gable, and the eaves break into a zigzag edge where the repeated frames meet the ground plane. At each end, patterned paving extends the building outward, so the plaza seems to continue rather than stop at the drip line.

At night the zigzag edges are lit and the roof turns into a lantern beside the sports courts. For a peripheral district where public lighting and safe evening space are scarce, this is a practical gift. We would argue it is one of the project's quietest and most useful decisions.

Sharing the Ground with Play

The center does not fence itself off from the playground, skating rink and running track next to it. Children move between the blue courts and the edge of the canopy with no threshold to negotiate. The sloped roof plane, seen across the play court and its exercise equipment, reads less as a building facade and more as a shaded extension of the park.

This is where the open-pavilion approach pays off. A closed cultural box would need a lobby, a reception desk and opening hours. A canopy simply invites people in and lets the program grow from whatever the community brings to it.

Where the Canopy Lifts: The Amphitheater Edge

At one end, the roof tilts upward and cantilevers over stepped seating, creating an outdoor amphitheater. The seating wall is covered in graffiti and murals. Whether residents painted it or not, it signals that the surfaces are open to local authorship rather than protected as finished architecture.

The lifted corner does climatic work too. Barranquilla's sun is intense and its rains are seasonal and heavy. The raised plane shades the seating while opening a view and a breeze path, and frangipani trees soften the hard paving. The tilt also gives the long, repetitive structure a clear front, and an otherwise uniform roof gains a face.

Timber Frames and the Open Hall

Seen from the gable end, the structure is plainly an A-frame: glulam members joined with steel elements and repeated down the length of the building. Inside, the frames carry corrugated roof panels, and daylight falls from the central skylight onto a concrete floor that is clearly meant to be used. Dancers rehearse on it, groups gather by the steps, and the space holds both without fuss.

Timber at this scale in a hot Colombian city is a notable choice. It brings warmth and a sense of craft that a steel shed could not, and the repeated frame suggests the kind of modular logic that makes construction and future maintenance easier. The open internal circulation means the hall works as a covered street as much as a room.

Plans and Drawings

The ground-floor plan shows the arrangement clearly: enclosed rooms line a long central square, and the plaza, not the rooms, organizes the building. The longitudinal section runs the full timber frame over stepped volumes, while the three cross sections compare a lobby, a music classroom and the open plaza under the same A-frame. One structure carries three very different degrees of enclosure.

The exploded axonometric is the most revealing drawing. It breaks the system into layers: a palm leaf roof covering, photovoltaic panels, a polycarbonate skylight, the laminated timber frame, concrete supports and service volumes. The hand-drawn section, with figures on a green roof above a low timber-clad volume, records the design's earlier thinking. The grid of rendered diagrams tests the frame in different assembly and configuration stages, evidence that the team treated the roof as an adaptable kit rather than a fixed object.

Why This Project Matters

Large social housing districts across Latin America tend to deliver units first and public life much later, if at all. Villas de San Pablo reverses part of that sequence. A civic room arrives alongside the housing, shaped through workshops and a prototype, and backed by a funding coalition that includes the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, Fundación Santo Domingo and the municipality. The lesson is less about form than about process: social infrastructure gets the same design seriousness as an institutional commission.

The architecture is deliberately simple. It is one roof, one repeated frame and mostly open ground. That simplicity is its strength. A canopy is cheap to understand, easy to occupy and hard to make exclusive. If the community keeps painting the walls, dancing on the slab and gathering under the lit eaves at night, the building will have done what its authors claimed for it.

Villas de San Pablo Cultural Center by Hubert Klumpner, Diego Ceresuela-Wiesmann (ETH Zurich / Urban-Think Tank_next) and Alejandro Restrepo Montoya, Barranquilla, Colombia. Area: 2,200 m². Year: 2025. Photography: Alejandro Arango Escobar.

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