Lopez Lopez Arquitectos, Parque Urbano Cumanda, Quito, 2011. La busqueda de lo colectivo e identitario en el espacio urbano

The Cumandá Urban Park, a project promoted by the Secretariat of Culture of the Municipality of Quito, allowed the transformation of the former bus terminal into one of the most important cultural centres in the city. The project by López López Arquitectos has functioned as a catalyst for culture and has contributed to redefining the relationship between the community and the inhabited context, demonstrating the adaptability and ability of the people of Quito to respond to social challenges. Recognized at the 2020 Quito Architecture Biennial, the Cumandá embodies the values of an ever-evolving urban center. Its objectives of inclusion and integration, even of different functions, make it a pole of attraction and social cohesion. The decision to convert a former urban transport terminal into a public cultural space, open to the whole community, represents a remarkable intervention strategy on urban transformations that highlights the importance of preserving the place, the connection with nature and collective identity. One lingering doubt remains: maybe the city could have attempted a sort of design experimentation less conditioned by the pre-existence, leaving more of the artistic and figurative expressiveness that we find in some masterpieces of Latin American architecture of the second half of the twentieth century: In some way and curiously the traces of that idea of the collective and social dimension of art are in the works of Clorindo Testa in Argentina, of Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi in Brazil, of Porro and Garatti in Cuba, in the frescoes of Rivera, Orozco and Tamayo in Mexico, in the gardens of Burle Marx. Southern declinations (I was about to write Mediterranean) of cubism, purism and rationalism that pursue or pursued there an idea of extroverted happiness, unthinkable elsewhere and at the same time a sort of melancholic awareness of the boundaries that delimit the right to vitality (Semerani, 2001, p.1).