Thickening the threshold: Public spaces for encounter in the entry squares of Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

In September 2018 I have traveled to Bogota - the capital of Colombia with a group of Methods & Analysis students and teachers. During the trip to Bogota I have repeatedly visited the campus of Universidad Nacional de Colombia – a national higher education institution. What stayed with me the most after these visits were not the sights of the most prominent university buildings and representative spaces but quite contrastingly – pictures of the forgotten lawns and the dilapidated fence which marks the boundary of the campus. Universidad Nacional has been isolated from the rest of the city by a fence raised in 1970’s and even more severely by busy traffic arteries. In spite of the separation, the campus plays an invaluable role in the lives of the inhabitants of Bogota. Not to mention the thousands of students, who daily cross the gates, innumerable families and groups of friends arrive at Universidad Nacional to rest and play there. The campus is a green resource for the city.Boundary is a social contract in which the sides agree that a contradiction cannot be resolved in any way other than separating the conflicted sides. If the separation is not questioned the status quo remains. An architect – a person whose work is to introduce change – is inclined to question the division. And what happens if we transform the environment in such way that the discourse, more intensive exchange between the sides and with each other realities become possible? The reality supplies one of the possible answers. In the present state of affairs many aspects of the functioning of the student life have been left to the informal market. In fact the informal markets flourish near the boundary. Vendors have discovered the boundary in a way that does not conform to the orthodox understanding of a boundary. The organic, unplanned, improvised erodes the stiff, regulated, formalized.What would it take to open the gates for the other realities though? Architecture, Urbanism and Building Science