Gabriel García Márquez Cultural Center

This guide to the Gabriel García Márquez Cultural Center in Bogotá follows architect Rogelio Salmona's 2004 attempt to fit a modern concrete building into the tightest block of the old town, two meters from a four-hundred-year-old convent wall. You'll hear how crews sized underground blasts to spare the neighbors' plaster, pumped concrete through hoses since no truck could reach the site, and hauled iron-stained sand from Bogotá's eastern hills to get the color Salmona wanted. The masons who spent four years fighting that rock kept working after he was gone.