By Juan José Pujana Mena
There is something almost nobody thinks about when a new building goes up: the months when the building doesn’t exist yet. During that time, the only thing the neighbours see is a hoarding. Metal sheets, plywood, a gate for the trucks and, with luck, a sign with a rendering of the project. That is what stands on the corner while the site is excavated, the foundations are poured and the structure rises. It can last a year, two, or longer.
I have always found that a waste. A building site has metres and metres of surface right on the street, at eye level, exactly where people walk. It is, without exaggeration, one of the most visible walls in the neighbourhood. Why does it have to be grey?
What other cities already do
In London this stopped being unusual a long time ago. They call it hoarding art. An organisation called Global Street Art has managed more than a thousand legal murals since 2012, with artists from around fifty countries, and many of them were painted on construction hoardings commissioned by developers themselves. The Considerate Constructors Scheme, the British programme that promotes good practice among builders, lists the benefits in very practical terms: the site looks better, tagging goes down, relations with the community and planners improve, and it costs little compared to printed panels.
What changes on the street
Anyone who lives next to a building site suffers it: noise, dust, broken pavements, heavy machinery. Paint doesn’t make any of that disappear. But it does change how it feels to walk past. A painted hoarding makes the route feel cared for rather than abandoned. People notice. They stop, take photos, ask who painted it.
It also changes how the neighbourhood sees the project. A site that looks after its temporary façade is saying something about how it will look after the finished building.
How I approach it
In my housing projects in Bogotá, I try to treat the hoarding as an open-air gallery for as long as the works last. A few rules matter. The hoarding is still a safety element and must stay solid, continuous and well signposted; the art goes on top of that, not instead of it. A neglected mural sends the opposite message, so maintenance has to be planned from the start. And it works best when the artwork has something to do with the place, its history or the people who live there.
Bogotá is a good city for this. It has become one of the capitals of street art in Latin America, with festivals, murals on entire building gables and a legal framework, dating from 2013, that recognises graffiti as a cultural practice. Extending that energy to construction hoardings feels natural.
In the end, the question is simple. If there is going to be a wall there for two years anyway, what do we want it to say?
Juan José Pujana Mena is a housing developer based in Bogotá, Colombia. More about him.