MAGAZINE ARQ 49 Design in Chile

Readings | Works and Project | Essays and Documents | Recent Architecture

   

 

READINGS
Design as discipline? / José Manuel Allard Serrano
The grandeur and pettiness of the craft / José Neira Délano
Seeking maestry / Miguel Eyquem
What for? / Gonzalo Puga
What is design? / Interviewing Charles Eames

Design in Chile, is developed from five points of view. Allard proposes a debate around the definitions and historical evolution of the term; Neira assumes the reality of the graphic design in Chile; Eyquem establishes a definition of design carried out from his own experience; Puga lightens us about the real possibilities of industry in the matter, and finally Eames allows us, through expressions of his approach to the design process, to return to the beginning: what is design?.
 
WORKS AND PROJECT

Design for 3 celebrations / Ricardo Lang
To drink or to take to the mouth a sandwich are signs, times and acts that propose, more than objects, an always original action field for celebration;a party understood as the opposite to the economy. The aim is to express through works the implicit beauty of the gregarious life that transcends the everyday life. The designs here presented were developed in the last years by young designers’ teams of the Catholic University of Valparaíso led by Ricardo Lang, with the sense of just making place for celebration.

Design, Complexity and Tecnology / Pablo Suárez
The designer has the possibility to coordinate and integrate different disciplines and of managing the variables that condition the performnce of the project. Under this premise Suárez has developed its brief and intense career based on the development of robotic prototypes. In this opportunity he presents us a robot of submarine inspection.

Elemental, typography designed in Chile / Dany Berczeller y Francisco Gálvez
During the month of September, the “Elemental Project ” was presented In Santiago. It was an exhibition that gathered the work of the graphic designer Francisco Gálvez, who has developed during the last three years a typography named "elemental" that is the first font for continuous reading carried out in Chile.

Export images: to be or not to be / Loreto Valdés
Loreto Valdés shows through some emblematic products, examples of a starting road that would establish our largely required “international image ”. The use of a label, a packing box, or even a match box becomes necessary so that the sentence “Made in Chile ” can stay in the eyes of the future foreign consumers.

Patrimonial Chilean design / Guillermo Tejeda
In a country like Chile, which fights in defense of its fragile memory, Guillermo Tejeda gives an impulse to the preservation and investigation of the national graphic patrimony. With the current take off of the graphic design in Chile, Tejeda proposes the necessity to appreciate the legacy of Mauricio Amster, of the National Library or of a publishing house like Quimantú, among others.

3 exhibitions: Knowledge spaces in the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art / José Pérez de Arce
The visitor that enters to a museum faces, before all, a way of learning. The Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art is unique in this sense because it outlines an anthropological and archaeological knowledge from the perspective of the art. This supposes a tension between two types of knowledge: one from the sensitive scope of art, the other one from the erudite world of science.
Under this task Pérez de Arce revises three examples of exhibitions that outline interesting solutions from the point of view of the ephemeral architecture.

The image global economy / Patricio Pozo
A group of new scenarios that constitute and configure the new territory of images, superimposed to reality. Figures of the everyday are translated until the exhaustion into two-dimension surface trying to represent, to support and to transmit a transactional world. A new race of designers –no longer anonymous artisans but visual authors of texts and interpreters of contents – will be in charge of managing and organizing this new scene.

Ship for the western Patagonia / Boris Ivelic
From 1984 the School of Architecture of the Catholic University of Valparaíso has traveled around the continent in learning trips –“travesías ”– that open notions of what is the place and its destiny. Several workshops of the School have done their “travesías ” to the Patagonia, opening new places or consolidating those that already existed. The ship Amereida, whose development has been led by Boris Ivelic, is a model that innovates for the development of missions on the sea border.

Traditional handcrafts in PUC / Alberto Sato
The character of what is handmade allows maintaining handicrafts as collection pieces as well as objects that inform about an original culture. However, their role in our society has been many times reduced to being just a consumption object that satisfies certain decorative necessities.
In an effort to define with clarity our view of handicraft, Alberto Sato rescues the necessity to maintain its presence under the eaves of a university institution.

Pieces of Pomaire's traditional pottery / Gonzalo Puga y Hugo Lagos
Pomaire owes its origin and name to the people of Indians of the XVIth century, which after being moved to different places, were settle down in its current location in 1771. Its potter tradition comes of the colonial epoch, when diverse jars are made for the housekeeping of the kitchen and big vats containing liquids.

 
ESSAYS AND DOCUMENTS

Interview to Gui Bonsiepe / Hugo Palmarola
In 1968 the German designer Gui Bonsiepe began his work in Chile, causing a decisive change in the speech and practice of Chilean design, incorporating in the discipline a necessary “project sense ”. Also, he formed the section of Industrial Design of the Institute of Technological Investigation of CORFO that remains up to 1973. After thirty years of his work in Chile, Bonsiepe elaborates a new proposal for design, transferring the project from rationalism to a problem of language. Palmarola approaches, through an interview, the different aspects of this design proposal.

A constant world / Alejandro Crispiani
The dissemination of the motto “design from the tablespoon to the city” had its peak moment around the 40 ’s and 60 ’s and its irradiation to Latin America was quick, with a gravitation that lasted until the end of the 70 ’s. Among the figures that were identified with this motto, the one that more completely embodied it was the artist and Swiss designer Max Bill. Crispiani gives us a vision of Bill ’s work starting from an analysis of the concepts that the Swiss developed around the “concrete art ” and the “good form”, among others.

Mauricio Amster, Typographer, 1907 - 1980 / José Manuel Allard y Francisca Reyes
A typographer is not only the designer of typographic sources, but also is the professional that projects on paper the texts that will give form to a form. The typographer Mauricio Amster is considered one of the designers whose aesthetic, technician and pedagogic contribution was decisive for the renovation and evolution of the graphic arts in Spain and Chile.

Architecture for sale: 2 projects of Izquierdo - Lehmann diploma class / Tomás Mckay y Pablo Riquelme
These two projects from the School of Architecture of the Catholic University of Chile re-formulate the idea of the house adapting it to the requirements of the market without leaving aside a deep analysis and renewed interest for an industrial constructive system as is prefabrication. Considering that, they place their work not only as a good product, but also like a cultural manifestation of our times.

Errázuriz house of Le Corbusier: Chronology of the project / Claudio Vásquez
The Errázuriz House was never built and it was the only project of Le Corbusier in Chile. This article is based on documents that have been gathered from the Fondation Le Corbusier, in Paris, and from different works and publications. The material has been ordered in chronological way, without going deeply into details, to keep the reading of the total. The aim is to establish a starting point that allows discussion around the project, contributing with new questions to those that are well known.

 
RECENT ARCHITECTURE

Technological Construction Center Duoc
Juan Sabbagh and Mariana Sabbagh
Santiago, Chile, 2001.

UNIACC cafeteria
EO Arquitectos Ltda.
Santiago, Chile, 2001.
Urban furniture Vitacura
Alemparte Barreda Asoc. Arqtos., Daw Arqtos y Diseñadores
Santiago, Chile, 2001.
Unicef Chile shop, remodelation
Jonathan Holmes
Santiago, Chile, 2001.
XV Group of Rio Presidential Summit
Amercanda
Santiago, Chile, 2001.
XIII Architecture Montage Biennial
Philippe Blanc and Carolina Portugueis
Santiago, Chile, 2001.
  New Master plan PUC Competition
Alameda - Lira
Santiago, Chile, 2001.