MAGAZINE ARQ 50 Evidences on buildings in Santiago

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

   

 

READINGS
High architecture: notes in the marginis / Horacio Torrent
Getting down to work / Patricio Mardones
Neither home nor decoration/ Romy Hecht

Three architects take a ride through Santiago searching for clues about what ’s going on right now within our city and its built fabric. Behaving just like private eyes, the first one reads newspapers, the second walks the streets, the third reviews some pertinent books. The result is a collection of images and words that tells us something about the state of Architecture, no matter whether prêt- à- porter or home- made or high- profile. Where and how can you find architecture in this three different scenarios? The question assumes a degree of certainty about its existance.
 
WORKS AND PROJECT

The architecture - architecture / Luis Valenzuela    
The distinction between an architecture thought for the client and another for the school and the academia becomes stronger,everyday. This duality which registers apparent contradictions is embodied in each young architect ’s experience of incursion into the real labour market. The predominance of stereotypes and styles recorded as the client ’s desires and aspirations turns the architect into a performer, one that learns to please and also to endure sacrifices.

"Taxi para tres", a film from Santiago / Orlando Lübbert   
One of the main issues about this Chilean movie is its capacity to communicate through its images the experience of living and breathing in a city like Santiago. From his architectural background, Orlando Lübbert, the movie director, looks at its main characters as they deal with a less apparent one,the city itself the place where the action unfolds.

Monday evening, El Comendador/ Ernesto Rodríguez   
A professor –who is not an architect- tells us about his teaching experience in the Old House where the architects are raised. There,“...time comes to a standstill; it delays the passing of events,and thus, because of its stillness you can stay and dwell...”

Art for seers / Denise Lira e Isabel García  
Situated in the environs of Santiago ’s airport, this straw house was erected for a short period of time;an art installation that uses concepts and elements from architecture outlining a relationship between territory, perception and subjects in movement.

Minimal / Pablo Rivera
The Minimal art project involved an indoor installation placed inside an art gallery in Santiago, another outdoor structure located in front of a Finnish museum and lately a construction placed in XXV Sao Paulo Bienal. These works that apparently merely pursue formal games, relate to architecture from the perspective of the social housing policies, that shape, standardise, and serialise forms of life by virtue of the minimum dwelling space.

Hoffmann's house / José Pablo Díaz y Rodrigo Vergara     
Hoffmann ’s house is a mediagua –emergency housing – that became an art gallery for emergent visual artists. This very shift might be considered as an operation of some “folk ” way of doing;as if a copy of a model, with spelling mistakes. Thus we can speak about the presence of a Chilean Popular spirit: to be able to make more with almost nothing (simply because there ’s no other way).

Even normal / Manuel Corrada     
As in a summer tale, Manuel Corrada makes us aware of the mismatch that arises when an obsessive ideology of form establishes codes of good taste on architecture giving importance to buildings that don ’t necessarily have it whilst obscuring the basic needs of a city like Santiago that seeks and yearns to be just a city.

Structures for densification / Diego Aguiló, Gonzalo Arteaga y Rodrigo Pedraza     
Three thesis projects that move beyond the academic field in order to achieve their goals:to promote, design and build houses within deprived settlements, densifying these, therefore offering clever responses to the dual problem of limitless urban expansion and scarcity of space. By means of the insertion of three storey support structures, the strategy allows several families to share a 9 x18 sq. meter lot while improving the surrounding urban space.

 
ESSAYS AND DOCUMENTS

Typographical Safari / Esther Engelmann
From her foreign point of view, the author has made a research about traditional Chilean sign painters. Displaced progressively by digital graphic media and cut and paste techniques, this craft fights in order to survive: it is time to appreciate the value of these procedures and their influence in Chilean popular graphics,before it is too late.

Salty layouts / Marcelo Sarovic
The salt marshes of Cáhuil conform a landscape shaped by a gulf of sea water that penetrates several kilometres inland between two capes because of a coastal depression. It is a productive landscape that stays almost unaffected by change as from the colonial time thus bespeaking of the transformation of the natural environment as an act of development.

 

A t rip to Finland / Ricardo Abuauad
The desire of visiting Aalto ’s work impels the author to go to Finland.A country that can be considered a periphery inside the periphery:from its situation “of border ” –that is familiar for a Chilean –, with dismembered and undulant geography and under the extreme brightness and darkness of polar latitudes,it has originated an appropriate and reasonable architecture.

 

Two english interviews: Richard Sennett and Charles Correa / Antonio Lipthay
In this inteview, Richard Sennet speaks about the space relationships of democracy. The public sphere, embodied as a space of visual communication among people, and its natural environment the city, are characterised by incompleteness; thereby the design policies wich operate on these ough not to obliterate this condition.
From his sharp vision Charles Correa comments on the practice of architecture and urban design in the context of a complex society such as India. During the conversation, there appear topics that make crossing on characteristics political and economic issues of third world cities, a world that clearly reflects our global culture fissures.

Proposal for an abandoned water tower / Eugenia Gazmuri, Patricio Mardones y Oyazu Wegener
Reclaiming an abandoned concrete structure of a monumental scale for public uses, this thesis project establishes its own rules in order to transfer the utilitarian structure into the public domain, struggling this way with all the adjustments that are required in the transfer of a scheme from the academia into the professional field.

Containing the uncontainable thing / Rodrigo Tisi y Dorita Hannah
Five architectural interventions called Containing the Uncontainable, by Rodrigo Tisi and Dorita Hannah, outline a theoretical project that looks towards the investigation on the concrete intersection between Architecture and Performance, giving place to spaces for information; the information as a control tool with the ability to manipulate the perception we have of our space, extending the domains of the body.

 
RECENT ARCHITECTURE

San Marcos atelier - house
Marcelo Sarovic

VI Región, Chile, 2001.

A school of architecture addition
Glenda Kapstein
Antofagasta, Chile, 2001
House in Ocoa
Mario Carreño y Piera Sartori
V Región, Chile, 2001
Resiter Building
Juan Baixas y Enrique del Río
Santiago, Chile, 2001.
García Rivera House
Cristián Valdés
Santiago, Chile, 2001
Patricia Ready gallery
Mauricio Léniz and Claudia Paublo
Santiago, Chile, 2001