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Three
Notes on a Certain Poetic to Architecture Today / Fernando Pérez
(Southern) Conal view southern cone / Christian Glavic
South of America: Then and Now / Horacio Torrent
The age of heroes and Utopias is past; and after the attempts to level
uneven social, climatic and geographical realities by force, the lands
of the south seem a good place to act uninhibitedly, without style,
without explanations. But this is not the “land of freedom”
of the other America, of the Mayflower. This time we are talking about
América with an accent, and not even all of that América,
but only its deep south, where we live. A Chilean architect, a Chilean
architecture student and an Argentine architect open the topic of conversation
for this edition.
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Gabinete
de arquitectura / Paraguay
Unilever Paraguay Building
Vacational complex, Ytú
Tomb in Piribebuy
Paraguay’s only access to the sea is via a single river; it is
a land of marshes and strange-colored clay. The images of these works
help clear one’s gaze to penetrate a country of roads blocked
to the exterior; a –peripheral?– land in the heart of the
continent, home to these constructions that hover between handicrafts
and globalization, between intimacy and mass market.
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MMBB
arquitectos / Brazil
Odontologic clinic in Orlandia
Countryhouse in Santa Rita
Trianon parking lot
They emerge from a country whose 20th century architectural project
was charged with a certain modernity, marked by the presence of Le Corbusier,
Niemeyer and the creation of Brasilia. Today, the neutral nature of
the works of MMBB Architects marks a transition, offering silence as
a possible route to the new Brazil.
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Gerardo
Caballero / Argentina
EPE auditorium
Alonso Lavítula house
The two works presented (one built, the other at project stage) correspond
to an ever more frequent operation in our world. Intervention in an
existing building –in this case, on two different scales and in
different programs– finishes up as the complete opposite of the
tabula rasa of opportunity the New World was supposed to offer.
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Rafael
Iglesia / Argentina
Quincha, table, trunk and swimming pool
Stair
San Luis st. building
"Architecture does not exist, what exist is works of architecture
...". A review that halts at the problem of weights, joints, the
construction itself and confronts the physical presence of the project
"under the spotlight". Iglesia's work, built with Argentine
wood, adobe and concrete, defies gravity under the skies of Rosario.
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Eduardo
Castillo / Chile
Memory turned into material
Remembrance Chapel
Coop house
Bottle's room
A small gallery
Chile’s rural periphery, precarious though it seems, is the working
material for these constructions, both built and at design stage. The
opposite of a gentrifying process, these buildings draw on and consolidate
ways and forms from their own tradition, making use of the same resources
and techniques that have built up the landscape of the Chilean countryside
over the years. It is an architecture of wood, nails, cloth and metal
sheets, put up by workmen –like most of what gets built in Chile.
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Mauricio
Pezo / Chile
Sterile art
Pezo’s work reminds us that other forms of city-building exist
in Chile, not just Santiago’s. Concepción, with its rain
and wide skies, is base and stage for these materialized reflections.
At times closer to art, at others, to architecture, they make monotony
and an apparent indifference the tools of intervention in a tranquil
context, inhabited by university students and a significant section
of Chile’s professional middle-class.
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Cecilia
Puga / Chile
Country house, VIII Region (Journey notes)
Cono sur winery
By pure chance, or perhaps reflecting circumstances in Chile today,
Puga’s work belongs, in these cases, to the rural south. The works
offer a context reading, take in ways of occupying the valleys, ways
of building, situations of daily life that seem, despite changes and
the passage of time, to persist and insist in these spaces.
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José
Cruz Ovalle
Pérez Cruz winery
Adolfo Ibánez University
Two works, horizontal and parallel with Chile’s longitude, offer
different ways of taking position between the Central Valley and the
cordillera. One with wood, the other with simple architecture, they
call on lightness and rootedness respectively, and in abstract measure
the many dimensions of a life-in-progress in the interior, and extension
as a territorial dimension of the architectonic task.
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Tracing,
landscape and territory: Cerro Sombrero and architecture of oil in Magallanes
/ Romy Hecht
This article seeks to highlight and analyse Cerro Sombrero as a foundation
pattern in Magallanes, not in the sense of occupying a territory by
a repeated formal model. Cerro Sombrero shows an imposed and deliberated
order in a territory without signals nor possibilities of occupation.
At the end, the rescue of the southernmost modern architecture of the
world.
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The
south Andes / Francisco Gazitúa
After walking several routes along and across the mountain range, the
author reflects about the relation between Chilean people and their
most important geographic reference, the Andes. What has been an empty,
tough and abandoned barrier, and has also been given the back by the
dwellers of the Chilean territory, he vindicates it as a location that
would give place to a collective consciousness.
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Soft
asymmetries / Jorge Francisco Liernur
This article was first published on Casabella, on April 2001 (n°688),
as a critic vision about the 2nd version of the Mies Van der Rohe
award for Latin-American Architecture, granted by the Fundació
Mies Van der Rohe of Barcelona. We think that is important to conserve
this vision about the prize, which reflects on certain attitude of
the North hemisphere with respect to the ex-colonies of the south.
The initiative of the Latin American award was suspended indefinitely
by its organizers in 2002.
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MAGAZINE ARQ 51 South of America
