MAGAZINE ARQ 51 South of America

Readings | Works and Project | Essays and Documents

   

 

READINGS
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.
 
WORKS AND PROJECT

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

 

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.

 
ESSAYS AND DOCUMENTS

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.

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.

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.