Good design, good business / Alex Blanch, Laura Novik

Blanch and Novik care about designers looking politically at reality, shifting their role from mere trend creators or new needs generators. This vision, engaged with culture in its widest definition, could prepare society to its own evolution and change.

Architecture product
Seriously sexy / Fabrizio Gallanti, edición de Francisca Insulza

When moved to more sophisticated markets, even the weekly grocery shopping engages identity, ideological choices and formal quality. Within the first world society, this is the statement M Preis supermarkets seem to make: there’s a link between communication, design, branding, space and capital gain.

A market utopia / Anahí Ballent

Maybe this is the first explicit recognition to Chilean society’s attachment to beach houses. Nowadays, second home stands for consumer goods. It reflects family status and embodies its wealth, being object of an attention that was formerly focused on the urban house only. Even a part of urban lifestyle has been relocated to the beach.

Doing nothing / Rodrigo Pérez de Arce

Together, Marxism and capitalism rule! Orientated to an upper-middle class crowd, a major real estate project located in the Chilean seaside makes the most outrageous socialist urban utopia come true, probably with no intention. Functionally segregated, massive apartment blocks are housing organized collective leisure.

City and consumption
A big container and many little carts / Alejandro Crispiani, Marcela Silva

An important part of our daily urban life is described here with such accuracy and perceptiveness, that it finally comes out of its domestic anesthesia. Thus, we recognize this choreography that gathers cars, customers, carts and products within the super sales room of the supermarket.

Vitacura: Witness of the consumption avenue to Chile / Pablo Allard
Santiago’s East End has been totally transformed during the last fifty years. Because of a demanding real estate market, a mix of garden city developments and commercial buildings raise along Vitacura Ave. This expansion expresses the relentless logic of the city’s free-market.

Malls in Santiago: lights and lights and shades / Gonzalo Cáceres, Francisco Sabatini, Rodrigo Salcedo, Laura Blonda
The configuration that the mall proposed, formerly demonized by some of the local intelligentzia, has been now completely incorporated in our urban way of life. Every important neighborhood has its mall, in a wide variety of sizes; but the mall has changed as well. New structures blend various uses and welcome pedestrians to walk by.

Capítulo 2 Restaurant , Chile / Smiljan Radic

Parts coming from different realms are carefully assembled to create a calm atmosphere in the middle of a public park. A pavilion as a follie gives place to urban leisure in a culture that erases boundaries between productivity and spare time and enhances the importance of sensual perception.

Fuel stations , Chile / Juan Sabbagh

The guidelines of our economic development could be seen along the evolution of its consumer system. Thus, gas stations have become icons that reflect what is going on with a fast, 24 hour, atomized and extended city, where cars and mobility are getting to be more important subjects.

Ática bookstore, Brasil / Paulo Bruna. Roberto Cerqueira

Starting as a mere commercial space, this project inserts keys that affect positively both business and city: a cafe facing the square and an animated, transparent front revealing a lively interior, turn the opening of the building into an appealing element for the neighbourhood and at the same time assure its commercial success.

Little shopping center, Chile / Andrés Mas, Cristóbal Fernández
A complex society allows the existence of parallel, opposite or complementary trends. The internal Chilean marketplace, utterly influenced by the image of the mall, lately is opening to alternative models of urbanity and consumption. These models complete a wide range of scales, between the hypermarket and the kiosk.