MAGAZINE ARQ 58 Plan view

Readings | Works and Project | Essays and Documents | Nexus

On the ground plan: reticle, format and lines / Josep Quetglas
From the ground plan up in architecture / Luis Izquierdo
Four observations on ground plans / Fernando Pérez Oyarzun
Building Footprints / Eduardo Sacriste

In an age dominated by a culture of images when architectural photography and rendering have become the media of choice, we take a look back at the ground plan. A genuine footprint of a building on its site, the ground plan contains many of the key aspects of a project, at once a means of representation, an architect’s design tool, and a layout and instruction pattern for the builder. Though the ground plan is invisible to the inhabitant, it determines with precision the quality of the spaces we inhabit.
Without the photos, we see the plan view once again.

Eduardo Sacriste’s book Building Footprints, showing plan views from antiquity to the 20th century all at the same scale, inspired us to publish a set of ground plans at 1: 250 scale of Chilean architecture.
The plans are divided into two groups. The first group is a series of houses –single-family homes, a social housing collective and a loft– built between 1946 and 2002. The second group is a set of building floor plans that extend beyond the limits of the page in almost every case. It includes the former Hotel Carrera whose renovation to house the Foreign Ministry still defies common sense. Substituted for the proposal of equal cost that won the 2001 tender, it has contributed to bringing the Chilean public tender process into disrepute.
Our thanks go to all our contributors who allowed us to use their drawings. Especially to Fernando Perez Oyarzun and his students in the 2003 “Theory and Practice of Domestic Space” seminar at the U.C.’s School of Architecture for the survey material they supplied to us, which forms the basis of a significant part of this publication.

Duhart House, Emilio Duhart

Sanfuentes House, Jaime Sanfuentes

Swinburn House, Jorge Swinburn

Quinta Michita, Fernando Castillo Velasco

Pirque House, Cristián Valdés

Los Sauces housing collective, Francisco Vergara

Tagle house, Izquierdo Lehmann arquitectos

TZ Loft, Rodrigo Tisi, Antonio Zaninovic


Apoquindo Building, Cruz & Browne arquitectos

Golf 2001 building, Borja Huidobro, A4 arquitectos

Foreign Affaires Ministry, Teodoro Fernández y arquitectos asoc.

Carrera Hotel, Josué Smith del Solar

Santa Caterina Market, Barcelona, España / EMBT arquitectos
A vision of reality both kaleidoscopic and hybrid is offered by this project located in a central area of Barcelona. Rather than a unitary construction, the building made with multiple elements defines spaces for an apartment block, an archeological site and a market. Its main façade is the fifth façade, a wavy roof surface designed to be seen from above.

Individual space in hyper-density / Carolina Bernales, Liliana Silva
Much of Hong Kong’s urban configuration is the result of frictions generated by a society devoted to neo-liberal economics bumping up against the limits imposed by the former British colony’s miniscule territory. The high population density forces residents to use the city’s spaces as a natural extension of their domestic space, a transference made possible by the superimposition of activities in the urban strata and a complex and efficient public transit network.

Ground plan echoes / Germán Hidalgo
Le Corbusier’s reflections on the plan view as a structural element that generates and regulates the architectural project have a curious starting point in the axonometrics published by Choisy. The vision of architecture as a severe and precise discipline, closer to engineering than to art, brings together these representations that reveal to the eye an abstract ordering of parts, systems and relations.

Field of vision polygon / Germán Hidalgo, Alex Moreno
A revision of panoramic views as a means of interpreting and representing landscapes is one of the starting points for understanding this investigation that crosses view, territory and cartography. The integration of old techniques with new graphic procedures makes it possible to draw polygons that measure the reach of the eye, thereby providing a new type of topographical representation.

Transformable floor plan / Carolina Valenzuela
The ground plan may be understood as the genetic material of space, and though it is not able to specify which acts will occur in it, it is very precise in indicating which ones cannot.
In collective housing, the problem that cannot be solved by a standard floor plan is obvious. New questions about typologies, construction and building strategies are raised by the search for floor plans that are capable of change, driven by the rise of unpredictable new family arrangements and the waning of traditionally dominant social patterns.