Generative matter / Jorge Godoy, Daniel Aisenson

Architecture has usually reduced its distance to other disciplines. It used to be music or sociology; today natural sciences lead big part of architectural research, within digital media support. A renewed time dimension allows the project to interact with external agents, through programming and simulation processes.

Computer aided design and manufacture / Claudio Labarca

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.

Translation and/or representation / Joseph Rykwert

Thinking, looking at, drawing, building... architecture is always proposing shifts from abstract territories (digital or mental) to material bodies. This information transfer needs some synthesis to be done within its associated representation. Just like in Borges’ maps, what is the point of representation if there is no interpretation involved?.

Skyscrapers ground floor / Marcelo Faiden

The engagement between architecture and gravity force is particularly noticeable within the ground floor of any building. This stratum displays the unavoidable link of architectural project with material world, including carrying of loads, support, structure and even its considerations to context.

On shells and blobs / Martin Bechthold

New representation techniques have expanded the possibilities of architectural form, such as it is understood as an expansion for creative freedom. How can we relate this new potential with the engagement that gravity force (as weight, thrust and resistance) demands on built work?.

Digital materiality / Daniel Rosenberg

As long as building processes relay on craftsmanship practices and intensive use of labour force, constructive appropriateness of new digital tools will be questioned. However, thinking this relation backwards could be enlightening: what about associating specific digital commands to specific building procedures?.

Atracttion to virtuality, willing for reality / Juan Ignacio Baixas

Mostly used at previous design stages, the incorporation of digital tools into construction processes is quite recent. But this displacement from design field to work and building is the first step of a change that just began; this shift should reinforce the relation between architecture and built reality.

Unbearable / Manuel Corrada

For architecture has always existed a gap between project and built work. This gap involves inevitable distortion due lost in translation: passing from paper to the built domain demands attention on how images are perceived and supported once out of his abstract origin.

Plastic forest - Mutek 2005, Valparaíso, Chile / Advanced Studio Spaces of - for performance. Text: R. Tisi

How many strategies does architecture have to communicate an idea? How can digital tools improve the interaction between buildings and its inhabitants? New technologies not only have changed the way buildings are designed and built but also the way we perceive and move within space.

Philips Pavilion, Brussels, Belgium / Le Corbusier. Text: F. Pérez Oyarzun

The Philips pavilion proposes a synthesis that integrates architecture, music, engineering and visual arts sheltered under a geometrically complex surface. Before media culture, events or computer aided design became widespread all over the world, this surface was at the same time a laboratory for building procedures and a particular projection screen.

Ibere Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brasil / A. Siza. Text: F. Rihl

Although the completion date of the first building by Siza in Brazil will be December 2006, it is already possible to see it finished on the outside. A single-material strategy and an innovative, bold use of concrete have brought closer both project and site work.

Remota Hotel, Puerto Natales, Chile / Germán Del Sol
Building in a distant land implies at least two things: the invention of a landscape and certain demands upon materials. Besides traveling distance issues, the materials involved in this construction have been left to their fate, facing the same abandon that shaped the territory where it stands.