Chilean Modern Architecture since 1950

3. Abstraction and Tectonics in Chilean Architecture since 1950

horAcio torrent 3 abstraction฀and฀tectonics฀in฀ chilean฀architecture฀since฀1950 The most typical conditions of Chilean architecture in recent years have been dominated by several factors: a pressure to build quickly a product that expands the country’s economic growth; the availability of a significant quantity of architectural projects for the market; the crisis of a welfare state; and the absence of a public entity that promotes disciplined architectural strategies. The landscape of the city and the territory of Chile at this time consist of works that are oriented, in terms of development and shape, to the new directions that the market promotes, segmented by groups, classes, and origins , according to the demand for the depiction, setting, and spacing of the activities of a society in a developing country. In principle, it seems a difficult time for some architectural works to emerge—for example, those that appeared more or less systematically in different international publications in the mid-1990s.1 Paradoxically, there has been a qualitative change that can be corroborated in an as yet small group of works and architects. Many of the good qualities of this architecture come from a greater dynamic between the principal protagonist of the local architectural culture and his interaction with a strongly internationalized architectural culture. The architecture now being produced in Chile is not exempt from the erosion of the dual models of interpretation and design actions that have been gradually replaced by a way of thinking and developing the project and the construction that more fully encompasses local social and construction practices and the plurality of opinions. There are many historic reasons behind the consolidation of such a fertile environment for the emergence of some notable architectural 92 horAcio torrent works that shape a certain personality and unique position from which to contribute to the more generic problems of architecture as a discipline. Elsewhere, I have emphasized the existence of a change in paradigm , or a profound change in practice, that has taken place among a relatively small number of professionals and academics, who are alert to the particular future of architecture in Chile.2 This change has spread, given the cultural promotion of architecture, the publication of specialized magazines, and core Chilean biennials of architecture , with an intense fluidity of ideas, concepts, and images occurring within local architectural culture.3 Regardless, there are historic conditions inherent to Chilean architectonic culture that have had their influence on recent architecture. This is not to say that the experience has been definitively developed in isolation from the context of international works and ideas, but rather to recognize that events and historic conditions have conveyed a certain particularity over the half-century.4 And above all, it is a question of highlighting the formation of what might be a system of concepts, thought processes, instruments, and values that have given Chilean architecture a certain singularity, shaped historically during the last fifty years. By presenting some of the most important works of architecture from the period 1950–2000, I will try to explain the relational continuity between the abstract conception of shape and tectonic attributes that form it. This process of development is viewed through a selection of paradigmatic cases that must necessarily be complemented by those presented in the other chapters in this volume. Of course, this is not an attempt to construct a genealogy, but merely to highlight the most important topics present in modern Chilean architecture that can be read at different moments. I argue that the modern shapes in the most recent Chilean architecture still form the base of the architectonic conception, because the intellectual tools of architecture come from elemental compositions in the process of design, established at moments of maximum recognition of modern architecture in Chile. I also review the interactions between professional practice and geography, the influence of scientific knowledge and art in the search for form in the 1950s, contributions made by postmodern debate through a recognition of the role of traditional material culture between the 1970s and 1980s, and in more recent times, the tectonic approach. This last is Abstraction and Tectonics in Chilean Architecture since 1950 93 elaborated between body and architectural experience, and the reenchantment that the landscape of this long, narrow country, its crazy geography and local myths, propose to architecture as a discipline and as a profession. elemental฀composition฀and฀modern฀shapes Since 1929, the year when what is considered...