Grupo Talca

Last week, I interviewed Macarena Araceli Ávila Burdiles, a 27 year old member of Grupo Talca about her student thesis project “Descanso en los Viñedos.” Using 170 discarded wine barrels, she designed and built an undulating overhang with benches and lounge chairs at the edge of the Casa Donoso Vineyard to provide shade for workers and visiting tourists. For drawings and diagrams see her website:

http://www.plazadescanso.blogspot.com/

Talca is the small city capital of the Maule region of Chile, three hours south of Santiago. For the past few years, the small architecture program at the University of Talca has required final year students to either write a thesis essay or design and build a structure. Grupo Talca is a loose formation of some of the first students whose projects were built and went on to win awards and prizes. Since the projects are student-organized, designed and constructed, the design process differs from normal construction process. Ávila began only knowing she wanted to work somehow with vineyards. Within that parameter, she found the vineyard Casa Donoso as a client and a mentor and from there began designing. Before a design or even structure type was selected, she discovered the available material of the barrels. The nature of the structure was secondary. The inversion of the usual design development process encourages material creativity, more careful use of budget and also a unique form that would be less likely given the use of standard, lumber-yard materials.

The initial design was actually a full-scale building, but a year in which to find client, material, create a design and build it is limiting, and eventually, with 200 barrels available, the project shrank down to a rest area (including some custom made lounges and benches). Several students tried to work with municipalities, but the slow bureaucracy and stricter construction rules pushed Macarena to find Casa Donoso, a local vineyard in the Maule valley as a prospective design partner.

In the first stages, a barrel was deconstructed and a prototype was built. The weight of the thick barrel pieces caused the first model to fail. In the second attempt, the imitation of the load-bearing system of vineyard trellising with end-post anchoring allowed the roof weight to be supported both by vertical posts and by the tensile force of diagonally staked wires. From there, the unit size of each pre-constructed piece was scaled down to make hand-installation easier given the workforce available. The end result is an undulating, partially opened roof under which workers and tourists alike can seek a respite from the endless rows of vines on the handmade recycled-barrel seats.

Macarena’s advisor, Cazú Zegers, was a graduate of the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso and by default, was also a student at and a participant in the Open City. Zegers’ work and thinking is a continuation of Open City methods in a more standardized setting. The cross section of work, poetry and territory are plainly stated on her firm’s website, and her teaching follows that lineage. Zegers’ work and projects makes use of found and recycled material to construct organic-looking work that often imitates either traditional building technique or their organic environments. Previous to her thesis project, student groups at the University of Talca had examined the re-use of plastic bottles washed ashore by local fishermen in their ramshackle homes in Putú, outside of Talca. In many ways Ávila’s her project is a descendent of Open City thinking. In their bottom-up design, she and other members of Grupo Talca approach material use, site and construction as co-dependent and arrive at better design.