Visit to the South with Grupo Talca

This past weekend, I went with four members of Talca Group, Rodrigo Sheward, Macarena Ávila, Martín del Solar and Miguel Ángel Alfaro to Pinohuacho, a small community that sits at the border between the Araucanía and Los Ríos Regions of southern Chile.  The group was checking in on the construction of a quincho, or outbuilding designed for holding asados (Chilean BBQ) and various other pre-existing projects built on the land of woodsman/farmer Pedro Vázquez. Within five kilometers are strips of rocky, vegetationless land where lava passed in 1971, the last time there was a full-scale eruption.  On the property are an outhouse, an overlook structure and platform and the under-construction quincho (barn-like events hall) at the base of the hill.

The Quincho
Set on a small, flat spit of land with a deep river valley at its front and small, steep foothills mountain on its back, the quincho is set to capture views of the adjacent mountain chain and of the still active Villarrica volcano.  When I visited this past weekend, the roof installation had just been finished and the wall installation was just beginning.  Mixing old with new, the quincho has a similar scale to local agricultural buildings, being clad with the local-style wood shingles, but the roof is asymmetrical and comes to a squared peak designed to ventilate the smoke from the fire out of the building.  The irregular windows are designed to optimize views but minimize the wind exposure (the property, perched on a high, small natural plinth, receives constant winds from the southwest).

The quincho is partially paid for with a US$4,000 grant from a federal program for farmers to develop their property.  It also comes from the loads of wood, both native, old growth soil and planted Oregon pine trees growing on Pedro’s property.  Grupo Talca designed the structure with Pedro’s insight (not too close to the river valley, could be flooding of water or lava).

El Mirador
Atop the hill behind the farmhouse is a three-year-old overlook refuge and platform.  For his university thesis project, Rodrigo Sheward built a linear, open-ended rectangle that functions both as a refuge and as a mirador (overlook).  Instead of holding the wood together with nails, the mirador is built using a system of clamping cables, run through the thick, old growth logs salvaged from the same hill that the structure is built on.  The mirador sits angularly to the fenced-in pasture used for animals, to better capture the view of the looming, (and sometimes exuding glowing red smoke) volcano in the near distance.

On the other side of the hill, the vista exposes three lakes and hills thickly blanketed with trees, dotted with enough farmhouses and fields to make for a half-domesticated landscape. Along the same line as the line of the mirador structure, a fence made of rough logs encloses the pasture to the north/southwest corners, leading the way to a platform facing the lakes to the southwest using the same rough-cut, old growth wood as the refuge on the other side of the field. The old-growth logs that make up the project come from Pedro’s property.  In fact, because mud makes the road to the site impassable for a large part of the year, Rodrigo’s design was limited to materials that were immediately physically available on the hill where his mirador was built. In many ways, Rodrigo’s design was dependent on Pedro’s knowledge as a leñador, or woodsman.

Pinohuacho / The Farm
A few years ago, Pedro’s son, Miguel, at 19 years old, realized that rooting out a living off of forestry and farming on the family property seemed impossible for his future.  Together with his younger brother Danilo, they began constructing a canopy system for rural/eco tourism.  Banding together with local neighbors, they formed Pinohuacho (orphan pine), a loose formation of eleven families who aim to create a rural tourism center on their farm and land.  Grupo Talca’s assistance in architectural design is helping attract foreign tourists (such as me) and Pedro’s knowledge and materials help young architects turn design into physical reality.  The projects on his property are mutually beneficial and are a reinvention of how young architects can get commissions and lower income clients can still make use of architectural services.

Conclusion
These kinds of construction projects are a small subset of Chilean design, whose varying directions has been made possible by economic explosion of the past decade. Chile’s identity seems anything but fixed. The distance between the southern “heartland” and Santiago, where most of Chile’s population lives, couldn’t be further apart. Though the Araucania and Los Rios Provinces have become international tourist destinations, many locals are still subsistence farmers, light years from the economic explosion that has built Santiago’s malls, freeways and high-rise apartments. In many ways, the architecture reflects this. The university program from which Rodrigo and Grupo Talca emerged was partially a response to the fact that there are few architecture programs that exist outside the Santiago orbit.
The projects on Pedro’s property represent a value system that is less trying to reinvent itself and more trying to rediscover itself.  The use of immediately available materials and local construction techniques represents both a pragmatism and a regionalism that is only possible outside of Chile’s capital megalopolis.