Material Use and Form in Chilean Architecture Practice

Material selection in design is indicative of connection with physical and cultural geography, attention to technological changes, environmental concerns and the project’s budget. In Chile, when and how materials are selected in the design process illustrates differences in philosophy. With its new economic and social openness, experimentation in architecture and design has exploded. Some architects emulate vernacular styles or local materials as a basis for finding new forms, some use standardized sizes and particular materials in order to cut construction costs and others begin with used or recycled materials as a premise for determining form. Still others use the materials themselves to reflect their landscape. Among all these precedents are a Spanish colonial adobe hotel in the Atacama Desert, a vacation home whose varied wood siding imitates the striations on the adjacent cliffs if the coast, a church that imitates roadside sculpture-shrines and a grass-roofed hotel that allows for a continuous vista of Patagonian pastures. The treatment and selection of material can be seen as a lens through which to examine the varying design precedents of current architects in Chile.

Several current architects take their example from regionalism. Their selection of materials naturally progresses from the use of local form. In his plea for a more sensitive architecture, Kenneth Frampton writes that building “must become the embodiment of habitable places” rather than a “misguided concern to assimilate the technical and processal realities of the 20th century.” Accordingly, many of these buildings take precedent not from urban industrial structures or the imported grandeur of the Spanish colonial style, but from the smaller scale, craftsman built structures farm buildings and homes that scatter the countryside.

Cazú Zegers’ Casa Granero

Cazú Zegers’ Casa Granero house borrows heavily from both local agricultural building and from the curvature and form of the local landscape in the southern lake district. The house epitomizes her approach to architecture; the form simplifies traditional lines using unfinished, local wood to blend with the surrounding forest. As she notes in an essay in her self-titled book, Cazú Zegers, prototipos en el territorio, “In America there are still vast portions of uninhabited territory, where the notion of limitless landscape within a fluid geographical space still exists.”

Zegers sees both the human constructed history and the geographic or geological history as inspirational in finding form. Her selection of materials are obvious; when local landscape and local forms are imitated, traditional materials are the clearest choice. Since the vernacular barns of the south are her main inspiration, her architecture tends to blend with the domestic landscape of farms that dot the countryside in the Araucanía and Los Ríos district, and the entirely wood structures with the natural landscape in their color and their weight.

Grass Roof Hotel in Patagonia by German del Sol

Like Casa Granero, Hotel Remota by German del Sol and Jose Cruz is based on agricultural outbuildings, this time on the large sheep estancias of the south. These Patagonian ‘galpónes de esquilas’ use grass roofs and the long, low-slung hall-style form. The undulations of the hillsides and the elongated rectangles of Patagonian sheep barns are used as equal reference points. The hotel merges traditional outbuilding form and references to the local landscape even further than Casa Granero by using one of the most prominent features in the landscape, the grass pastures, to make up the roof. From above, the hotel visually merges with the environment.

Eduardo Castillo’s Capilla l’animita takes a different precedent. His small, wood-sided chapel evokes the ‘animitas’ or miniature roadside shrines to the dead that are scattered across rural roads in South America. In his quest to infuse architecture with spiritual meaning, Castillo resizes clay-sculpted soul shrines to full-scale chapels for the living. The continuously wrapped siding, which extends from the walls across the roof) imitates the continuity of the clay unit animita sculptures. His chapel reinvents folk art on a human scale.

Outside of these direct design references, several Chilean architects borrow local materiality and construction knowledge but twist it into new forms.

Copper-clad house by Smiljan Radic

This ranges from using materials traditionally but to arrive at new forms, such as the adobe and tapial of Hotel Tierra Atacama by Matías González and Rodrigo Searle, or finding new uses for old materials as a means of discovering form, such as the copper-clad home by Smiljan Radic Clarke in Talca. In their efforts to maintain the material language of the vernacular but willingness to move outside of the limitations of traditional form, Radic, and González/Searle are able to move outside ‘values’ architecture but still make their buildings regionally representational without resorting to the kind of sentimental vocabulary that appears with direct imitation.
Their adobe/straw construction walls have clean, modern lines and boxes instead of the hacienda-styled adobe construction of del Sol’s Hotel Explora Atacama down the road. These architects can be seen as intermediaries between architects who use local building language and those who prioritize material use in the search for form. Smiljan Radic specifically inverts use of material as a basis for design experimentation. His Casa Cobre No. 2 is his second foray into the properties of copper. Material can be selected for practical as well as aesthetic or philosophical concerns. Schedule and budget concerns can determine form as much as landscape or the vernacular imitation, whether by standardizing materials or using recycled materials that are immediately available.

Bip Computer Building by Alberto Mozó

Alberto Mozó’s much lauded Bip Computers building in Santiago takes material considerations to a practical extreme. Unlike Hotel Tierra Atacama or Casa Cobre No. 2, which use materials to reflect landscape, save money or create energy efficiency, Mozó prioritized standardization of the laminated wood beams throughout the structure as a means of making assembly quick and onsite material use efficient. Realizing that the company would grow in the near future on a tight budget, the building is designed so that it can be re-worked or moved should the need arise.

Metamorphosis house by José Ulloa Davet & Delphine Ding

Like the Bip Computer building, the Metamorphosis House, renovated last year by José Ulloa Davet and Delphine Ding uses regularity of size to keep construction efficient and material waste low. The horizontal siding creates the illusion of irregularity while keeping costs down by hiding, making randomness cheap and fast. Its consistent horizontality creates what the architect as an “autonomous unit.”

Outside of commercial architecture, it is much easier to use material as the precedent for design. The Open City in Ritoque, an experimental playground for the Universidad Católica of Valparaíso and Grupo Talca are both organizations able to use found material to determine structure and purpose. Macarena Ávila’s thesis project “Descanso en los Viñedos,” a semi-enclosed shelter for vineyard workers, re-uses wine barrels to dictate both the form and the function of the structure being designed.

Macarena Ávila’s thesis project “Descanso en los Viñedos,”

The curved barrels were combined to create an undulating overhang, supported by end-stakes, similar to the adjacent vineyard rows. Of course, in the commercial world, it would be difficult for materials determine form, but in a university setting or at the Open City, the play between material and design sets a precedent that has extended into the commercial world, particularly in the works of Cazú Zegers and German del Sol. It is this example created in an academic setting that is particular to Chile and has had a trickle down effect into wider practice.

The Chapel Cristo Salvador of the young firm Supersudaka uses recycled glass and tiles to clad the exterior of their small, urban chapel, an example of using urban waste (broken glass is easy to come by on the back streets of Santiago) to create a distinctly urban form. The mosaic façade of the chapel resembles street art and graffiti that lines other alleys and sidewalks in the neighborhood.

A more subtle use connection between many of these projects exists; many Chilean architects use materiality to imitate surrounding landscape. Karsten Harries seems to be describing Chile when he notes in The Ethical Function of Architecture, “A spacious horizon is an image of liberty…the open ocean or the view from some mountain top is preferred to the bounded beauty of a black forest valley. What announces itself here is not only the developing sensitivity to the sublime but also the connection between the sublime and freedom.” In fact, several of the previously mentioned structures imitate their surroundings through material use. The Hotel Atacama, by using earth similar to the very plot it sits on forms a continuous, low-slung visage of earth continuing on to the mountains beyond.  The Metamorphosis House’s stacked horizontal siding recalls the layered stones in the adjacent cliffside.  The unfinished wood of Casa Granero blends the structure seamlessly into the forest.

Kiltro House by Supersudaka

Jose Cruz and German del Sol’s Patagonian hotel sinuously follows the edges of the hillsides into which it’s built. Besides these structures that specifically consider materiality, Metamorphosis House’s thin wood siding imitates the stacked horizontal lines in the adjacent cliffs. The otherwise cubic Kiltro House by Supersudaka has a wildly angled roofline made of wood that imitates the hills stretching out in the view below.

Huilo-Huilo Hotel by Rodrigo Verdugo

The new Huilo-Huilo Hotel by Rodrigo Verdugo, perhaps the most fantastical of all, creates a mountainous waterfall from a conical stone tower in the middle of a forest, designed to remind its guests of the magnificence of the environment they have come to visit.

Because many of the architect-commissioned structures that are able to play with material and form are summer homes or private hotels, Chilean architects are able to allow interplay with material to revive old form, create new ones, make more economic and efficient design, and play with program and design process. Through landscape, through its unique geography, through rural artisan construction, through its history of academic experimentation, and through the opportunities to build presented by the economic boom, Chilean design is a model for material play and form.