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.

Thus far, the institutions I have visited and architects I have met have all been products of a small and very wealthy financial elite. The Encyclopedia of Nations, reports that

Currently more than 40 percent of the country’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of just 10 percent of the population. In Latin America, only Brazil and Guatemala have less equitable income distribution. This huge disparity has created a large social divide in which a relatively small middle class is caught between a huge mass of urban and rural poor and a small and extremely powerful elite. Fundamental to the shifts in economic policy over the years is the importance attached to income distribution by the changing administrations…The number of Chileans with incomes below the poverty line (roughly US$4,000 per year for a family of 4) fell from 46 percent of the population in 1987 to 23 percent in 1997.

(http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Americas/Chile-POVERTY-AND-WEALTH.html)

With its huge revenues from the government-controlled copper mines, Chile is investing in housing and infrastructure development that has helped to bring many Chileans out of extreme poverty. However, a short trip outside of Santiago will show that the upscale garden communities like Providenica, Vitacura and Las Condes are lone oases. Immediately outside the city, in the agricultural lands of the Central Valley, industrial-scale cheese processing plant for La Funda sits beside a series of stick/thatch shacks in the flood plain of a polluted river (where the cows are left to graze). Farmers still plow by hand with donkeys. At the edge of a poorer exurban neighborhood, kids play soccer feet from 100 km/hr traffic inside the cloverleaf of the highway exit ramp because it’s the only government maintained grass in the area. It all makes for more thorough land use (kind of green in a way) but doesn’t do much for the quality of life of kids who chase balls in highway traffic or people’s whose houses periodically go sub-aquatic.

The Chilean architecture that gets international press is the vacation homes and corporate office towers of the suburban financial centers east of Santiago proper. Of course, it’s true just about anywhere that architecture by architects is a luxury (and largely unnecessary) product, but Chile’s example is extreme. Most upper class families are able to build vacation homes right on the coast or in the mountains with an hour or two of Santiago, which oftentimes are adjacent to hand-to-mouth farming, ranching or fishing communities. The Japanese magazine A + U  devoted its entire July 2006 edition to Chilean architecture.  Nine out of the fourteen featured structures were private homes and one was a high-end hotel. Not a single featured structure was public.

A week and a half ago, I joined the group called Un Techo Para Chile (“A Roof for Chile”) which is devoted building temporary structures and permanent housing for the extreme poor of Chile. Kind of like the Habitat for Humanity of Chile. Except when I went we weren’t building anything. We were filling in a 13’ x 10’ x 6’ hole that sat 11″ from the edge of a shack where a very nice family lived. Actually, a bathroom had stood where the hole now is, but it caved in a few weeks ago. Water (toilet and shower) waste had been pumped directly onto the ground, eroding the ground enough to create sinkhole large enough to collapse an entire portion of a house. This family is now bathroomless. It could be worse–they have a working sink in the kitchen with running water and a stove, but in a country with less income disparity, they would also have heat, a house without gaps, a paved road (this is an urban neighborhood) and a way to control the array of stray dogs and cats that seem to be invading their house. They have two small children and the father has a heart condition that leaves him too weak to work.  

Lack of decent housing poses obvious immediate economic and health problems. Lo Espejo is at least an hour by public transportation to the city center, where many residents work. The distance from both jobs and resources such as clinics, schools and government offices takes up time that could be used in child care or work, not to mention the cost.  The lack of heat and insulation keeps the houses uncomfortably cold in the winter and allows stray animals to enter the house, wanted or not. The release of raw sewage onto the ground means that both houses sometimes cave in and that people live immediately adjacent to their own waste. Animal excrement is scattered across the communal packed dirt areas, immediately adjacent to the jerry-rigged barrels used as family bread ovens and where children play.

Within Chile there is a hope that the recent economic growth can bring Chilean standards of living up across the board.  To a certain degree, extreme poverty has been well addressed.  The shack that the family in Lo Espejo occupies was built by volunteers free of charge, and more permanent housing is under construction nearby.  Unfortunately, the heavy dependence on copper revenue and its decreasing demand means that the flush of cash that the government is now experiencing might soon come up seriously short. For now, Chile is one of the least affected by the economic downturns, thanks to a huge “rainy day” fund generated by huge budget surpluses from increased copper revenue. If the international economy stays in a deep recession though, copper demand will not rise for a long time to pre-crisis levels. Heavily dependent on the industry, Chile’s government bailout may not last forever.   (See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124337806443856111.html)

 In the meantime, though, according to the Wall Street Journal, ”Chile is putting $700 million into a huge infrastructure program designed to create at least 60,000 jobs in road paving, airport upgrades and housing construction. The home-building plan, which features subsidies for middle- and low-income buyers, has prompted developers to start clearing land for a 400-unit development called Western Gardens not far from Santiago’s airport.”  Chile has built hundreds of thousands of new public housing units in the last two and a half decades, but in Santiago, the projects are largely segregated to the far west and south of the city, leaving the poor as isolated as ever from their more middle and upper class counterparts.

Architecture has an ethical obligation to address human and wider societal issues. Architecture is not only these summer houses that are touted on international vanity magazines. Maybe this is a problem of how architects and architecture itself is structured. Architecture shouldn’t be a luxury service. Architects are able to bring design solutions and ideas that a self-builder cannot.  There is one university affiliated public housing organization, Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental “do” tank.  It’s a rare offshoot of the vanity design in which many published architecture engage. Chile has come a very long way since the Pinochet era, but the social/economic structure has a long way to go before everyone has access to halfway decent housing.  The economic crisis will show just how strong both housing policy and social change is here.

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.

For four days, between May 1st and May 5th, I stayed in the cubícula, an irregularly shaped little one room cabin nestled into sand dunes and originally designed as a workspace for the poet Godofredo Iommi. The cubicle is in the urban center of the Open City, clustered with 4 other houses just past the entrance gate. The house shakes violently all night as heavy trucks pass by on the coastal route just above on the hill.

The ‘city’ is a collection of houses, communal buildings and experimental structures scattered on a plot of about 500 hectares (1,235 acres) that stretches from the beach, across low-slung sand dunes, across the coastal route and up to the top of the first foothill of the pre-cordillera until by a stand of eucalyptus trees, the property unceremoniously ends with a barbed wire fence. The houses and installations are divided, fairly evenly, between the low-lying sand dunes on the sea-side of the coastal route and the high hillside overlooking the road. At the beach, the houses are plunked unceremoniously on top of the sand (the community is anti-landscaping) and above the some houses are huddled into the other steep hillside and scattered along the high, planar meadows at top.

Intersected both by railroad tracks and the main coastal route of the region, the Open City seems to be constantly crossed by people wandering from place to place. I attracted suspicion wandering around because the previous week, a young couple that introduced themselves as architecture students tried to break into one of the houses. Many of the residential structures are isolated in the dunes, inviting vandalism and theft.

A group of ten or so 20-something-year-old friends were camped out just across the tracks listening to reggaeton and grilling asado amidst washed up garbage and horse shit on the edge of a fresh water pond just across the railroad tracks. An old hermit’s shack is just over the dunes. Fishermen come and go along the tracks and across the pond are farmers on horseback herding cows on horseback with German shepherds across swampland and sand dunes. The place still has a feeling of (albeit a little more worried) anarchy.

Originally formulated as a place to create architecture without the usual restrictions of budget, client, particular site, the Open City has stayed almost dogmatically true to its original goals since it was founded by Godofredo Iommi, Alberto Cruz and others in the early 1970s. Relying on poetry, memory and landscape for influence and ignoring the traditional methods of plans, sections and elevations, the process of construction is as important as the final form. Through ignoring traditional precedents, the Open City aims to escape hierarchical European or North American urban design and define something distinctly South American.

Though the founders and current residents stringently deny that the place is a utopian community, it certainly shares some characteristics with New Lanark in Lanarkshire, Scotland, the Fourier community in New Harmony, Indiana, the Transcendentalist Fruitlands community of Harvard, Mass., or the 1960s utopia of Twin Oaks in Louisa County, Virginia. Early on, in one exercise at Ritoque, visiting students were urged to tear up their government-issued ID cards as a kind of ritualized cleansing from the outside world. Like these communities, there was an attempt to break away from the detrimental forces of the market in search of a purer environment. Unlike many of these communities, though, there was no attempt to reach any kind of economic autonomy. Since the founders were all faculty members of the nearby Universidad Pontificía Católica de Valparaíso, a true attempt at self-reliance was senseless.

Perhaps it is the cross between philosophical independence and institutional reliance on a larger organization (the Catholic Church controls the university where nearly all the residents work), the Open City has been able to survive long past the era when most communes and living experiments have collapsed. It helps too that all architecture students at the architecture faculty are at some time or another required to pass by the city and understand its dogma, the place is constantly infused with new projects undertaken both as a rite of passage and as a requisite part of receiving a diploma. One of the newest building projects in the open city is the graduate student housing project, with five individual cubicles for current students.
In an effort to keep the property from being subdivided by the original families and sold off (the beachfront property has become much more valuable since it was purchased), the families that make up the Open City formed the Corporación Amereida, which manages the property both administratively and monetarily. No one family officially owns the house in which they live, and the land is officially bound to serve its original intended purpose of artistic expression and experimentation. Maybe it was because of this legal action that the community has lasted longer than nearly all communities of its kind. With an alternating president of the Corporación, no one person has the ability to close down the community or make major changes without consensus.

As architecture internationalizes, and as energy-efficiency and practical concerns replace the search for original form, the relevancy of the Open City comes into question. There are a few younger professors and graduate students who make the Open City home, but the energy and enthusiasm that created the Open City in the 1970s is far from its peak. It seems important to have places that allow free experimentation with form somewhere, but if the ideas don´t extend past the property line of sand dunes and hills of Ritoque, what does it matter? The extent to which the Open City has affected outside design I am still trying to determine, but at the very list we can see it as a moment of autonomy in Chilean architecture.