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.