Walking Away: Alternative Practices in South America Southern Cone in the 1960s and Their Legacy

The modern ideal was built upon disciplinary oppositions (urban – rural, elite- mass, body – mind, etc.) that in architecture resolve in the dialectic theory vs. practice (or thinking vs. making, or design vs. building). In the second half of the XX century, in South America’s southern cone (Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile) a new tradition brew from academia and politically conscious architects that discarded that opposition and claimed the act of building as a rightful intellectual way of thinking. In the heat 1960’s post-Brasilia revisionism, the _Nova Arquitetura_ group (Ferro, Imperio, Lafevre) in its search for a “poetic economy” claimed that _o canteiro e o desenho_ [the work site is the design] where all relations of production come to be resolved. Almost contemporarily a tight community of architects and writers converged in the Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Chile, re-founding its architectural program and giving birth to the so-called “School of Valparaiso” — and its communal testing ground: _Amereida_ or Open City –, an educational experiment that understood the processes of building, construction and fabrication as foundation of a new architectural poetics, radically challenging the traditional pedagogical scenario and reclaiming architecture’s social role. These precedents will setup the conditions for the rise of new aesthetical and ideological paradigm that will consolidate and be continued in other regional enclaves, even though the following repressive political period would muffle its development. In the democratic context last decade, this legacy will be being claimed by a new generation of young practitioners that were sprouting and extending across the sub-continent through design-build collective practices. Meanwhile _La Escuela de Talca (Universidad de Talca, Chile, a rising new architectural program) was updating Valparaiso’s legacy with a clear social mandate, most notably through the required “design and built” graduation thesis that have started to populate the school’s surrounding communities and landscape.This paper will identify and define shared characteristics among these experiences, such as the notions of _travesia_ (the journey, both as physical and intellectual travelling) and _ronda_ (ring, collective thinking and making), _sitio_ (site, both as context and work-site), and _proceso_ (process, buiding as material and social performance); and argue that they are shoring the rise of new identities based not on figural questions, as expressed by traditional modernism, but in the deglution of oppositional differences between theory-practice and the embracing of “making” as a critical (haptic) thinking practice.

Volume Editors
Sergio Palleroni, Ted Cavanagh & Ursula Hartig

ISBN
978-0-935502-94-7