| Abstrakt: |
As Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso argues in his song, the South's contribution to humanity seems constrained to culture: music, literature, art, films, or food. Science (even social science) is the North's domain. Likewise, theory--the armature to operate and dominate the world--has remained the North's privilege, and with that the whole discursive control on the future. Could 'otro' future be possible? 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 twentieth century, in South America's Southern Cone (Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile), a new tradition brewed among academic and politically conscious architects that discarded those oppositions and claimed the act of building as a rightfully intellectual way of thinking. In the heat of 1960s 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 came 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 "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 the foundation of a new architectural poetics, radically challenging the traditional pedagogical scenario and reclaiming architecture's social role. These precedents will set up the conditions for the rise of a 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 of the last decade, this legacy will be claimed by a new generation of young practitioners that were sprouting and extending across the sub-continent through design-build collective practices, such as URO1.org (Chile), Al Borde (Ecuador), A47 (Argentina), Lab.Pro.Fab (Venezuela), Oficina Informal (Colombia), among many others. 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 build" graduation thesis that have begun to populate the school's surrounding communities and landscape. This paper identifies and defines the shared characteristics among these experiences, such as the notions of travesia (the journey, both as physical and intellectual traveling) and ronda (ring, collective thinking and making), sitio (site, both as context and work-site), and proceso (process, building 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 dilution of oppositional differences between theory/practice and the embracing of 'making' as a critical (haptic) thinking practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
