Chilean Architecture

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.