from one spatio-cultural context to another- from j apan to the UAE,

AN ISLAND OF CATHOLIC MONKS:

for example - is based on an interest in "landscape" and in profit. CHILE'S UTOPIA IN THE 1990S
Landscapes, in the words ofYi-Fu Tuan, embrace a fundamental ten-
sion between what is "real" and what is "fantasy". They allow, and
even encourage, us to dream.
Muji has recognized the landscapes of each country it expands to as Francisco Diaz
valuable raw materials for the construction of 1ts globa l brand image
there, and it "harvests" landscapes in every new country in which it
sets up shop. It also harvests landscape imagery for its home market
in j apan from places where it does not yet do business as a retailer,
s uch as the plains of Mongolia. Landscapes have proved to be profit-
able. To support the transfer of the imagery to a new context, a set
of representations are produced. Based on Muji's existing marketing
policies, a country is scanned and mapped, its iconic and archetypi-
cal landscapes are identified and then these are incorporated into
the company's identity. Muji replaces the whole with a fragment; it
enlarges one element of space to stand in for or represent the en-
tire country. Landscape is "Muji-fied", its essence artificially con-
den sed to convey Muji's image. Iconic landscapes have thus become
another clean and simple product to be consumed by the masses
in japan and by design aficionados elsewhere. Paradoxically, these
landscapes evoke different notions or res ponses in differe nt cultural
contexts: when consumed in japan they will contribute to the global
esteem of Muji, but the same imagery will come to embody all the
Advertisement for a Muji properties of the typical japanese Zen aesthetic when seen by know-
house, 2010.
ledgeable Western consumers. This multivalency of landscape al-
Courtesy of Muji Japan
lows Muji consumers to superimpose their own identities upon it
freely.

Wh ile many countries were struggling agai nst the so-called m illen-
nium bug, the year 2000 found Chile polarized by the ba llotage of the
presidential elections ofjanuary of that year. The neck-and-neck race
pitted Ricardo Lagos, the centre-left candidate who_ would be~ome t~e
first socialist president after Salvador Allende, aga mst j oaqum Lavm ,
a conservative run ner-up who could have become t he fi rst right-wing
president after Pinochet's dictatorship. The draw resu lting from the
first round of voting in December 1999 was fo llowed a month later
by only a narrow victory for Lagos, showing that ten years after the

49
48

As some oft he proof of the
anternataonal success of
Cholean archotecture sonce
the 1990s, we must poont
out the monographoc ossues
dedocated to Chole ossued
by severalonternatoonal
magazones, oncludong
Cosobello (no. 650, 1997),
Arquotecturo vovo (no.
85, 2002), A + U (no. 430,
2006) and Arqume (no. 32,
2010). Also, the Spa nosh
magazine 2C has published
monographic ossues on
several Chilean architects
of this generation: Mathias
Klotz (no. 26), Smiljan Radoc
(no. 44), Ceci loa Puga (no. 53)
and Pezo von Ellrochshausen
(no. 61). In add otoon, the
magazone El Croquos recently
published an issue on
SmiiJan Radoc (no. 167).
Furthermore, several
international exhibotoons
of Chilean architecture
have been held since the
1990s: Chilean Contemporary
Space (Barcelona, 2002);
New Chilean Architecture
(Belgrade, 2007); and Chile,
Territory for Architecture
(New York, 2009). Finally,
Mathias Klotz receoved the
Borromini Prize in 2001,
Aleja ndro Aravena was
a warded the Si lver Lion
a t the Venice Biennale in
2008 and Smiljan Radic
was recently appointed to
design the 2014 Serpentone
Pavilion in London.
50
return of democracy, Chi lean society was still strongly divided in
nearly equivalent halves.
In contrast, the Chilean architectural culture of that time showed
no polarization. After years of carefully developed work- which man-
aged to align different tendencies with the shared goal of positioning
Chilean architecture on the international scene- a single discourse
achieved hegemony, bringing with 1t a sense of calm, certainty and
international success to the architectural culture of the country.'
The story that follows is, therefore, a tale of success: the success-
ful construction of a discourse for a new Ch ilean architecture at the
dawn of the new millennium, a discourse so powerful that it soon
turned into an ideology of sorts. But this narrative is a lso an attempt
to present that discourse as such- as a carefully crafted theoretical
operation constructed on the grounds of an ascetic Catholic culture
that was learn ing to enjoy the delights of neo-libera lism a nd globali-
zation. In the end, this is a story that needs to be told today in order
to turn it into history, thereby enabling architectural discourse to
move forward.
Acaveat as we move forward: since the protagonists of this narra-
tive are still alive- and some of them may have cha nged their minds
since the period under discussion- their identities have been revealed
only in the footnotes.
A Remote Island
Nowadays it is cool to be an isla nd (suddenly architects love islands
and archipelagos), but riding the "island wave" in the 1990s- in paral-
lel to the rise of globalization- was a ri sky endeavour, a nd Chile did
so with relative s uccess.
Technica lly speaking, of course, Chile is not an island, but its
geographical characteristics as a thin strip ofland between the Andes
and the ocea n fostered its sense of isolation from the rest of the world.
Chi le is an island within the continent.
With the country's return to democracy in the 1990s, the new
authorities managed to turn the politica !loneli ness of Ch ile during
Pinochet's reg ime into an advantage by promoting the country as an
island of discipline, fisca l order and safety surrounded by far less suc-
cessful states. To protect the laboratory in which neo-liberalism had
first been tested in 1976, economic agreements with Europe, the U.S.
and Asia promoted Chile's image of isolation, boosting the pride of
a cou ntry that bega n to be shown as an "example" to its neighbours.
Rut thts apparent isolation ended up further encouraging an "insu-
Catalona Mena , "Touchong
lar mindset". In cultural terms, Chile's remoteness began to prove the Other·, on Gerardo
to be an advantage. To be in the farthest corneo of the world, as the Mosquera, ed., Copying fd~n :
New zea land-born theorist Mark Wigley once ironically observed, Reunt Art on Chile (Santo ago:
Puro Chole, 2006), 154 .
brings "the sense that we are uncontaminated by the world, and that
we have the best possible perspective of the world". Or, as a Chilean 3
Mark Wigley, ontroductoon
architect proudly said, "distance helps to filter: not just any seed finds to the seminar "Chile at
purchase here".• Thus, the combination of isolation and distance with Columboa", Avery Hall, New
economic success allowed for the rise of a double attitude similar to York, 29 March 2013, voewed
online at http
Habermas's characterization of neo-conservatism: "on one hand, it ://www.youtube.com
takes economic advantage of the flow of information, but on the other, /watch1v=ZzPfRsz _lbw
(accessed 6 February 2014).
it slows down those elements of globalization that may threaten its
traditional values". 5 4
For a country with deep Catholic roots, those traditional values Alejandro Aravena,
·conversact6n con Julio
are inevitably linked to religious ethics. Cuban art critic Gerardo Salcedo", Arquotecturo COAM
Mosquera had said that "Chile is a non-baroque Catholic country, and 343 (2006), 72. All Spanish
it could also be said that its culture is a sort of Catholic Ca lvinism".• quotes have been translated
by the author.
Non-baroque, in this context, means a sense offormal austerity and
lack of ornament, while Calvinism refers to the ascetic condition of a 5
Mena, "Touchong the Other·,
social life that rejects any kind of ostentation. 154.
To summarize, Ch ile brought together remoteness, isolation, aus-
terity, modesty and asceticism: all of the cha racteristics that define 6
Gerardo Mosquera,
a monkish life. Ch ile can therefore be understood as a country that · Introduction-, in •dem,
function s as an island, but since it is an island within a continent, it Copying Eden, 27.
is best understood as a cloister.
Once you have the cloister, it's just a matter of time before the
monks appear. Th is is wh at h appened in Chile during t he 1990s,
when a collection of theorists, editors and practitioners created the
most successful architectura l discourse the cloister-island had ever
known, instituting a faith in a specific way of practising architecture,
positioning Chilean practices on the international scene, naturaliz-
ing the loca l architectural discourse and providing it with h istorical
roots- to the point where anyquestioningcould be regarded as heresy.
The New Discourse
As Foucault points out, discourses are formed through the accumu la-
tion of statements about a specific subject. Therefore, a di scourse is
not justa speech made by a si ngle spokesman, but the result of micro-
political struggles between different statements out of which one
interpretation emerges as hegemonic, pushing everything else aside.
51
 In other words, every hegemonic discourse presents th e statements
See Mrchel Foucault, The
Archaeology of Knowledge that affirm it while hiding those which contradict it.'
and the Drscourse on In this sense, Chilean architectural di scourse in the 1990s was
Language (New York: Verso
shaped by a series of statements aimed at explaini ng not on ly its par-
Books, 2010).
ticularity among a plethora of other "emerging" countries, but also
8 its detachment from that which had threatened architectural culture
Fernando Perez, Alejandro
Aravena a nd Jose during the 1980s: postmodernism and Deconstructivism.
Quinta nilla, Los Hech os de Ia The formative statements were carefully constructed to hide their
orquitecturo (Santiago: ARQ,
2000).
origins in a clear attempt to block any possibility of critique that might
have come from these sources, a nd a lso to hide t he very constructed
9 nature of the discourse, presenting it as someth ing "original", "natu-
See Alberto Perez-C6mez,
ral" or "given".
""The Architecture of Steven
Holl: In Search of a Poetry Among the roots painstakingly hidden we can find such theories
of Specifics·, El Croquis 93
as Critical Regionalism and Phenomenology. While the former was
(1999).
masked by confusion- aligning regionalism with the postmodern
recoveryoflocal tradition and thus leaving aside its critical component-
the latter was addressed without explicit mention, replacing it with
the notion of "facts of architecture".' But Critical Regionalism was
often visible in the sublimation of"hand-tech" construction methods
and the stubborn- not to say chauvinistic - attempt to present the
Chilean scene as something exceptional and radically different from
any other. Phenomenology, for its part, was evident in the exaltation
j of"the work", the relevance given to the first-hand encounter with the
building and the emphasis on materials, place and the experience
I
lr of architecture. For instance, a behavioural theory like the "facts of
architecture", which understands architecture as an unconscious
relationship between body and form (giving the architect the ability
to design the way people behave within the building), draws upon
phenomenological concepts such as "experience", "presence", "imme-
diacy" and "circumstances".9
As part of that discourse, the statements used to demonstrate the
uniqueness of Chilean architecture in the 1990s also tried to establish
its difference from some international trends of the preceding dec-
ade. Though Deconstructivism never managed to find fertile ground
in Chile, the news that arrived from the north had to be kept quiet
in order to keep the grou nd clear for a new theoretical construction.
For an island that never received the east-coast American academic
magazines that facilitated this debate, Deconstructivism was seen
only as a style launched by the Museum of Modern Art whose images
were brought to Chile by a young Za ha Hadid in 1991; and despite the
52
I
fact that her drawings looked pretty similar to some of the construc- 10
Alej and ro Aravena,
tions of the Open City in Ritoque - leading many local architects to "lntroducciOn," tn td em,
think that Oeconstructivis m had been already "anticipated" by Chile- Ma teria l d e arquit ecturo
(Santiago : ARQ, 2003), 10.
this kind of disassembled architecture with no formal regularities
seemed at odds with a local scene that wanted to move away from the 11
excesses of postmodernis m. Indeed, on the remote island of Chile, Ara vena, ·conver sacton con
Julio Salcedo·, 73.
postmodernism and Deconstructivism were seen as two sides of the
same coin, the coin of "intellectualization": 12
Mathias Klotz, "EI desarrollo
(T]here was a distancing that sought to differentiate itself from the previ- de una pr3ctica· , in Teodoro
Fernandez: Arquitecturo en
ous trend, in this case that of the 1980s, whose emblematic works were
el poisoje (Santiago: ARQ,
intellectualized instead of being thought, becoming loaded with his- 2008), 22.
torico-linguistic meta-discourses, whether they were postmodernists or
13
Oeconstructivists. 10
Alejandro Aravena,
"Escepticismo razonable,
But the true antagonist of the new architecture in Chile in the erotismo riguroso .., lecture
1990s was, of course, postmodernism. Forgetting that it had arrived given at the exhibition
when the country was under a dictatorship, postmodernism was criti- Espoi contemporani o Xile
(Contemporary Space
cized under the assumption that it had no relationship to the political in Chile), Colegio de
context. Such an operation was not by chance, because the critique of Arquitectos de Cataluiia,
Barcelona, May 2002.
postmodernism was precisely based on its departure from the specific
concerns of the discipline. "Nostalgia", "fashion", "transcendentalism"
and "over-intellectualization" were the words often used to demon-
strate how postmodernist concerns represented a distraction from
the "essence" of architecture. The generation of the 1990s saw the
1980s as a moment of excess that was boosted by enthusiastic young
a rchitects who uncritically embraced foreign ideas and that "brought
artists from the outside world into the bunker and celebrated them, a
little inebriated by the rarefied air of the enclosure"."
The critique both of"drunkenness" and of the uncritical adherence
to foreign ideas fuelled an ascetic bias that shaped the new discourse.
The kind of architect Chile needed in order to overcome the "mediocrity
of a bustling postmodernism" 12 had to employ a completely different
approach: instead of drinking at parties and making new friends to
invite to conferences, the new architect had to be young(hopefullywith
no professional experience during the 1980s), rigorous when taking
on projects, faithful to the craft of architecture and respectful of the
limits of the discipline- an inward-looking architect who would be
willing to stop "racing to have the last word in order to start thinking
about creating new first words".13 Said differently, what Chilean archi-
tecture was looking for was a craftsman capable of approaching the
53
 discipline with discipline. Isolated by remoteness on a cloister-isla nd Cabrie l Cua rda a nd Martin
Correa, Benedictine
that impeded whatever it pe rceived as a th reat to its traditional va lues churc h's ent r y ramp,
th is new a rchitect was doom ed to become a monic ' Santiago, Chile, 1963

Real Monks
But the myth of the monk was not new to Chilea n a rchitecture. Jndced,
Cabrie l Cua rda and Martin
part of the theoretical cons truction of t he 1990s had to do with locat·
Correa, Benedictine
Church. Sa ntiago, Chile, ingthe right historical roots to connect the new generation with what
1963. had happened before postmoderni sm.In a Heidegger·inspi red move,
Picture by Francisco Diaz
a bridge was built to cross the postmodernist stream without getting
wet; in th is way, theori sts m anaged to con nect t he 1990s w ith the
1960s, t hereby ensuring the purity of the discourse's origins. That's
why there was no bette r way to beg in creating the genea logy of a new
tradition tha n starting with genuine architect-mon ks.
In 1961, two young Benedictine monks - Gabriel Guarda and Martin
Correa , both a rchitects w ith no experience - accepted the commis· the church is marked by austerity and, even more, by a certain poetics
sion for a new church fo r their Benedictine monas tery in Santiago, of austerity. The spirit of this austerity refers, more or less clearly, to a
Chile. Although they initia lly refu sed to design it, a rguing that they Corbusian root and, th rough him, to a certain Calvinist asceticism . ..
had aba ndoned a rchitectu re to adopt a monkish life, t he Benedictine Here the abstraction of a stripped-down geometry should be seen as a
order invoked t heir "vow of obedience" to force t hem to accept the pro· path to a spiritual world .. . "
ject. After two years of design a nd construction, the church opened in
1963. It was a n instant classic, a nd from day one it was considered a Those interpretation s were strongly influential for the new gen·
masterpiece of m odern Chilean architectu re , for it merged the heri· eration that was beginning professiona l practice during t h e 1990s.
tage of Chile's two Catholic schools of architecture in a single building: As a by-product, the myth of the young monk-architect becam e a sort
of ma ntra for Chilean a rchitects: even if you have no experience, you
Rather tha n being functiona l, the poetic asceticism of thi s church
can design an ideal work of architecture if you devote yourself to your
represents very well a certain shared sensibil ity between the group of
work like a Benedictine monk.
14 [the Cathol ic University of] Valparaiso and the ci rcl es of the Catholic
15
Fern and o PE!re z, University of Santiago, which favour aesthetic components of modern Fe rnando Perez e t al.,
"Arquitectura, c ult ura y
architecture and the ability to enter into the symbolic field and interpret Playing the T rump Card Iglesias de Ia modernidad en
p rac t ica p rofessional e n The case of the Benedictine monks, however, presented a problem for Chile: Precedentes europeos
Chile 1930- 1980", in Portales
certai n local traditions."
the em erging Chilea n discourse: they never explained their project y omericanos (Santiago: ARQ,
delloberinto: Arquitecturo y 1997), 180.
ciudad en Chile, 1977- 2009 The building, a deconstructed double "c ube of light" m ade out of decisions or provided any theory to help understa nd the building.
(Sa ntiago: Edicioncs UNAB,
Brutalist cast-concrete pa inted white, was presented during the 1990s The new discourse needed not only older build ings as roots of origin, 16
2009), 97-98. I will not delve further into
as the best example of how t he precepts of modern architecture were to but a lso a set of operative rules t hat cou ld be presented as the "cipher
the biographical data of Juan
be m anifested in Chi le: austere, wh ite, silent a nd using a single mate· book" for new architects. Borchers h ere due to a lack
ria l. As the product of ascetic rigour, this architecture could link Chile Funda me ntal to this task during t he 1990s was the recovery ofthe of s pace.

not only with the modernist mas ters, but also with someth ing beyond:
To understand the perspective from which the problem of the chu rch is
approached, we should start by referring to a certain spirit of dispossession;
figure ofju an Borchers (1910- 1975).' 6 Th is Chilean architect, a mysteri·
ous- even mystical - characte r who built just t hree projects a nd lived
off t he island a nd under the radar for more tha n a decade, was just
the "canonical" model that a rchitectura l theorists of the 1990s were

54
55
 17
Is idro Suarez "Traza de
Jua n Borchers.., c1ted in
"Biografia de Juan Borchers·,
CA 98 (July- Septemb er
1998),18.
18
Rafael Moneo, "Arch 1tett ura
e g loba lizzazione: Alcune
r•fless•on• a part1re dalle
vicende de ll"arch itettura
cilena contemporanea·,
Cosobello, no. 650
(November 1997), 3.
19
Osvaldo Caceres briefl y
mentions him as a brilliant
student who travelled to
Europe right after obtaining
his degree, while Humberto
Elias h and Manuel Moreno,
in t heir h istory o f Chilean
architecture from 1925
to 1965, only c ite him as
a curious case d ue to his
theo retical interests.
See Osva ldo Caceres,
La Arquitectura del Chile
independiente (Conc epcion:
Edic io nes Universidad de l
Bio -Bio, 2007), 134; and
Hu mbe rto Elias h an d Manuel
Moreno, Arquitectura y
m odernidad en Chile, 1925-
1965: Una realidod multiple
(Sa ntiago: ARQ, 1989), 70-71.
56
looki ng fo r. Borchers was presented as a n introspective and rigorous
intellectual wit h seemingly no life or concerns beyond the rea lm of
a rchitecture. For insta nce, Isidro Suarez, Borchers's lifelong profes-
siona l partner, has said:
From when he was in university, he chose the mystical sense of the life of
reason, that is, the ethical sense, fie rcely moral, which makes him reject
any figuration and any bureaucratic crystallization. He admired Fray Luis
de Leon and San Juan de Ia Cruz. He was Catholic, despite being a mild
Rational Atheist, and throughout hi s li fe he had nothing- no house, no
wife, no ch ildren, no property - besides his documen ts, his pencils, hi s
colou red inks and his notebooks."
Borchers seemingly devoted his li fe only to study, refle ction and
work. He was presented as a silent architect who spent years in Europe,
m et Le Corbusier, did a rchiva l resea rch a nd studied buildings first-
ha nd. All thi s d evotion to a rchitecture ha d led him to develop his
own theory, one that merged scientific a nd philosophical approaches
in order to expla in a rchitecture as both a physical and metaphysi-
ca l phenomenon. His work was published in two books: Instituci6n
arquitect6nica (1 968), a sort of a rchitectural treati se based on a series
of lectures h e gave at his studio between 1965 a nd 1967, a nd Meta-
arquitectura (1975), in which he explains the numeric series he created
to "improve" Le Corbusier's Modular. These ideas seem to have been
grounded in theworkofanothermonk, Dom Han s VanderLaan, the
Dutch Benedictine who first conceived this idea of plastic numbers
in architecture.
Borchers's first public presentation as a source for the new dis-
course occurred in 1997, when the Italian magazine Casabella dedi-
cated an issue to Chile. In the introduction, t he Spa nis h architect Rafael
Moneo mentioned Borche rs as one of the roots of the new Chilean
a rchitecture: "The course of the last fifty years of Chilea n a rchitecture
is the product of two pa rticu la r phenomena: the Valpara iso School a nd
the fig ure of]uan Borchers."'"A few yea rs later in 1999, an entire issue
of the magazine of the Chilean College of Architects was devoted to
Borchers's studio, a nd severa l resea rch projects exa min ing his work
a nd legacy began , fos tering the myths s urrounding him.
However, it is still hard to agree upon Borchers's actual releva nce
wit hin the hi story of Chilean a rchitecture. Indeed, historia ns who
w rote before the 1990s barely mention Borchers in their accounts of
modernity in Chile.•• And others who have written on the s ubject more
recently simply don't consider him as worthy of attention. 20 We must 20
These authors onclude
therefore ask, why did Borchers sudde nly emerge as a funda mental
Francisco Liernur, Horacio
source for Chilean architecture in the 1990s? Torrent and Miq uel Adria
This question has two possible answers . The first might be the open- (and not by coincid ence,
all of t he m are fo re 1gnersJ.
ing of Borchers's a rchives in that same decade, a fact which faci litated
See Jorge Francisco Llern ur,
scholarly research about h im, turning him into a sort of "trump card" "Porta les del labe r.nto:
Comentarios sobre Ia
for new theorists. The second would be that there was a certain inten-
arquitectura en Chile,
tionality behind presenti ng Borchers as a source for the new generation 1977-2007", in Portales del
of Chilean a rchitects: when information about someone is scarce, you Laberinto; Horacio Torrent,
"The 1990s: Juncture in
have the cha nce to shape him into a model. In other words, Borchers - Chilean Arc hitec t ural
a n a rchitect who isolated himself from the world in order to discover Culture", in Miquel Adria,
its internal logic through study a nd observation - cou ld be shaped into ed., Wh ite Mountain:
Recent Archit ecture in Chile
t he mythical holy figure that every discourse desires as its founding (Santiago: Pu ro Chile, 2010);
father. As presented in the 1990s, his character served the visions ofthe and Miquel Adria, ""Ch ilean
Postcard s.., in idem, White
a rchitect-as-monk and of a rchitecture as a monkish act ivity.
Moun t ain.
Catholic Utopians
No seriou s account of Chilean architectural development can avoid -
no matter how hard it may try- discussing the Open City in Ritoque.
In a certa in way, this is an inescapa ble refere nce fo r a ny Chilean
discourse that might be proposed: no matter your position, there is
always some aspect of the Open City you ca n draw upon in order to
support your arg ument. Of course, the new discourse of t he 1990s did
not highlight the formal resolution of the city a nd its constructions (as
m entioned earlier, these fall closer to Deconstructivis m) or its mate-
rial aspects (the extensive u se of brick pushes the Open City closer to
postmodernism). Rather, the aspect that deserves attention here is
the relationship between "words" and "works" that cha racterized the
working processes within the Open City. This aspect, which requires
a particular connection between work a nd life, was highlighted and
praised during the 1990s.
As an informed reader may know, t he Open City is an experimen-
tal laboratory for a rchitecture found ed in 1971 by the Ins titute for
Architecture of the Catholic University of Valpa ra iso (IAUV), a nd it is
located on a site of275 hecta res over the dunes ofRitoque along Chile's
central coast. The city, which is inha bited by faculty members of the
JAUV, is used to develop projects - or "construction s" - a nd events,
such as gam es, feasts , lectures and so on.
Perhaps the most radical development in Chilean a rchitecture, the
Open City is usually linked to proj ects of a simila r spirit, like Ta liesin
57
 21
Anne Pendleton-Jullian, The
Rood That Is Not o Road and
the Open City: Ritaque, Chile
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1996), 49.
22
Codofredo lommi, "La Moral
Poetica·, transcript of the
welcome speec h given
to new students in 1980,
consulted online at http
://www.ead.pucv.ci/ 2011
/Ia-mora 1- poetica-2/
(accessed 10 February 2014).
influence on the discourse of the IAUV. Alberto Cruz and Godofredo
Iammi, founders of the IAUV and both practising Catholics, used to
mention t he "holiness of the work", a concept that refers to the fact
that goodness and beauty belong to an order that is beyond humanity.
Iommi expressed it as follows:
58
West, Drop-City or Arcosanti. Though this comparison might be
grounded in a kernel of truth, the foundation of the Open City actu-
a lly has theoretical and political roots that differentiate it from
any other example of its kind. Its theoretical foundations include
the relationship between architecture and poetry, a connection to
Heideggerean principles and the theory of"one's own north" - which
perceives South America as a place yet to be discovered and therefore
as the "north" that served as the focus of their research. Regarding the
project's political roots, we cannot neglect to mention that the Open
City was founded in conjunction with Salvador Allende's election
as the president of Chile; his government, supported by a left-wing
coalition that included socialist, communist and Marxist groups,
frightened many people in Ch ile (as well as abroad), and this might
have prompted the isolation of this group of architects and their
detachment from real ity.
As a laboratory, the Open City is not only a testing ground for the
IAUV through construction, sculpture and installations, but also a
place where a specific way of life is explored, one in which a person's
profession and life are fully merged through an eroticism that is
understood as a "falling in love with" the work:
In this attitude there is an absolute fusion oflife and art that ... is directed
toward the making of space through a rchitecture, and there is a devoted
conviction to architecture as a creative endeavour occupying a rarefied
state of purity. This devotion is akin to religious devotion in its focus,
strength, and passion and is born from an intention that is absolu-
tely detached from architecture intended as a profession. The intention
requires that artistic activity- creativity- discard formula and traditional
canons and replace them with invention. To reinvent all, each time."
This rel igious devotion is not just a metaphor; it has a structu ral
No matter who makes a good or beautiful work, Saint Ambrose says, that
work belongs by right to the HolySpirit. This might be, in the language of
non-believers, that sublime or divine love is the true owner and the real
author of any work that is good and beautiful."
This sacred condition of"the work", as understood by the IAUV in 23
Cod ofre do lomm•, Carta del
the open City, clearly matches the way Cruz and Iommi merged work
errante (Va lpa raiso: Escuela
and life. Isolation from the real world and the denial of the profes- de Arq u•tectura UCV, 1976),
sional way of practis ing are evidence of a monkish understanding of 11.
architecture, an understanding that forces the architect to "change his
life in order to change life"!' If the work is something sacred, then its
realization is a path to holiness; therefore, changing one's life in order
to develop a sacred work would lead the architect to become a monk.
Monks
Thus the pantheon of sources for Chi lean a rchitectu re in the 1990s
was composed of people who were far from normal, including two
monks who abandoned their meditative lives for a while to design
an amazing chu rch and then returned to their cells, an architect
whose life was seemingly devoted to little other than reflecting on
architecture and a group of architects who abandoned the real world
to create a utopian community in order to develop architecture in
their own way. All of them were presented as people beyond good or
evil, without any desires or interest in mundane issues, devoted to
their work and concerned with "essential" things. All of t hem were
Catholic. Chilean architecture's utopia during the 1990s was an island
of Catholic monks.
This construction becomes more explicit when we look at the people
who were left out of this picture. Chilean a rchitects who produced rel-
evant work during the 1960s but were "normal people", such as Emilio
Duhart, Fernando Castillo-Velasco and Abraham Schapira, were never
acknowledged as sources of the new generation, even though some
of their bui ldings could have helped to create a genealogy of modern
Minimalism and architectural experimentation in Chi le.
Actually, if we look closely at the work of Guarda and Correa,
Borchers or the IAUV, we hard ly find any trace of the Minimalism tliat
cha racterized Chilean architecture during the 1990s; on the contrary,
the density of elements made ofBrutalist concrete that we find in the
Benedictine church or the Copelec Building (Borchers, 1965) s how
no formal relation to Min imalism. The same cou ld be said about the
constructions of the Open City, which show a strange but interesting
mixture of the influence of both Arte Povera and Deconstructivism.
However, as t he Argentinean historian Horacia Torrent has observed,
"[Chilean) architecture from the 1990s on was marked by a revaloriza-
tion of abstraction, basic composition and modern cubical form."24
59
 24
Torrent, "The 1990s", 43.
25
Joseph Brodsky, ·on Derek
walcott", New York Revtewof
Books, 10 November 1983,
con sulted online at http
://www.nybooks.com
Ia rticles/arch tves/1983
/ no v/10/on-derek
-wa lcott! (accessed 10
February 2014).
26
This quote was used by
Smiljan Radic in an article
in 1998 ("Airededores; ARQ
39 [August 19981, 27) and
then by Alejandro Aravena
in both a lecture in 2002
("Escepticismo razonable,
erotismo riguroso·, given
at the exhibition fspo;
Contemporon; a XUe, Colegio
de Arquitectos de Cataluiia,
Barcelona, May 2002) and
the introduction of a book
he edited in 2003 (Moterjo/
de orquitecturo, 11).
27
Alberto Sa to, "Traces·, 2C,
no. 8 (1998), 25.
28
llka Ruby and Andrea s Ruby,
"Essentia l, Meta-, Trans-:
The Chimeras of Minimalist
Architecture ", in Minimal
Arch;tecture (Munich:
Pres t e l, 2003).
60
How, then, can the specific exa mples from the 1960s and 1970s dis-
cussed above be regarded as sources?
The devoted lifes tyle of Borchers and the Benedictine monks and
the connection between the words and works of Borchers and the
IAUV provided fertile ground in which a new architecture could g row.
Though the lifestyle and that connection were not always achieved,
they helped to create an image of a new model of a rch itect far removed
from the impurity ofpostmodernism.
This generational insistence on the "purity" of modern Chilean
architecture's origins led, obviously, to a form al simplicity in the
buildings. Mies, Ellwood, Coderch, De Ia Sota, Siza, Souto de Moura,
An do, Zumthor, Herzog& de Meuron and Sejima were formal - though
not always declared- references for a generation seeking to develop a
clear, pure and silent architecture. In this way, the marriage between
clean roots - as red iscovered by theorists- and clean architecture - as
actually designed by practitioners- was finally accomplished.
Originality
But in order to create something new - and be able to claim its original-
ity - Chilean architecture turned its peripheral position on the world
stage (seen as a disadvantage during the 1980s) into the origin of its
uniqueness. Indeed, Brodsky's idea that "contrary to popular belief,
the outskirts are not where the world ends - they are precisely where it
begins to unfurl", 25 was extensively quoted and presented as the reaf-
firmation of how Chile's removal from the world was what could open
up the possibility for creating something originaJ.26 Architects began
to discover t he outskirts of the island. Monkish isolation led practi-
tioners to escape from the cities in order to place their abstract cubes
against the country's stunning natural landscapes, cladd ing them
in local materials and claiming that "hand-tech" cheap construction
methods were the local response to the high-tech approaches ofthe
first world. Therefore, the "Minimalism with bricks" of Latin American
1980s architecture,27 as Alberto Sato ironically characterized it, became
Minimalism with wood, concrete, copper and glass during the 1990s.
However, Chi lean Minima lism had no relation to the therapeutic
viewpoint that Andreas Ruby perceived in "Essential Minimalism" (an
introverted building that protects us from the surroundings).28 0n the
contrary, the "Minima !ism with wood" had no other aim than showing
the "truth" in materials and construction covering a regular shape in
order to prove itself different from the showi ness ofpostmodernism.
29
But in the context of a discourse- understood as a set of arguments
Sebastian lrarrazaval,
aimed to repress a threat- what is the "truth" we are talking about? "Arquitectura mater1ca,
aproxtmacoones a Ia obra de
The subject does not interpret; he is uncritical. He is faced with physical Herzo!l y de Meuron·, ARQ 39
events. He is not faced with texts, a~ proposed by the Structuralist stream (AU!lUSt 1998), 8.
Jed by Rossi, but with effects a nd affect, [and) in the end , with illusions. 30
Today's a rchitecture aims to seduce ... Ma nuel Corrada recently
proposed the metaphors
According to this Ch ilean architect, honesty about materials and of the javelin and the
boomerang to explai n
construction would be seductive illusions made out of effects and
the way architects face
affect, designed to catch the attention of an uncritical subject and !llobalization. While
thus preventing him or her from reading the "text" that underpins the architects li ke Koolhaas,
Hadid and Foster hurl
building. Text and critique - meaning discourse and consciousness- their javelins over Beijing,
are the threats the new discourse wanted to repress. In other words, Dubai or Taipei, Chilean
architects !lO to Europe and
what Chilean architecture originally created during the 1990s was a
Asia and then return - like
discourse that repressed the possibility of discourse. a boomeran!l - to achieve
At any rate, the success achieved by these seductive illusions reco!lnition at home after
their international tour.
prompted a renewed faith in the post-postmodernist practitioners.
Manuel Corrada, "Puntada
Chilean architects began to be acknowledged and celebrated overseas, Chilena·, in Trace (Santiago:
Constructo, forthcoming
thereby turning the island into a place whose architecture was able to
2014).
teach something to the world.
The discourse was so powerful that even its creators became con-
vinced by it. Practitioners of the 1990s forgot that both the role of the
ascetic monk they played and the sublime condition of the Minimalist
objects they designed were just mirages. They were not as rigorous
and ascetic as the real monks of the 1960s, nor were their buildings as
therapeutic as the ones they drew upon as references. They were, how-
ever, accomplishing a great deal by preaching to uncritical audiences.
Once again, discourse proved to be stronger and easier to understand
than the complexity of the personal character of architects.
Epilogue
By the mid 2000s the Chilean monks turned into preachers or prophets.
Like boomerangs, they flew abroad to display their achievements
and then returned to the island to be received as heroes. 30 Once they
achieved success overseas, the generation of the 1990s split. There
was no longer any need to keep invoking the monks of the 1960s, nor
to keep repeating the same statements.
As a result, the discourse was publicly abandoned a decade after
it had emerged, but it maintained its influence on the island itself:
through seem ingly innocent words like "sublime", "essential", "simple"
61
JTI
I 31
Ruby and Ruby, "Essential
and "elem ental", it was communicated to a new generation. Thus LESS THAN MIES
Meta·, Trans·'", 22. Minimal ism- embedded in Ca lvinist-Catholic ethica l discourses
about work, purity, cleanliness and a cla rityofintent ions became the
32
See Kenneth Frampton, "The official religion taught in the new schools, published in the new media
Making of Ground", tn Pulso: and rewarded in the architecture competitions held on the island. Hut Marco Biraghi
New Architecture m Chile
(Santiago: Contrapunto,
as Andreas Ruby has pointed out, "the mea ning of Minimalist archi-
2006), 16. tecture changed into practically its opposite. Thanks to its success it
became the incarnation of precisely that superficial, materialist culture
33
Felipe Alamos Undurraga,
it had always seen itself as a critical alternative to.""
"Apoq uindo con Manque hue Nowadays, only a few vestiges remain of the religious ideas of
dice adios a los ochenta··, El
Mercurio, 26 July 2007.
Chilean Min imalist architecture- a trend that even Kenneth Frampton
32
praised. Nowadays, young apprentices of architectural monkhood
find entertainment in solving "essential" problems of the discipline,
such as how to cover a box with the weirdest material of the moment,
even comic strips or japanese motifs, to g ive a "cleaner, higher and
more orderly image" to a commercial strip mall. 33 In other cases,
designing a construction detail to join two wooden sticks in the most
archaic way possible is monkish territory. Furthermore, clear, mini-
mal floor plans- better known as the free plan by modern architects-
helped practitioners jump easily from single-fami ly vacation homes
to s tores, strip malls and office buildings, proving, in the same way
that Venturi and Scott-Brown d id, that a frictionless floor plan may
also be friendly to frictionless capital ism.
And while the snake was biting its tail, the island has become
increasingly secularized a nd sceptical about official discourses. In
2011 students went out into the streets of Chilean cities to fight for
their rights, awaking a sense of citizenship that had been slumbering
since the 1980s. The political polarization of the 2000s proved to be
nothing, though, compared to what happened eleven years later. With
cities transformed into battlefields for months on end, a new aware-
ness of the urban condition emerged. In architecture, this awareness
turned against those beautiful boxes that, as t hey soared above stun-
ning natural land scapes, did nothing to improve the island's cities
or the lives of its ordinary citizens. In the face of such challenges, the
rel igious discourse of a pure, pristine and si lent architecture simply
had nothing to say.

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