American cities—and Santiago in particular—but rather to make an effort to conduct pragmatic, empirical research that would yield results specific to the field of architecture, which involved gathering information in the field, since many studies were more sociological, economic, and historical in nature and did not bring the urban form of our cities into the international debate. The research had to be relevant to others, and the downtown area of Santiago had to be interesting for people in other countries to read about and understand—especially given the ideas of rethinking the discipline that prevailed in those years and were led, among others, by the architect Rafael Moneo, a highly renowned scholar. With a clear understanding of how to conduct his research, José Rosas returned to Chile to work in the municipal archives of the City of Santiago to tackle his thesis on the founding city block and its evolution toward modern architecture. The study covered a total of 100 city blocks, of which 40 were examined in depth; these were located within a trapezoid bounded by the following landmarks: Santa Lucía Hill, the Mapocho River, the ravine that is now Alameda Avenue, and the Negrete Canal, which is now Brasil Avenue. These 40 city blocks also included certain pre-Columbian structures, which provided the study with a solid rationale for selecting the area under consideration. The value of the thesis, therefore, would be to alert the municipal and state authorities in the capital that downtown Santiago—and the central area of the community—should be preserved and maintained so that it would not cease to function as the central city in terms of its use, significance, and the foundation upon which the rest of the metropolis was built. The Spanish grid, inscribed within the trapezoid, would thus be foundational and essential to the value of Santiago and its 32 districts. Its heart, consequently, would give meaning to the central city as a value in and of itself and breathe life into the rest of the capital. If the authorities failed to recognize this, they would lose precisely that, transforming the city into a sequence of scattered districts lacking a clear structure and identity—noting that the vertical development of the central built environment, when resolved at the plot level, abandoned the city block as a unit of infill. The methodology used focused on illustrating urban transformations. It involved two parallel lines of work: first, research of the city block at the Latin American level; and second, the depiction of the city center at three urban scales. Rosas’s greatest strength was his talent and skill for drawing, which was reaffirmed by his professor, who told him that graphic representation was a way to confirm morphotypology evolution processes and that, through the following three steps, it would make the city’s transformations evident: •Select •Interpret •Project Working on three scales was essential to document and present the central city block under study from the macro level; the intermediate level, the city block, and the micro level, the buildings within the block. To this end, three types of plans were created, each at its respective scale: 1:2500, 1:1000, and 1:500. This led to what Rosas termed “an atlas of plans,” which allowed the floor plan to be understood as hard, objective data; consequently, the thesis took on the significance of a “record” and, in Rosas’s words, became more important than the text itself. Drawing the maps, then, involved distinguishing what one wanted to show and reveal by using three scales: 1:2,500, which resulted in the NOLLI map—the area that Karl Brunner defined as the “City”—and which allowed one to view the block layout as a whole. The 1:1,000 scale allowed for a detailed view of the city block; for this, Rosas drew on a famous map from around 1910 by Alcides Garay, which organized a series of city blocks into a single unit. Finally, the 1:500 scale, where he
thesis
The Block and Changing Building Typology: Downtown Santiago and the Constants of the Latin American City
DOCTORAL THESIS: José Rosas Vera. Completed between 1983 and 1986. Technical School of Architecture of Barcelona. Advisor: Manuel de Solà-Morales i Rubió.
By: By: Pablo Altikes P. Photos: José Rosas V.
The primary focus of this thesis was to study how the downtown area of Santiago, Chile, was modernized, and how the 16th-century grid layout of the colonial city gave rise to a remarkable transformation that would lead to the creation of a republican downtown between 1850 and 1875, thanks to the proposals of Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna. Subsequently, as a result of the urban planning philosophy that prevailed in the early 20th century, and the ensuing arrival of Karl Heinrich Brunner von Lehenstein as a professor at Universidad de Chile and his later collaboration with Roberto Humeres Solar—who was head of the Urban Planning Depart- ment at the Municipality of Santiago when the Official Urbanization Plan for the Municipality of Santiago was drawn up and approved in 1939 — a second period spanning the 1930s through the 1960s began. The third and final period of study will cover the years 1960 through 1986, the date on which the completed thesis was submitted. Rosas had numerous conversations with Manuel de Solà-Morales, who urged him not to complain about the problems inherent to Latin
186 ←
AOA / n°54
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online