PLANTA 1º PISO / 1 ST FLOOR PLAN
PLANTA 2º PISO / 2 ND FLOOR PLAN
The great city: ideology and practice Around 1929, the technical, design and professional dimension of the urban problem exploded. Brunner polarized the debate on the future of Santiago, Muñoz Maluschka institutionalized the scientific technical instruments for the promotion of harmonious urban growth, Larraín and Arteaga incorporated the new aesthetic dimension of modern architecture in the Oberpaur Building, and young students of the Universidad de Chile attempted the first reform of the teaching of architecture. Kulczewski had occupied a leading position in the construction of large portions of the urban fabric in recent years, and had already explored the dimension of language that would correspond to the architecture in relation to a new phenomenon, the city in transformation. Luciano Kulczewski was an achiever in the key period of the city that starts with the positive transformation of social and political structures promoted after the centennial celebrations and abandoned with the crisis of the 30’s, certainly a key point in his career. He would personally live through the crisis and subsequent capitalist reorganization, when he had to negotiate with the financial system his project for a small skyscraper. After the crisis the construction of the city was instrumental in the reconstruction of the capitalist base of the country. The subsequent reconfiguration prompted new forms of real estate business, new forms of labor organization and consequently the construction market. Individual endeavors would be questioned, both in the architectural sense as well as the artisanal craft regarding construction.
In general, his choices were not precisely stylistic. They set a pattern of possible variations of minor elements, whose main transformations were in the sizes of the openings of the windows and their associated ornamental systems, which suggests tight budget considerations. This option for project variation, which Kulczewski associated with freedom 12 , was also common practice in real estate developments from the late nineteenth century, as in the case of the complexes made between 1924 and 1929 by Hilarión Hernández Larguía for the Banco Edificador Rosarino in Argentina, to name just one example 13 . Something that certainly contemporary criticism argued: “It is desirable that some of these new construction partnerships take the first step, building a residential neighborhood in a particular style (that in its uniformity will always allow large individual variations) maintaining a harmonious feeling of a modernist complex or a recreation of other times and places.” 14 Moreover, the ambition towards the effective use of the plot or the controlled dimension of the premises are not strictly features of an early modernity, but clearly correspond to the aspirations and possibilities of the real estate development that both operators and his different clients proposed. What is particularly defining these complexes is the conviction of the significance of building the street with the continuous housing, due to the alignment of the houses - something that was essential in the Berlage Plan for Amsterdam, for example - and that, as a townscape, displayed the ability of Kulczewski for designing on an urban scale, just as important in the idea of the creation of community as its identification and readability through ornamentation.
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