Casa Dagorret (1935) Av. Providencia 701, esquina General Salvo, Providencia / Dagorret House, 1935. 701 Providencia Avenue, corner of general Salvo, Providencia.
Architectures for a city in transformation
Beyond all fascination from the possible stylistic classifications, the work of Luciano Kulczewski can be understood through its most radical contributions to the relationship between architecture and city. He was an achiever in a key period that begun with the transformation of social and political structures promoted after the centennial celebrations. His way of conceiving the city clearly stands apart and his architecture is a form of symbolic production of the new era of the big city.
Por / By Horacio Torrent y Maximiano Atria (obras)*
A traditional, historicist and ungenerous reading places Kulczewski as a forerunner of modern architecture, as if his work needed an out-of-its-time reference to become relevant. That is, pre-modern, as if an indication of what was to come. This interpretation tries to assume an anticipatory ability that would place him at the forefront with his achievements, mainly for reasons of style, when in fact his works as classified by styles are always rather late than anticipatory. Beyond any avant-garde condition is the ability to create a good work, the well-thought craftsmanship and the profession structured around the things that matter. If the work of the architect is to be understood standing by itself, a product of coincidence or remoteness from the traditional historiographical models, classifying it as art nouveau, art deco or any hybrid or eclectic style, its actual contributions become uncertain. It is difficult to place him within precise guidelines if the concepts become elusive. This common reading, that of someone very capable who received foreign influences and retranslated them into something his own and original, comes from a historiography more accustomed to understanding the foreign originals rather than the local, which usually avoids the recognition of differences and individual vicissitudes.
It is clear his stylistic speculations seem to effectively put him outside any dimension of modern architecture. And in this respect, proper modern conceptual tools - such as the open plan, the dimension of pure form, opening the constructed body, to name a few - are actually quite alien to his architecture. But then, on what are his modern intentions based? His modern capacity lies in the ways in which he portrayed the architect’s work in relation to the city, exceeding the capacity of the isolated work of architecture in order to relate to broader systems of references in the construction - in form and construction – of the architecture of a new city with metropolitan dimension. Much remains to be explored in the work of Kulczewski, especially in order to transcend the superficial aspects. But the urban dimension of architecture, although elusive and often silent, was apparently present from the beginning, as it was the subject of his degree thesis in 1919 at the Universidad de Chile. During his formative years the metropolitan phenomenon was too obvious for a young man with transformative intentions and a certain socialist militancy not to instill his discipline and profession with some radical sense, proposing a new relationship between architecture and city. He would even apply this to the most attractive and fascinating dimension of his work, the language, trying new meanings
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