Enrique Browne: Let me propose an open question, which issue would you like to address and is never asked? It relates somehow to teaching. Architecture in Chile, as well as many other things, has “fallen” into the realm of the University, academia, in spite of having been born as such from the fine arts and taught in workshops and technical schools. Architecture schools tend to complain about having to be a sort of technical school, and it is difficult to stay the course with a discipline that revolves around art and the Academy. Although it is not strictly an art, it does use the tools of the arts, it requires thinking with your hands and learning from trial and error. One could understand the teaching of architecture as a “workshop” - in fact that name is used - where work revolves around a problem or a fact, and there is someone with more experience and others with less, where everyone moves forward and learns over the years, as in the workshops of old times. The needs of the economy or the market are what make us take shortcuts to have some assurances that things can be achieved earlier. Carlos Alberto Urzúa: Upon graduation different career paths open up, where as an architect you can develop independently or stay under the wing of the University. How did you manage your options? I graduated in 1972 when everything was in chaos in Chile, and in 1974 I moved to Spain [where he was born], for a PhD at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. At the time there were several Spanish architects that I was interested in, mainly the master seniors of modern architecture of the period, such as Sáenz de Oisa and Alejandro de la Sota. And a new teacher was in everybody’s lips, Rafael Moneo. He was not in Madrid any more, he had just moved to Barcelona; he was an architect of whom everybody was talking... There was a trend of social housing in Madrid with something not very different from what Jaime Besa and Mario Pérez de Arce were designing in the Salar del Carmen, one of those twists of the modern movement, which from time to time returns to its vernacular roots. That was the state of Spanish architecture, as expressed in the village of Caño Roto. In Spain the struggle to develop an original style of modern architecture or do architecture as that of the rest of the world has always been present. In Barcelona, Coderch, and in Madrid, Sáenz de Oiza and De la Sota, were architects who were definitely working with modern architecture.
EB: The Ruíz House is from these years, a very nice project for a small house. Was it your first work? Yes, it was a house for a Spanish friend, a historian, then as young as I was. Fernando Domeyko, who had recently done work at the Yungay district, came to Spain at the time, invited by the Colegio de Arquitectos for a PhD program at the Baum Centrum with Habraken. Here we met again. I had been in one of his workshops at the University of Chile, working with Madrid architects of the 19th century. Precisely because of that my friend asked me to do something in a small plot he owned. I designed this house for him in 1980, and when I came back to Chile I presented it at the 1983 Biennale.
95
Made with FlippingBook Digital Proposal Creator