CAU: How did you come to join the office of Mario Pérez de Arce? I came back to Chile at the beginning of 82, when there were still thousands of things to do. Mario and I had met before and he invited me to work with him, he was full of work. Suddenly everything stopped. As is often said, construction activity doesn’t stop, it crashes. And that’s how it was, customers disappeared from one day to the next. Don Mario then offered me to teach, and I took over a workshop at the Catholic University. I was with him until 1991 when we parted ways for the Estación Mapocho Cultural Center competition. EB: And you never stopped teaching... It’s true, I began on 1983, then I became assistant teacher to Montserrat Palmer and from then I never stopped. I must have done about 80 consecutive semesters, even for a time I did the two semesters and then the summer workshops. In some workshops we had over 80 students. We also started with the system of weekly submissions of work projects. CAU: In your 40 years of professional career and 30 years of teaching, what are the changes you have seen in the way of making architecture? We are a generation in the middle; we moved from the pencil to the computer. Computers allow for a ferocious speed, but the most important thing is still choosing alternatives and making decisions. The concept has not changed, although there’s always been some emphasis and today that emphasis is sustainability. I also see a certain comeback of a kind of postmodernism, in the sense that the form comes first, something that I thought was dead. It reemerges from time to time, moving from great heaviness to great lightness. Regarding materials, there are more technologies and alternatives. Chile used to work with a certain brutality borne from austerity, which was actually poverty. However today the most expensive and wasteful solution is exposed concrete... I would say that the big change relates to globalization and the wealth of information, and to a decidedly more universal architecture where a tower in Shanghai is identical to one in Manhattan. RL: Your work involves architecture and landscaping as its main fields. When and how did each one of them take an equal role in your career?
I would say that in this case the opportunity to do landscaping appeared all of a sudden, with the first place in the Inés de Suárez Park competition in 1994, our first work of the kind. In addition, having worked with Domeyko first and then with Mario Pérez de Arce, two architects concerned with the landscape. Regarding Fernando Domeyko, the sense of understanding the city as a continuum between private and public, between the built environment and the landscape, is his most important contribution. As in the Yungay district project, in the projects he did in Madrid and then Cádiz, what was important was the understanding that the interior rooms, the courtyard, the porch, the street and the square form a continuum. As for Pérez de Arce, he simply had a fascination with the Chilean landscape. Today we are used to hear that Chile is more landscape than country, as Nicanor Parra says, but 40 years ago there already were architects like Pérez de Arce and Emilio Duhart, who spoke of how special and exciting Chile’s landscapes were. Mario, Tita Carmona, Marta Viveros, Esmee Cromie, were all early on concerned with the landscape. Mario
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