Mario Pérez de Arce Lavín was born on June 13, 1917. His father Diego, a lawyer, passed away when Mario was only five years old, leaving his wife Sara and their three sons - Mario and two sisters - in a difficult financial situation. He studied at Colegio Mercedario San Pedro Nolasco graduating with the highest honors. He enrolled in the engineering program at the Catholic University, but transferred to architecture in his sophomore year convinced by his friend Vicente Izquierdo Philippi. There he found a stimulating environment and many new friends such as Emilio Duhart, Juan Echenique, Héctor Valdés, Patricio Schmidt, Fernando Castillo, Alberto Piwonka, Manuel Gutiérrez and the somewhat older Sergio Larraín García Moreno, with whose class he would be a teacher assistant and later a collaborator, occasional partner and lifelong friend. After completing an uneventful fellowship in Florida, USA, where he closely experienced the war atmosphere, he became professor at the School of Architecture at the Catholic University, and became one of the actors in the “burning of the Vignola”, one of the new generation’s symbolic break-up actions with the prevailing academicism in the teaching of architecture. The students began to enthusiastically adhere to the tenets of modernism promoted by the Bauhaus and a young Le Corbusier. He married Beatriz Antoncich and fathered five children, two of them architects. Numerous grandchildren came after; several of them architects today. His passion for architecture kept him professionally active and permanently engaged in teaching at the Catholic University. His other passion, the landscape, transformed him into a constant hiker, an admirer of the land, a tireless critic and ultimately an advocate for new ideas for the city and for the education of new architects. In 1983 he received the National Architecture Prize and a decade later he was appointed Professor Emeritus at his beloved School of Architecture at the Catholic University. He died in 2010 while fully active, at the age of 93. Academic Rigor Formed in the rigor of the neoclassical treatises, throughout his life he preserved and respected the values of this way of making architecture: composing with the balance of a renaissance painter, with the classical restraint where all the parts are orchestrated into a harmonious whole. “Emilio Duhart and I worked for some time at the office of Alberto Chupo Cruz Eyzaguirre, the most rigorous author of classical mansions, mainly French, and who resorted to his collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century engravings. To us it seemed absurd to design this type of architecture in the twentieth century, but long after we recognized that it was a good experience of rigor, order and carefully detailed works”. When facing choices he usually repeated, “this is how Chupo would have done it”. It would later be a reference for his architecture, clearly divergent with the Academy. If something looks good, it’s because it is good. Proportions - the relationship perceived between the parts of a whole - are harmony, wherein each part plays its role in the whole. The “looking good” in architecture has a lot to do with the balance detected and described by the classics. A column must have a diameter proportional to its height, its capital proportional to its shaft. The supported element also maintains a proportion with the column, and so the whole building is the result of proportions between its parts. Certainly, having been trained in the discipline of classical proportions allowed him and the first group of modern architects to address modernity with the discipline and rigor of the Academy. This training also explains how this generation is based on the MODULOR, the New Standard proposed by Le Corbusier as a replacement for the academic regulations. This time, placing the human being as the principle and center, rather than an abstract idea of proportion.
El Modulor es la Nueva Norma de Le Corbusier que se impone a la normativa académica reemplazando al Vignola./ The Modulor is the New Standard proposed by Le Corbusier as a replacement for the academic regulations.
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