In 1950, at the age of 43, he designed a building on Bulnes Promenade in which he proposed a façade that complied with the morphological restrictions described in the Brunner urban plan. However, towards Nataniel Cox Street, he designed a completely different configuration: he not only proposed large windows, but also incorporated an element of enough thickness to simulate a brise-soleil from a foreshortened view, and therefore kept the solid and robust expression of the building complex. From this moment on, the work of Despouy is able to acquire a different dimension. As if it were a discovery, the operations that add complexity to the compositions of his façades acquire greater influence in the resolution of his works. The successive programmatic complexity of his commissions, the size and typological diversity of the following projects will foster increasingly intense operations in the incorporation of pioneering building and typological systems. Always taking proper care of the delicate tension between technical resolution and the visual expression of his architecture, the choice of color and material will contribute to add value. The new ornament takes on different expressions in works such as the building on 378 Villavicencio Street, where he manages to modulate the entire façade – finished in ocher-colored stoneware ceramic mosaic from the Irmir factory - with the reinforced concrete frames that reveal the interior division of each apartment. In 1958 he completes the building on 309 Providencia Avenue, with a volume attached to an existing building and enclosed by a body entirely finished with a curtain wall of square metal profiles. Almost as a first technical experiment, the proportions of the curtain wall recall the iconography of the European avant- garde, sharp black lines and color panels. He would later repeat this feature in several works. Steel as a resource in the design of façades was increasingly used and rapidly replaced the protruding cornices and reinforced concrete frames that had allowed him to give order and proportion to his façades. These slim and sleek steel structures combine the delicate proportion of each of the parts with enclosure systems and solar protection. This is the case of the façade for the Bustamante Park building of 1972, without a doubt the culmination of the quest for the elegance of steel that we also see in other small works such as the building on Francisco Noguera Street and in the large façades of the bank branches in Valdivia, Concepción and Viña del Mar, in addition to the demolished wing of the Workers Hospital. The post-war atmosphere and the spectacular development of modernity in the United States provided a new horizon of references very well understood by Despouy, who naturally adopted the materials and construction criteria that recall the work of Mies van der Rohe in America. This is evident in the Bustamante building with his work with I-beam profiles similar to those used by Mies in the Seagram Building in New York (1958). The recurring references to European and North American architecture encouraged the combination of different ways to solve the problems that each project presented. In 1960, after the Valdivia earthquake, Despouy received the commission to build the first branches of the Banco Español de Chile. Here he proposed a glass façade building that broke the line of the continuous façade by pushing the main body back and carefully placing a canopy forward toward the curb. A new moment in his career began with this series of large buildings that required the architect to solve problems associated with banks and their location in the urban fabric, usually in front of the main squares, and to tend to an architecture that seeks to establish the new image of modernity associated with these institutions. In Viña del Mar in 1962 he developed another project for the Banco Español, a building with two bodies made up of a base plate and an attached tower. The base faces the main square, while the residential tower runs lengthwise along Arlegui Street. The operation was solved by configuring balconies that subtly detach from the plane of the façade, leaving in the end walls of the tower facing the square a vertical slot of shade. Along with a group of small windows drawn
Banco Español, Valparaíso, 1965. / Banco Español, Valparaíso, 1965.
Banco Español, Viña del Mar, 1965. / Banco Español Viña del Mar, 1965
on an empty plane and rigorously displaced toward the neighboring residential building, he creates a complex that effectively operates between the space of the square, the base of the bank volume, the vertical end wall of the residential building and its façade towards Arlegui Street. The complex equation is reinforced with the horizontal strips of the thick edges of the balcony slabs, offset a few centimeters in front of the main columns so as to create a second plane and therefore generate a visual construction based on independent elements, clearly defined and outlined, seeking to accentuate the horizontal to the point of using glass railings to avoid breaking the delicate construction of the elements. The building on Arlegui Street marks another turning point in the development of a constructive and visual language. The facade “detached” from the volume, the thickness built as a sum of independent elements and with formal autonomy between the parts, an element that belongs to the work of Lucio Costa in the Ministry of Health and Education in 1935, to the works of Le Corbusier in the Housing Unit in Marseille and Chandigarh in India. This formal autonomy can be understood as the starting point for what would later be the use of brise-soleil in facades and exposed concrete, the genesis for a brutalism acquired through experimentation and the constant meandering along a subjugated modernity.
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