in 2025. Those who know him say that this achievement and VAP itself cannot be understood without going through this architect, builder, designer, manufacturer, and resilient entrepreneur's trajectory, which began in 1983 when he entered the Architecture School at Universidad Bío-Bío. Three years later he switched to Universidad Católica in Santiago, always concerned about how, as an architect, he was going to influence people's quality of life. He felt that this was "a tremendous responsibility". In Concepción, he had done an internship in Roberto Goycoolea's office but did not finish. "They were doing social housing and I asked why the housing didn't have this or that. It didn't have a connection in terms of costs, or profits; for me, the issue is that people can't live like that. It created conflict because they knew I was right, but market forces are different. They asked me to leave," recalls Mozó. Around 1994, Mozó lived in Barrio Yungay and opened Bar Puro Chile. "At that time there began to be a lot of imports and we saw that the identity was being lost. The restaurants were Italian, etc. And we were... Pure Chile!" he recalls. "The door was a Chilean chili pepper; it was made by artist Pablo Rivera. To practice this, I made a crescent-shaped bar and there were a lot of tables with wheels. They were made of demolition oak and had a star made from Canelo wood, inserted for the Mapuche people." Soon after, he began to renovate and restore buildings. "In Barrio Yungay I began to see houses that were destroyed, abandoned, and it seemed to me that they were like a cancer in the city. Therefore, I would ask the owner how much he wanted to sell it for, look for someone who wanted to buy it, and I would do the renovation project. The first was Roberto Artiagoitía's, the Rumpy. It had very thick brick walls, it was three stories high and it had burned down. There I built a habitable 'piece of furniture' dividing the space left by the perimeter walls into two symmetrical houses. Intervening in old houses is complicated. You don't know what you're going to find when you demolish something. So, I choose to build a new volume within the old one. As a result, of his work as a builder, his interest in ecology began to grow. "I was very bored with the amount of debris that was being wasted at construction sites, the inefficiency," he says. "Thirty-eight percent of what a landfill receives comes from construction. It comes from our drawings. I had already started with climate change issues, and at one point, I took on conscientious objection. We architects don't do some- thing like a Hippocratic oath. Conscientious objection means that what I am projecting I am doing to someone else, not to me. Even Heidegger says that "construction is fundamentally protection, by essence". How am I going to create something that does not protect? Hence, I decided to work exclusively in wood. It was a radical decision. Before that, he was building with iron and other metals, but the pollution that they created pushed him in a different direction. Thus, he decided to design and build one of the milestones of his career: the BIP Computer Building. The BIP Computer Building, Architecture to Assemble, Disassemble, and Reassemble In 2007, Nicolás Moens de Hase, the owner of several houses on the corner of Suecia and Bilbao streets, wanted to demolish them to build a three-story building and locate his company's offices there. The architect who started the project decided not to continue because in Providencia it was forbidden to build low-rise buildings. Some plastic artists who had displayed their works in those houses told the owner to call Mozó. They met and agreed on the intervention. The architect then met with the Municipality's director of works to present his idea: a three-story wooden building. The official told him that it was not possible to build with that material within the municipality. "So I told him: 'This land is 2,500 m2 and at some point, the owner is going to sell it. I want to avoid demolition, because they are going to salvage the doors and windows, and the rest will go to a landfill. After that dialogue, they agreed to integrate the new volume as an extension of the house.
The idea was to "build the building along the diagonals" and assemble it on the ground. For this purpose, he got 100-kilogram glulam beams so that the workers could lift them themselves and avoid the need for cranes. The timber section for beams of that dimension was 90mm by 398mm. He contacted Las Torcazas Construction Company and, by making a prototype, convinced them to take on the challenge. "We made a small part of the building and I put a canvas on it to see if there would be a deformation when it was lifted... it was one millimeter." Once under construction, they designed a 250-square-meter dou- ble glass facade, inside which they installed napa, thus constructing a thermal panel. It was erected on February 27, 2008. Months later, the BIP Computer building won the RIBA Emerging Architecture Award for a significant project by an architect under 45 years of age in London. The Moth and Gifts to the City His appreciation for interior design led Mozó to create furniture that is unique in its design and functionality. One of them was called La Polilla (The Moth) and was made for a men's clothing store. With its wings outstretched, the moth was used to arrange accessories. When opened, it also trapped the legs of a mannequin. It was made of larch and lingue wood and various bronze pieces. He also made a Batman closet for the same store. Previously, at the openings of a house in the Yungay neighborhood, he put a bench for the neighbors to sit on, so that they would not appear walled up. In the studio of photographer Gabriel Schkolknick, he made a facade that the children of the area interpreted as a soccer goal and played there. Those are some of his "gifts to the city," he summarizes. From OWA to VAP After the inauguration of the BIP Computer Building, he founded the company OWA - Opt for Wood Architecture - in partnership with French investor Alain de Pontavice, for the manufacture of industrialized hous- ing. His goal was to make rural houses, and lofts, that could be installed in ten days and could be erected using only a telescopic ladder, a pulley, and ropes. "I always work with constraints," he explains. "I manufactured boxes consisting of a 1 × 4" wood frame, two sides of OSB, and a horizontal decking with a ventilation gap. Each caisson was 2000 mm wide, 610 mm high, and 90 mm deep; the insulation was glass wool. The columns were continuous, with a Hilam laminated beam. The caissons were attached to the column with a flange protruding from the frame. The previous decking matched exactly with the next caisson." On February 27, 2010, he had a house/prototype assembled, just resting on the ground, on a lot in Barrio Yungay. When, after an earthquake that night, Mozó went to check on the condition of his prototype, he discovered
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