With three years of successful operation, the Cautín River Urban Park in Temuco is emerging as a model of resilient and beautiful landscape archi- tecture. Osvaldo Moreno, at the head of the project, explains the keys for the future that can be extracted from this constructed southern riverbank. In the Norte Grande, the Tocopilla Geopark shows that it is not oblig- atory to put external layers on a place, to add elements, but rather the opposite. “It was a park in subtraction, so to speak”, summarizes Rodrigo Werner of the work that won the 2023 Urban Contribution Award (PAU) for the Best Public-Use Project by CAW Arquitectos. Thus, in various ways, new paths are outlined, diversifying the debate and the permanent proposal capacity of the design disciplines. They, by valuing the existing, revalue the pre-existing, cohabitate, and build more sustainable and lasting cities, which evolve with, from, and for ourselves in the territory. ! Post-Sustainable Architecture. Symbionts, Biotopes, and Repair Ecosystems Edition: Soledad Miranda T.S. Eliot, at the end of his poem The Hollow Men (1922), presents a vision of the end of the world that departs considerably from the eschatological and dystopian narratives to which we are accustomed, in which fate is resolved in a single, catastrophic instant. Instead, for Eliot, “This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper”. We have already experienced this prolonged period before the end of the current Sixth Extinction. Every year, we witness the disappearance of species, landscapes, and entire ecosystems. With them, all the associated symbiotic networks have also become extinct, in a “double death” that, as Donna Haraway pointed out, sweeps the multiple histories, memo- ries, and cultures that we build alongside these life forms into oblivion. That is why we cling to the hope that, from time to time, techno-sci- ence offers us. An example of this is the news that this year scientists managed to germinate seeds from a 1,000-year-old Commiphora tree. Earlier, in 2012, they achieved the same with seeds from plants of the Silene stenophylla species, collected by squirrels 30 thousand years ago. We have also heard of the Russian cosmonauts who, in 1982, suc- ceeded in making an Arabidopsis specimen flower on board Salyut 7, or astronaut Scott Kelly, who in 2016 managed to grow a Zinnia on the International Space Station. These tales of “ecological resurrections” and the possibility of colo- nizing other planets are deeply melancholic because they confront us with the fact that what can never be recovered are the tangled symbiotic Gonzalo Carrasco Purull
networks on which these species depend, as well as the ecosystem services they provide. There would, therefore, be no reversibility in the face of solitary extinction. If survival is the issue, it is clear that it will not be a matter of isolated individuals, but of human and non-human com- munities finding ways to foster encounters, collaborations, and kinships to cope with the effects of accelerated climate change. Everything seems to revolve around acceleration since this is not the first time that the planet has faced climate change, but it is the first time that global warming has an anthropogenic cause. This is precisely what the Anthropocene is: a geological event that we have already entered, although we still do not know what kind of planetary conditions it will produce. How does this affect architecture? Very much so. When confront- ing its history with large planetary temporal magnitudes, we realize that almost everything we know as architecture and urban culture has occurred during the Holocene, that is, during the last almost 12,000 years. Therefore, if the Anthropocene is an event that will lead us to new planetary conditions, does our discipline possess the tools, knowledge, and skills necessary to face not only a change of trends, technologies, decade, or century this time, but a complete geological era, as the post-Anthropocene world will be? We seem to be facing a major epistemological change, not only of conscience or individual ethics, such as incorporating measures to build sustainably. This is because the history of our craft has been deeply linked to our agrilogistic origins as a species. In Mesopotamia, as Timothy Morton points out, was when, as a species, we learned to think in an exclusionary way, under the principle of non-contradiction, where one thing cannot be two things at once. Thus, agriculture separated, divided, and excluded the environment between cultivated zones - which we transformed into culture by our abilities as a species - and those that were wild or unproductive. Similarly, architecture began to design enclosures that delimited the interior from the exterior; cities became walled, separating urban from rural dwellers, and buildings were subdi- vided into increasingly specialized spaces, keeping the interior strictly separated from an environment that was often perceived as hostile, dangerous or, at best, worthy of contemplation, but at a distance that made it a landscape. This way of thinking has led us to imagine architecture from excluding oppositions, such as architecture and nature, ecosystem and society, city and countryside, interior and exterior, public and private, human and animal. However, for anyone who observes carefully, life always ends up hybridizing and mixing everything up. Spring enters our architecture in the form of spores, insects, and birds nesting on roofs, while fungi pro- liferate in the corners and under our foundations, while, vines climb up walls and lichens cover the spaces between the pavement and the floors. Nevertheless - to paraphrase Hegel - we have pushed the advance of architecture forward in such a way that we have inevitably destroyed the “innocent flowers” by the roadside. The sustainability discourses that emerged from Kyoto in the mid-1990s, concerned with achieving “balanced” development through gradual reductions in carbon emissions, gases, and energy consumption, now seem insufficient. Meanwhile, we continue to think of nature as a backdrop against which our buildings stand out, as a dimension that does not concern us because we define ourselves more as producers of isolated objects than as creators of biotopes and as builders of cities rather than of ecosystems. We live in critical times, that is undoubtedly true, and therefore, falling into hope can be dangerous. No wonder Friedrich Nietzsche called it “the worst of evils”, hidden by the gods in Pandora's box, since it punishes us by giving us a false sense of relief and, therefore, leads us to inaction. As architects, we hope that new materials and technologies will emerge to solve the disaster that our capitalist ways have caused for the last two hundred years, while we continue to transform our planet under agril- ogistic principles. When we look at a place to build, we do not see it as part of an ecosystem, but reduce it to the abstraction of a piece of land,
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