Alejandra Celedon

En 1979, la tercera y última Operación Confraternidad
inauguró el Programa de Radicación y Erradicación que
se extendería durante la siguiente década sobre la ciudad
de Santiago. Ese mismo año, la nueva Política Nacional de
Desarrollo Urbano liberó los límites de la ciudad, mientras
el Estado prometía la entrega de 160.000 títulos de dominio
a pobladores a lo largo del país. Sólo dos años más tar de, en
1981, las 17 comunas existentes en Santiago se subdividieron
en 32, siguiendo una lógica de gobernabilidad en base a
unidades autónomas, extensión lógica de la regionalización
nacional implementada por la CONARA. Una delgada línea
entre planificación y desregulación cruzaba estos programas
y operaciones. Una tensión entre la libertad, como idea, y el
neoliberalismo, como sistema político económico, yacía en el
modo de conceptualizar la arquitectura habitacional en
la década de los ochenta en Chile. Esta c ontradicción
entre imposición y liberalización, entre intervención y
autorregulación, puede ser leída a través de políticas puntuales:
las erradicaciones y su plan piloto de relocalización (las
Operaciones Confraternidad de 1976-78-79), la tabula rasa
que implicó la entrega masiva de propiedad a lo largo del país
– siendo la más visible la del Estadio Nacional en 1979 – y ,
finalmente, la subdivisión comunal de 1981.

La escuela es un invento moderno para resolver un antiguo problema social: la educación de los niños. Paradójicamente, la habitación en la que se ha adoctrinado a los niños es la misma en la que históricamente han comenzado los levantamientos y revueltas sociales más críticos. Y aunque el aula, como concepto y espacio material, se ha construido gradualmente a lo largo de los siglos, ésta no ha cambiado esencialmente con el tiempo. Orbis Sensualium Pictus, escrito por Comenius a mediados del siglo XVII-y considerado el primer libro infantil ilustrado de la historia occidental-describe una escuela y un aula que no difieren mucho de la experiencia de la escuela pública que domina el entorno educativo en el presente. El grabado retrata a un profesor transmitiendo conocimientos a los alumnos en un interior cerrado. En esta imagen de escuela temprana, las ventanas están ubicadas lo suficientemente altas como para evitar interrupciones en el interior y asegurar la ventilación desde el exterior. Concentración, memoria y atención al maestro definen una disposición jerárquica de cuerpos pasivos controlados y formados por muebles: una silla para el profesor (cathedra), bancos bajos (subselliis) para los alumnos y una mesa (scribunt) sobre la cual corregirlos. Una serie de objetos-una pizarra, una tablilla y una varilla-definen la normalización del mal comportamiento y el castigo como parte del proceso. Inicialmente un solo espacio interior, la escuela estaba típicamente dentro de la casa del profesor o de algún edificio de propiedad municipal o eclesiástica. De este modo, la escuela comenzó en una habitación: el aula o sala de clases. A pesar de los esfuerzos por escapar de esos interiores convencionales y prescriptivos, los discursos sobre la escuela parecen comenzar y terminar en el aula, tratándola como caja de resonancia y termómetro para la sociedad completa. La reducción sinecdótica de la escuela al aula se ha utilizado no sólo como recurso discursivo, sino también como estrategia de diseño: siguiendo un modelo educativo que concebía cualquier escuela como la suma de sus aulas, la sala de clase se transformó en la unidad mínima y fundamental tanto para los edificios como para las instituciones.

The school is a modern invention that solves an old social problem: that of raising children. Paradoxically, the room in which children are indoctrinated is also the one in which most critical social uprisings and revolts have historically begun. And though the classroom has been built gradually over the centuries as both a concept and a material space, it has not essentially changed much over time.

Like a Matryoshka, Smiljan Radic’s Teatro Regional Biobío in Concepción, Chile grows from one layer of the building to the next: from the solid play-spaces at its core to the translucent façades, from the volume of the building to the city outside and the landscape beyond. In a set of Russian nesting dolls, the outermost wooden figure separates at the middle, splitting top from bottom. Such division reveals a nearly identical figure inside, which in turn contains another smaller version inside of it, and so on. When opening the first doll, the user generally knows what to expect – until the last, solid doll suddenly brings the game to an end. In Radic’s theatre, every layer takes on a different nature, with its own rules and aesthetics. Hidden rooms and rehearsal spaces only reveal themselves once inside the building, with changing material expressions, colour palettes and atmospheres. There are green rooms, yellow-painted wooden surfaces and red-coated fire stairways. There are black-painted wooden surfaces and layers of coconut covering floors, walls, and ceilings. Through transparencies, openings, and spatial connections, the pieces of the building coalesce into a unified whole.

Construir un Estadio para un Museo fue la operación detrás del “Stadium”, el Pabellón de Chile en la 16a Bienal de Venecia de 2018. La exhibición recuperó un evento olvidado de la historia local reciente donde, durante la dictadura de Pinochet, se otorgaron 37.000 títulos de propiedad a pobladores de Santiago en el Estadio Nacional de Chile. Para el evento en 1979 se redibujó una planta del edificio
que en vez de graderías trazó polígonos con el nombre de más de
60 poblaciones de la periferia de Santiago de donde provenían los convocados ese día. El dibujo, punto de partida de “Stadium”, reúne en un mismo esfuerzo un impulso cartográfico y uno narrativo. Stadium discute sus premisas desde una segunda adaptación del pabellón, donde se reconstruye el estadio para el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago en 2019. La muestra, al igual que el evento del pasado, transporta la ciudad a un edificio, y hace visible
la periferia en el centro. Así, el Arsenal Veneciano y el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago hacen eco de su contenido y abren nuevas reflexiones disciplinares a partir de las operaciones que involucran: en ellos un edificio es comprimido dentro de otro edificio, o incluso una ciudad dentro de otra. “Stadium” retoma la premisa de Rossi sobre la Arquitectura para el Museo para plantear su potencial para abrir debates críticos sobre la arquitectura y sus prácticas.

The change of decade (1970-1980) is at the centre of this story: a hinge between inaugural operations and systematized policies. The last years of the seventies and the first of the eighties witnessed a series of pilot operations on the city of Santiago de Chile. These first operatives built the initial images of policies revolving around housing that will consolidate and multiply in the rest of the decade. At different scales and with their own routes of propagation (deregulate, liberalize and atomize), three specific cases function as indices that explain the modus operandi of a longer and broader period: Operaciones Confraternidad of 1976, 1978 and 1979, the Property Titles Signature in the National Stadium of September of 1979, and the Communal Subdivision of 1981. In revisiting these three moments, the early construction of ideological inception routes in the city is advocated.

The building of Chile’s National Library is one of a series of permanent constructions erected to celebrate the Centenary of the Independence, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Some hundred years later, this particular building offers the opportunity not only to reflect upon a nation’s evolving self-image, as it materialises in its institutions, but also about architecture’s abilities to give form to such ideas through a building. On the other hand, libraries are such a fascinating thing. Part building, part machinery, to look at any library now is to see the crisis of space, objects, functions and even the need for an institution like this: digital books, digital catalogues, online repositories and databases, make the stuff of this building obsolete – yet, might we still need it (both stuff and building), since it is not just a library, but one of the fundamental bricks of the Republic? And if so, might we need to rethink its architecture, since the matter of libraries has radically changed in time?

In 1959, a selection of 45 building plans were collected in “Building Footprints,” an issue of a student publication. The collection of drawings ranged from the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis (447 bce) to Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp (1954), from the Great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak (1312 bce) to the United Nations Headquarters in New York (1952), all at the same scale, using the same technique.
The book’s title suggests the word ichnography, which Vitruvius used along with orthography and scenography to explain the “forms of expression of arrangement” of a building – that is, the devices used to visualize its dispositio. In these terms, ichnography referred to the top view of a building but also indicated the arrangement of ideas and an effort of the mind. The word comes from the Greek ichnos – a footprint or track made by the sole of the foot – and thus signifies the plan or track formed as a ground for the base of a supported corpus. From ichnos (footprint) and graphe (writing and drawing), ichnography refers to the imprint, whether drawn or written, of a work: a plan. Evoking the idea of vestige or trace, ichnos suggests that the plan represents the building’s being, that is, the idea from which it originated. In its most economical expression, a plan delineates the fundamental distinction between an interior and an exterior, private and public, inclusion and exclusion, thereby revealing patterns of occupancy and forms of life.

San Rocco.

In the early 16th century, Pope Leo II commissioned the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He decided to pull down Constantine’s original church, which was then more than a thousand years old, and start all over again, with the controversial goal being to demolish an existing stunning building to design and erect the most magnificent church in all of Christendom. It was a quest for perfection.

Abstract:
La operación de coleccionar es una que cruza a la arquitectura y el arte, pero que se remonta a las estrategias y modos de la ciencia y la arqueología. En tanto ‘interzona’, una colección implica una tarea de traducción y edición: la abstracción, extracción, manipulación, y, finalmente,  prescripción de un discurso cubierto. Una operación epistemológica, el coleccionismo implica un acto de desmontar cosas para re-contextualizarlas en un nuevo montaje, lo que obliga al coleccionista a tomar una posición respecto a la inclusión, exclusión y posicionamiento de ellas. En tanto escritor de este ensayo, actúo aquí como un coleccionista de colecciones que comprimiendo el tiempo y el espacio, argumento que la traducción facilita la identificación de esa delgada línea que define lo que está dentro o fuera de una serie.

Revista 180 N36 Universidad Diego Portales

In the context of the course “Experiments on Representation in Architecture,” Dr. Alejandra Celedón held the short seminar “The Plan” in the School of Architecture, University of Costa
Rica, from 21 to 24 April, 2014. As part of the event, Dr. Celedón was interviewed by Valeria Guzmán on 25 April, 2014. Here follows the transcription.

In a conversation with the artist Menno Aden, Alejandra Celedon explores into the artist’s precise, objective and detached views proposing that such records produce a cartography that naturalises the limit between that room and any other. The vast scale of the world is reduced by Aden into a manageable area, that of the room as the building block of strategy of supervision and surveillance.

The plan did not always have the authority that held. An enquiry into such authority is the main concern of this thesis, and into the consequences the above had for architecture. Why did the plan dominate architectural discourse and practice for about two centuries and in which ways this affected the discipline?
The prominence that the plan gradually gained along the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had not always been so, what poses the main historical questions of this work: how and why did the plan acquire such place, how it became the central architectural device and came to matter as much as to be at the core of the discourse of modern architecture and eventually to be one of the central targets of its critique in the decades after Second World War.
The material objects of the thesis beyond specific moments, figures, texts and drawings, indicate the extent to which the word ‘plan’ changed its sense in time, registering and triggering disciplinary changes – the relationship between drawings and words, between objects and discourse. Such changes of meaning correlate with a shift in the definition and scope of the discipline – from the actual building, to the drawing (disegno) of the building as object to be constructed, to the building as a device for organising and managing the city. The final negation embedded in the Non-Plan (the plan’s antonym) turned into a point of contrast, which allows framing this historical issue in contemporary terms.

Exhibition in Cities Methodologies 2012.

This exhibition aims at presenting the drawing of the plan as a socio-political operation that internalises rhetorical power through its drawn lines. It displays a collection of six central drawings, constituting a visual history of the Plan, paired with six different rhetorical tactics – metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, decorum, ekphrasis and irony. By doing so, it proposes a drift in the role of plans from representation towards instrumentalisation, arguing that the modern plan becomes a technology for the administering, and eventually normalization, of the entire city. In this way, these ‘tactical drawings’ ultimately question the fate of the plan and planning.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/urbanlab-archive/en2/index.php?page=3.1.0

“Encampment” refers to the construction of a field,
the establishment of a territory, the act of defining and
enclosing a piece of land. In Santiago, Chile, encampments
(campamentos) have historically served as a
means to conquer urban space, as a strategy through
which people solved urban housing shortages on their
own terms. Throughout the twentieth century, informal
settlements established around the city’s periphery used
tents and other forms of light construction as a first step
toward gradually claiming ownership of the land, ultimately
creating a pathway to formalized home ownership
for those involved. The tents in the photograph from the
early 1970s represent a city in which housing is the first
and only element.

Chile’s National Stadium was a building and a city for one day. On the 29th of September 1979, the building was filled by 37,000 people for a massive operative which provided ownership titles to dwellers (pobladores), settling decades of makeshift land occupation and policies. A blueprint of the Stadium with the outline of shantytowns instead of bleachers was prepared, rendering the genesis of Santiago’s current layout within the drawing of a building. From sports venue and hosting religious events to a concentration camp, the exhibition recreates the different functions as a machine for viewing and revisits the stadium’s typology, congregating dissimilar groups and serving unlikely purposes. This is the story told through a drawing from an event of the past, which foresaw the present of a city within a building. The exhibition narrates a double story interweaved in one drawing: that of a building (with its dissimilar uses) and that of a city (with its housing development), both converging in one event.

El tiempo del arte es el de la contingencia, de la inmediatez, el del aquí y el ahora. Como diría Baudelaire para referirse a la modernidad, es el tiempo de lo efímero, lo fugitivo, lo contingente, y por ende, todo lo contrario a lo inmutable y eterno. El tiempo del arte, así como la modernidad de Baudelaire, es en momento presente. El del arte es una temporalidad que marca una diferencia en lapso real y presencial, ofreciendo una respuesta sincrónica a condiciones sociales, políticas y económicas. En este sentido, inaugura posibilidades de cambio ofreciendo alternativas más radicales y rotundas que las que la arquitectura ha sido en general capaz de generar. En tanto ofrece posibilidades el del arte es un tiempo crítico.