Last Chile. Like other aspects of Chilean cultural life, the architecture emerging after the dense parentheses of the dictatorship is the result of a peaceful and slow transition. After the assimilation of the theoretical Latin American debate on ‘appropriate modernity’ and the weakening of the postmodern style imported from the other America, the production of the last decade shows a balance between tradition and avant-garde that is not related with the nostalgia for the past or the euphoria toward the new, but rather with the capacity of architects to enter into a creative dialogue with their own circumstances.

Jorge Edwards
The 16th Nation
Europeans of Chile
Fernando Pérez Oyarzun
Poetics of Case
Chile, from Word to Matter
Hugo Segawa
Contrasts in the Cone
A New Chilean Visibility

Local and Global. Gathered here are twelve works which, connected to tradition or in a cosmopolitan key, bear witness to the nuances of the last Chile: the wineries of Paine and Santa Cruz refer to the process of elaboration of wine with constructive materials and systems; the landscape installations of both Atacama and Ciudad Abierta subordinate their geometry to nature without attempting to tame it; the chapels of Florida and Santiago evoke their sacred nature through abstraction; the school gymnasium and the university faculty of Santiago are transformed into resonance boxes of their respective educational contexts; the offices and the production shed in two difficult sites of the capital use formal severity as an urban strategy; finally, the house of Lo Barnechea and the social housing in Santiago are proposed as repeatable models

José Cruz Ovalle
Mathias Klotz
Germán del Sol
Manuel Casanueva
Eduardo Castillo
Enrique Browne
Fernández y Hernández
Alejandro Aravena
Izquierdo y Lehmann
Assadi y Pulido
Irarrázaval y Acuña
Undurraga y Devés

Anticipating the Future. The Venice Biennial exhibits coming architecture with large projects now in process; and the anthology of Herzog & de Meuron at Montreal’s CCA displays their endless formal imagination.

Richard Ingersoll
Venice, the Biennial’s Dance
Luis Fernández-Galiano
H&deM: Building from Nature

Simultaneous Moneo. America and Europe compete for the attention of Rafael Moneo, who has finished, almost simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, four works published here with photographs by Duccio Malagamba: the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, a religious and urban fortress; the extension of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in dialogue with Saarinen; the library of the Catholic University of Leuven, organic counterpoint of an old cloister; and the Chivite winery in Navarre, decanted by secular traditions.

Luminous Palimpsest
Cathedral of Los Angeles
In Close Proximity
Academy of Art, Cranbrook
Curves at the Cloister
Arenberg Library, Leuven
Reserve of Essences
Chivite Winery, Navarre

Luis Fernández-Galiano 
Last Chile

Chile is a geographical oxymoron. From the desert to the floes, this endless country slithers by the meridian to reconcile fire and ice, sliding between the Andes and the Pacific with the confidence of one who acknowledges being both cordillera and ocean. Remote in space and close in time, from Spain it is perceived as the last south and the nearest history, having lived its own 11 September at the end of our own dictatorship, and having followed its democratic restoration with the impatient emotion of those who have also experienced a peaceful transition towards political freedom. After the fragile populist and lay republics of Azaña or Allende, the solid military and Catholic regimes of Franco or Pinochet established the fraternity of those who are familiar with the tragic disorder of hope and the totalitarian order of submission, and the building of today’s market democracies rejuvenated with economic fuel the feeble structure of cultural ties.

Also in this symbolic field Chile combines extreme ingredients, mixing local substance and imported forms with the ease shown by the latest architecture, where the tactile materiality of copper or wood and the long breath of wide horizons are shaped in the cosmopolitan container of metropolitan canons to compose a landscape at once peripheral and central. As in the traditionalist and experimental Spain of the eighties, the Chile of today extracts its lure from its condition of threshold between two worlds, on its journey from involuntary isolation to conventional globalization. When in 1973 the army bombed the Palacio de la Moneda – generating the coup’s architectural icon with the smoking image of the Presidential Palace – it destroyed a building which was Chilean and foreign, raised with local labor and European plans, vernacular stone and Basque ironwork brought from Cádiz by an Italian at the service of the Spanish crown.

In El sueño de la historia Jorge Edwards has narrated the austral adventure of that architect, Joaquín Toesca y Ricci, interspersing the portrait of colonial society with that of contemporary Chile, and his tender, ironic gaze illuminates the current debate more accurately than the passionate abysses and peaks of Pablo Neruda (with whom he shared diplomatic destinations, but not the manie de bâtir that produced the houses of the poet, so arduously phenomenological as the beach Merzbaus of Ciudad Abierta). The intellectual and sentimental heritage
of the country of Lagos and Lavín brings together the surreal avant-gardism of Vicente Huidobro and the emotive academicism of Gabriela Mistral, the cosa creada and the cosa cantada, and perhaps only the metaphorical marriage of Altazor and Lucila Godoy can give birth today to the paradoxical spirit of a nation oxymoronic in its territory, but also in its history and culture, which from the last West exports nourritures terrestres and elementary odes to a Europe of dusty and amnesic sybils.