The urban development process in Chile has historically had to negotiate with a challenging territory that dictates the placement of housing, services and infrastructure. These processes often resemble colonization efforts, seeking to penetrate the landscape from Patagonia to the Atacama Desert, utilizing a diverse array of tools to handle geographical and climatic difficulties.
Today, centuries after the colonization of the Americas, we continue to explore and advance into less accessible territories in Chile. Some contemporary geographical landmarks and interventions in wild territories take the form of landscape architecture projects. These projects serve not only as instruments of accessibility and orientation in remote areas but also as new forms of interaction between the anthropogenic and the natural.
Beyond the architecture project and its relationship with the landscape as a backdrop, these interventions must contend with time and distance, values inherent to a vast and rugged territory like Chile. These ephemeral, fragile, and silent projects aim, with less formal frenzy than architecture, to generate an intimate dialogue where landscape and architecture merge into a single act. Here, the intervention becomes a narrative exercise, where geometric elements must interact with natural phenomena, tectonic processes, and movements, transforming and shaping the territory.
Thus, considering the landscape as an essential element in national identity, the intention of this paper is to explore contemporary interventions and methods that generate or transform the relationships between territory and user in Chile, thereby reinventing the dualism of landscape as architecture.
Christian Beros Architect
Esenghiul Abdul, Architect
www.berosabdul.com
©Beros Abdul 2024