Ciudad Abierta: The Open City of Ritoque, Chile

Max Harden Ciudad Abierta 2013

The road between Santiago and Valparaiso.

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As we ride through the fog, the sun shines upon the coniferous trees of the Chilean Andes, peeking through to bid us good morning along the road to Valparaiso. Descending back through the mystical divide between land and sky, the earth gives way to a colorful pixilation along the Pacific coastline. The port city of Valparaiso rises exultingly, offering glimpses of its former glory, before the realization of the Panama Canal. Its colorful palet climbs the steep hillside, filling the crevasses of the seaside geography while the waves of the Pacific crash upon the city shores.

The decent toward Valparaiso bisects the labyrinth of outer residences, clinging to the hillside, and eventually gravitates toward the city’s axis of historical colonialism, standing boastfully upon uneasy ground. The road then turns north, closing the strip of residential towers upon the rocky shores and opening to sandy dunes and vacant hillsides. Before the road reaches Ritoque, a narrow sandy road branches off of the main highway, trans versing the membrane of a seemingly alternate universe, into the Open City of the Catholic University of Valparaiso.

The Open City was conceived by the Catholic University of Valparaiso to serve its pedagogical objective to create an new paradigm of architectural academia; to be based directly upon modern poetry. Modern poetry was the by-product from a shift of audience, no longer serving as a commodity for the elite, and the birth of modernity, freeing human dependence from institutions of governance, and thus allowing mankind to gain control over his own course of life.

Opposite: Fig. 1 Max Harden May 2013 Digital Photograph Road between Santiago and Valparaiso

This tremendous shift in social structure challenged poetry to dismiss historical traditions of the art in order to reclaim the language and find mans new existential connection to himself. For the Catholic University of Valparaiso, the ambitions of modern poetry were to serve directly alongside their architectural endeavors, as they also left behind the traditions of the architectural profession, to discover mans connection to the natural environment of South America.

Upon entering the Open City, a sense of the sublime overcomes as traditional city plans and construction methods are dismissed, creating a discomfort as the body leaves societal boundaries to transcend into a state of mental stimulus, free of tradition, norms, and convention in order to “volver a no saber”, “to return to not knowing.”1 With this theoretical framework, students embrace their imagination to create poetic acts in the form of architecture. In doing so, each piece has unique characteristics in relation to site, therefore omitting any sort of aesthetic or functional cohesion.

The poetic act, or phalène, is an essential component to the Valparaiso curriculum as it serves as the connective tissue between the art of poetry and architecture. The importance of these poetic acts, in conjunction with the original amereida travesía, would thus lay the foundation for arguably the most significant contribution made by the Catholic University of Valparaiso; the Open City.

Ann Pendleton-Jullian describes the pedagogical value of phalène by explaining; “Phalène is a French word for a species of butterfly. It was used by Edgar Allan Poe to equate poetry with the flight of the butterfly attracted by starlight.

Not unlike a nocturnal Icarus, the butterfly knows that reaching the star will mean its own death but, despite this, it is unable to alter its course.”1 Godofredo Iommi, a poet and founding member of the university, re-defined phalène through a serious of seminars 1. Ann Pendelton-Julian, The Road that is Not a Road: and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile, (Cambridge, Massachussetts, The MIT Press, 1996), 13.

2. Ann Pendelton-Julian, The Road that is Not a Road: and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile, (Cambridge, Massachussetts, The MIT Press, 1996), 69.

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given on modern poetry and art. Modern poetry’s intention to redirect poetry’s focus from the bourgeois toward life itself demanded that the students perform a series of interventions within the city, often times in the streets, on buses, or on the beaches, in order to engage poetry actively as a participant of the city rather than simply a spectator. In doing so, the phalènes were taken back into the realm of societal urbanity as an intervention meant to change the true essence of life, “the way of living it.” The phalènes were an outlet to engage and fuse members of various distinctions through the use of language, ultimately creating spacial configurations determined by the level of participation or occupation. The activity produced through these events creatively linked poetry to the physical realm. Correspondingly, Le Corbusier shared the belief in poetry’s intrinsic nature within architecture and modern aspirations, stating; “This being the case it only remains to decide whether occupying one’s self with poetic phenomena, manifested by volume, color, and rhythm, is an act of unity or one of chaos-whether architecture, sculpture, painting, that is to say volume, form, and color are incommensurable or synchronous-synchronous and symphonic. And whether life. . . can but touch unknown existences along its path, by the means that one commonly calls “art.” The dictionary says that art is “the manner of doing.” . . .

Ladies and Gentlemen, the heart of the matter is this, . . . that one strives (from time to time-exceptional days!) to qualify the indefinable, a word which describes one of the paths to happiness, and which, extraordinarily, is not translatable into certain languages. [In those things which are not of the countenance but of the essence, the architectural destiny is played out.]”3 3. Ann Pendelton-Julian, The Road that is Not a Road: and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile, (Cambridge, Massachussetts, The MIT Press, 1996), 51.

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The synchronization between the poetic phenomena and the individual self is exactly how the Catholic University of Valparaiso not only approaches the art of building but also how they rediscover their relationship to Latin America.

In relation to the prior, achieving this higher state of consciousness was the only proper way to approach conceptualization, not just as a design but to determining how the architecture will ultimately coalesce within the poetic phenomena; only then can the act of building truly be a poetic act, a phalène. The later to be discussed in the forthcoming section.

The momentum created by the public demonstrations began to draw attention to the university and their innovative pedagogical approach toward architecture. As artists and academics of various disciplines began to join the ranks of Godofredo Iommi and Alberto Cruz, Iommi was entrusted to write amereida, a free verse poem articulating the theoretical mind-set around which the program was to be based; a manifesto. The use of free verse, devoid of structure, allowed for subliminal meaning, creating a relationship between individual lines, uses of pause, and migration of lines.

In doing so, the reader’s imagination is engaged, rendering them a participant rather than a spectator. Yet amereida was not solely focused on the phalène, the objective was to combine the spiritual awakenings of the travesía along with the phalène in order to truly express the rediscovery of one’s relationship to Latin America devoid of European and even Indigenous enterprise. South America was seen more as an encounter rather than a discovery simply because the intention of Christopher Columbus was to discover an alternate route to India to enhance the European trade enterprise.

Because of this, South America was believed to be an obstacle, therefore masking the perception of an opportunistic discovery.

In amereida Iommi writes; “how to receive america? be vigilant raise the vail across -the voice tells ustravesia which is not discovery or invention but consent that one’s own sea dares us arise in gratitude or recognition our own liberty.”

Constellations were the primary source of direction and calculation used during the discovery age. When the Northern Hemisphere is left for the Southern, the North Star is lost and is replaced by what Dante describes as; “four stars in the shape of a cross-the pole of the other heavens.”⁴ Amereida transposes that cross, the cifra, upon the continent of South America in order to establish a new calculation of discovery, the travesía of the interior sea. In August and September of 1965, a group of ten faculty members made up of Alberto Cruz, Fabio Cruz, Godofredo Iommi and another poet, Claudio Girola and another sculptor, a philosopher, a painter, and two others set off on the first travesia from Punta Arenas, Chile to Santa Cruz del la Sierra, Bolivia (the axis of the cifra). The travesía was intended to discover the origin of Latin America and its historic cultural heritage and its meaning through the various languages and landscapes that comprise the continent. Through language, the mind reconnects one to its cultural heritage, while body reconnects one to it’s continent through poetic action, the 4. Ann Pendelton-Julian, The Road that is Not a Road: and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile, (Cambridge, Massachussetts, The MIT Press, 1996), 75.

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phalene. Together, the travesia and phalene were used in conjunction to discover the voice of Latin America, thus, rediscovering mans existential relationship to Latin America devoid of European or Indigenous enterprise. The unveiling of the gift that is Latin America.

Since the original amereida travesia, the travesia has been an important concept for student research. While today, travesias have a pre-determined destination rather than a continuous journey guided by cifra, the ideation remains true; discovering the relationship with Latin America as a gift, rather than an obstacle. The phalene is still used in order to conceive reality through the use of language, through this reality, discovery of Latin America’s worth is found and is then used in order to inform the physical making. This process is what the university describes as “the beginning;” erasing pre-conceived notions of history, as if to turn back time. The act of building assumes the weightless physicality of language, and as the space is articulated through the poetic act, the gestural act marks the beginning of the spatial manifestation. Through this experience the theoretical reality becomes the built, not to create rules or precedent, but to create a way of acting that completely negates the commodification of building, incommensurable to the footprint of societal boundaries. The lightness of building therefore creates minimal consequences toward the newly discovered landscape as they act in unison without any hierarchical assumption. In this, human doesn’t triumph over land as the situation would be if landscape were an obstacle, but human and land create a relationship, a new language.

It took years, eighteen to be exact, before the influence of the travesia would lead toward the creation of the Open City of Ritoque in 1970. The practices of rediscovery were transposed onto the fixed boundary lines of Open City’s site, and yet, even though the acreage of this permanent

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The cifra guides the amereida travesia across South America in pursuit of discovering mans relationship with the Latin American landscape devoid of European or Indigenous enterprise.

Opposite: Fig. 2 Godofredo Iommi Cifra Ink on Paper

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site wouldn’t compare to the expanse of Latin America, the constant rediscovery through poetic exploration continuously changes its navigation, creating the illusion of an endless land. The communal nature of the poetic act carries through into the design process where collaboration is encouraged, rather than the familiar competitive nature of design. Connection to the language and poetic spirituality inform design, skipping the usual process of construction documents, in order to prevent corrupting the imaginative impulse. The design process differs between projects as designs fluctuate in scale and ambition. Students work alongside professors and contractors, building as the design process exists simultaneously. For this reason, construction time frames are tailored toward each project resulting in occasional projects that never achieve fruition. Building materials are the result of whatever is locally available, making improvisation an important piece of the equation. As time passes, natural forces wear upon the tremulous structures causing a sense of decomposition that characterizes the building very relation to site, one of temporary alteration before it’s embodiment is erased. In this sense buildings are no more permanent than the tides of the ocean and the waves of sand where nature ultimately prevails in cleansing its own surface. By accepting nature’s condition, history ceases to exist at a functional level, leaving only traces in memory of a previous discovery, rather than a period in a constantly shifting idealist society. This memory is what links the different physical contexts of the site into the larger network. The site of the Open City is not seen as a fragmented land with various topographical characteristics but seen as a memory of travesias that creates a larger network of travesias throughout the continent of South America, creating homogeneity. Establishing that connection is what allows specific sites to be approached through

Opposite: Fig. 3 Max Harden May 2013 Digital Photograph Road between Santiago and Valparaiso

Lightness of structure creates balance between the natural and built environment, creating a relationship instead of hierarchy.

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The Music Room exemplifies in the introverted nature of The Catholic University of Valparaiso’s theoretical framework. The absence of windows directs attention inward to avoid commodification of the sea while enhancing the mental and social connection.

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a larger lens rather than one of specificity.

To say that the Catholic University of Valparaiso poises itself as a utopian society is a troublesome distinction to make. On one hand, its theoretical framework is far removed from societal and professional frameworks in an attempt to achieve a higher level of spirituality and poetic understanding making it somewhat of an “imaginary” place.

On the other hand to say it is utopian would define the university as “a place of ideal perfection especially in laws; government, and social conditions.” Achieving perfection has never been a desirable task for the university since it’s task has originally been to probe the understanding of the humans relationship to nature as a method of constant rediscovery. Perfection would assume that the discovery was achieved and it would be unnecessary to continue investigation. Laws would also undermine the importance of “volver a no saber” as the saying implies that instances of poetic action only relate to the current project and not to all past and future projects. In fact, by that definition, the Catholic University of Valparaiso seems to be the anti-utopia where constant questioning continuously reforms any existing relationship toward finding truth and enlightenment.

Evidence of this quest of rediscovery is the Open City of Ritoque. It’s diversity of formal language exemplifies the complexities of the spoken language, constantly reformulating itself to achieve new formal relationships with the landscape that it honors. To explore its grounds is an adventure into a mental sphere of artistic and thoughtful imagination that demands constant inquiry and investigation. Liberation is found within its introverted atmosphere of self reflection and complete disregard of fitting into the commodified nature of architectural and social practice, freeing the individual of constant agitation and fleeing to the independence of the natural landscape.

Opposite: Fig. 4 Max Harden May 2013 Digital Photograph Music Room

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