Architects: Felipe Assadi Figueroua, Francisca Pulido
Contributors: Pablo Casals, Francisco Duarte
Project for: The XVI-th edition of the Chilean Architecture Biennial 2008
Location: Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile
Photos: Felipe Assadi, Cristobal Palma, Nicolas Saieh
Mounting the XVIth Biennale of Architecture begins with choosing the place: The Museum of Contemporary Art from Forestal Park. Even if the building was not large enough to place the Biennale, it had plenty of virtues for the event: a central location with good accessibility, immersed in the most important park of Santiago, but which mostly carries one of the most significant variables for this fitting: the possibility of extending the invitation to the Biennale for many people, not just those linked to the guild but to a much larger population. Opening the exhibition in the specific context of the «Towards an architecture that protects Our Land» meant to expose our affairs publicly in a plaza connected to a space where different parts of the exhibition would encourage the exchange of information openly.
All of the sections of the Biennale could not be completely inside the MAC, as we knew in advance to choosing the place. The lack of space inside the museum was an opportunity, first, to go out in the street with a good part of the event – that which is held by those who have more time and energy to generate knowledge through experimentation, that is students – activating in the same time the square in front of the museum that has been the scene of continuous public events linked to the performing arts. The «square of jugglers» is presented as the public platform on which to build a temporary pavilion of 400 m2, of similar proportions to the central space of the MAC. This pavilion was to contain the exhibition brought by schools. Secondly, this free of «exhibitions» central courtyard of MAC became the large auditorium that will host the conferences of the International Meeting.
From the beginning to the end of the design the idea of working with reusable or reused elements was pursued: from the structure of the pavilion for the schools to the elements of mounting and display from inside the museum. The first, based on scaffolding, works as a cage-free facility on the plaza, freeing therefore as much public space as possible for other activities tangent to the biennial. The exterior of the pavilion is a second hand Aluzinc fabric strip provided by Hunter Douglas. Though it is a recyclable material, the energy consumption for that recycling is so high that it becomes less costly if environmentally discarded. Hunter Douglas opens a possibility to reuse them and therefore saving energy, turning this element in a future potential first-line product.
The rest of the article, as well as more pictures of the project can be found in issue 4/2010 of Arhitext magazine.
