Unusual Architectures: «Other» Experiences in Architecture and Urbanism, Santiago de Chile (1950-2020)

Abstract

Understanding the contemporary city as an unfathomable experience, as a set of complex experiences, prone to the indeterminate, this research acknowledges and collects fragments of a larger complex to search for and highlight objects, situations, artifacts, and experiences far from the canonical discourses. These "other" experiences are defined as unusual architectures, that is, located on the margins of what is normally discussed and valued in the traditional spaces of architectural practice, criticism, and teaching. Such recognition is constructed from otherness and comprises a provisional and changing complex. Methodologically, the research implies, first, a conceptual contextualization regarding the valuation of the otherness in architecture and the city as a motor of change in the discipline, and second, an immersion in the direct experience of space by the team. Through urban tours and a search for bibliographic and archival information, ninety cases are collected. Their relevance and critical potentialities are discussed and twenty-seven are studied in depth, making a planimetric and photographic representation, as well as a discourse of contextualization and valuation. Of these, six cases are rescued to contextualize the categories proposed for the organization of all the others. As a finding, the value of otherness, often silenced, is recognized in the set to trigger new possible ways of facing the architectural and urban challenges of contemporaneity.