The Road That Is Not a Road
Notes from The Road that Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile, Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian (1996): http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/road-not-road-and-open-city-ritoque-chile or http://www.amazon.com/Road-that-Open-Ritoque-Chile/dp/0262660997 ]
Joseph Rykwert in the Foreword to the book (1996):
"The Viña del Mar/Valparaíso school is unique in that it is autopoetic; it has quite literally built and planned itself, with each building seen as a poetic act."
Giancarlo De Carlo in the introductory essay, "The Ritoque Utopia" (1993):
"I asked why they chose such an elusive approach to the circumstances and means proper to architecture. Because, they answered, it is necessary to put forward radical alternatives to current architectural practice, which is subject to economic power and is therefore commercialized—in that it focuses on quantity and has a hypocritical attitude in regard to quality, providing ambiguous simulacra with the complicity of opportunistic or ignorant criticisms.
I must add, as I am afraid it is not clear from the above synthesis, that all this was expressed most quietly and gently, with the serene aloofness of people who are at peace with nature and all human beings.
[…]
So, what is the Ritoque utopia about? Well, it opens a series of questions that may be worth reflection and discussion—for example, that the primary concern of current building activity is financial, and so its products are mostly marketable commodities. Those who design and build as a profession engage in operations that must yield profits to their promoters, so they cannot evade the requirements of economic power and become inherently a party to making architecture a commodity. This complicity is consummated at a level of unawareness or hypocrisy, as in fact architects are always talking about philosophy or poetry, but most of their products are simply marketable. The extremes of this distortion are to be found in architectural education that, instead of preparing young architects to be disinterested inventors of spaces responding to the multiplicity of human needs, trains them to produce spaces as standardized as possible and thus more easily marketable. Ritoque's utopia, like every serious utopia, does not admit uncertain hypotheses—for example, that it is probably intrinsic to architecture to have to resolve apparently insoluble contradictions—and so aims at an absolute alternative, making use of all the hazards and certainties that its deliberate estrangement can offer."
From Chapter 1:
"[…] In fact, the site is all movements, rhythms, and sounds: the sea, the sand, the wind, the light, and air, the motor traffic and train.
Two impressions form. A first impression: the site is land and space in one of tis most transparent, ephemeral, and mutable states. A second impression: because of or in deference to these qualities of the land, the constructions on the site of the Open City are light. They attain a status of lightness. Consequently, there is an apparent lightness of physical impression onto the site.
Lightness because the way in which the constructions touch the ground does not demarcate territory of building through strong physical impact and authoritarian footprints but, instead, lets the land initiate the configuration of territory and space in both plan and section. Because of the movement of the sand by the wind and movement of the ground (earthquakes), building weights and volumes are supported by many points of contact distributed according to structural and spatial needs and intents. Volumes lifted off of the ground allow the natural migrations of the sand to continue uninterrupted, whereas those buildings that do make physical contact with the ground, whether it be shallow or profound physical contact, allow the physical forces of the site into their space. One gets the impression that if all the constructions were removed from the land, the land would not hold their memory.
Lightness, also because the materiality of the constructions at the Open City is related to a type of constructions that is artisanal, which remains attached to the physical process of building at the scale of the artisan and not the machine. It therefore reveals the hands of the builders and is a representation of human occupation of the site and not the mechanical domination and reconfiguration of the site. One sense the presence of raw nature and not manipulated landscape, of footsteps and not tire tracks.
And status of lightness because there are no apparent imposed formal ordering devices that regulate the development of the constructions. Instead ordering devices that regulate the development of the constructions. Instead each constructions is attached to the space of the site through ideation and ideaphoria, which manifests itself as spatial strategies with spatial form and relationships. However, the forms and formal ordering devices do not come first and are not fixed but can transform as spatial specifics and tactics are developed. Because formal ordering of space is rendered through this mental activity and not through the (super)imposition of formal devices, physical center and boundaries do not exist in any conventional way. Each building has a center of gravity of sorts that remains unpunctual and difficult to locate with any precision because these centers are never formalized and because they migrate as constructions are added to or transformed. Occasionally groups of buildings, such as the Banquet Hospedería conglomerate, overtime begin to reveal sets of centers of gravity: constellations, in that they produce, in addition to the individual centers of gravity, a center common to the set. Again, however, this point is not fixed but can migrate because it is a resultant, not a determinant, of construction activity. Often edges of constructions are even more illusive than their gravity centers just as the edges of the city have never been defined by walls or fences.
And status of lightness, also, because not only are physical centers an edges illusive but there is also a tendency for meaning to migrate and transform within single buildings and within the city as it has grown and matured over time: as new buildings are added to the site or existing buildings revised; as constructions are overtaken by the sands, winds, or other natural forces and left ruined or rebuilt and reoriented to the forces of the site."