In a Workshop with Dogma and Plan Comùn
In collaboration with: Sebastien Beauregard, Camila Campillay, Daniela Cárdenas, Marisela Rojas
With its monumental housing blocks and semi-detached house spread over a large batch of 31 hectares, the Unidad Vecinal Portales is a paradigmatic project of modern architecture in Chile. The Buildings occupy only 20% of the ground, leaving 80% a free surface that is state owned. However during the last sixty years, collective spaces have been the conquest of the inhabitants of the ground floor who now have multiple individual suburban backyards. Yet, the Unidad Vecinal Portales is contained within the consolidated city limits and is surrounded by various programs of metropolitan scale like the University of Santiago, with its first Arts & Crafts School in Chile, whose infrastructure is now deficient.
Therefore, three operations arise:
_To colonize the entire public ground space with continuous housing in response to the appropriation of public spaces by the inhabitants. The perimeter of the property is built equally,
delivering 6 different typologies inside, depending on the user.
_To empty the blocks by relocating the families in this new urbanity, exchanging the property rights of the blocks with the new houses.
_To fill by reprograming the vacant blocks into an infrastructure dedicated to the development of technical skills, recognizing the old vocation of USACH as a school of arts and crafts.
Thus, the blocks become the public space of the community.
-SA-L 