Architecture as fluid technology. The housing blocks by Corporación de la Vivienda of Chile

Abstract

In a general sense, architecture and technology articulate two modes of evaluation of objects and built environments; however, are there conditions that allow us to consider architectural works as technologies? This paper explores this possibility by analyzing bibliographic, documentary, and planimetric information on housing blocks developed by the state agency, Corporación de la Vivienda (CORVI), between 1953 and 1974. Using Process Tracing as a method of analysis, milestones were identified that showed the ways in which the design and production of this typology were influenced by a regime of values based on the idea of rationalization, and that the heterogeneity of its cases showed flexibility and adaptation to the ways of calculating and realizing this value. The conclusions address the causality observed between value and typology in this case, and suggest that this behavior expresses a technological condition of architecture.