South Chile - Extreme Architecture

Abstract

Typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions on the one hand, and the lack of roads due to the inaccessibility of mountain areas and the extended coastline, combined with the harsh climate of both hot and polar, on the other, make designing and building in Chile an extreme task. It is and always was also hard to design and build in Chile due to the isolation of this country from the rest of the South American continent thanks to the difficulty to overcome the barrier formed by the Andes. Can these unique conditions be used to create a unique architecture that brings new qualities to global heritage? Perhaps all these "threats" are also a significant potential for creation, using beautiful landscapes and pure nature. In the beginning, there was the Word. Architectural culture requires faith and extreme sacrifice. For this reason, the presentation begins with a project to which its architects devoted their lives and decided to become men of the cloth. Buildings devoted to religious worship often exceed the utilitarian dimension of architecture, becoming the determinants of directions that architecture will follow. An example of this heroic expression of architecture is the construction of the Benedictine Church in Les Condes, a suburb of Santiago, in 1962-1964. Can Theatre be a cure allowing people to overcome trauma? The programme of reconstruction of the city of Concepción in Chile after the destruction wrought in 2010 by the tsunami, included not only the restoration of previously existing housing and infrastructural functions, but also the introduction of new cultural function. In 2011, an architectural competition for the design of the Regional Theatre was announced, which was won by three Chilean architects Smiljan Radić, Eduardo Castillo and Gabriela Medrano. The building was put into use in 2018 and is not only a monument of the past, but also a sign of a new beginning (Figure 1). One of Chile's greatest natural resources is its diverse landscape. Difficult accessibility of many areas, low population density and unfavourable climate are the main factors that have caused large areas of land to remain in their natural state. Along with the development of society and the popularisation of tourism, a need arose to build the right background for exploring these natural values. The history tourism in extreme conditions is not long. In Poland, for example, it dates to 1850, when the first winter expedition to the Valley of Five Ponds in the Tatra Mountains took place. In Chile, the first tourist expedition to Patagonia took place in 1879 and was described in the book by its organiser and participant, Lady Lorance Dixie (Dixie, 1880). These extremely hard natural conditions have created a unique opportunity to create modern architecture in interaction with the natural landscape. We will examine this problem on the example of 5 hotels and 5 ways of interacting with the landscape and study these architectural ideas.