by Alice Fang , Begum Karaoglu, Joel McCullough, Oliver Bradley, and Chengliang Li
With a haunting history of political reappropriation, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD III) in Santiago, Chile, exemplifies how futile good intentions in architecture can be. Built in 1972 as a socialist symbol under Allende for the third session of the UN Conference, the building was co-opted into the military headquarters of Pinochet's military dictatorship. With minimal architectural intervention, the building's socialist ambitions were entirely erased, entering the Chilean imagination as a symbol of the repressive government dictatorship. In 2006, a fire partially destroyed the building. Our project extends beyond the site and reuses what is left to create a new cultural institution in conversation with UNCTAD's history.
Given this political history, we question how we can design for a democratic future without being naïve and acknowledging the imprecision of architecture as a political tool. Monumentalizing architecture is no longer enough since those in power can easily change that definition.
We utilize four tools. Ground that extends to the city through different patches. Roofs that reorganize the block through covering. A datum of roof that transforms the tower into a progremeless totem of the city. And liminal space between roof and ground that is activated by props. The project builds ten structurally independent tables. Due to the consistent effort to maintain the datum above and below the roof, the lifted archipelago becomes a unity of parts. The specificity of the tables cancels out individual authorship for the collective whole integrating into the cityscape.
Our goal is to redefine the current cultural institution. By freeing the ground and allowing for crisscrossing, the site becomes a public square for cultural exchanges allowing for friction with the city. We introduce props that utilize the logic of the theatre to provide a framework without creating enclosures between the ground and roof. This allows for cultural engagement to happen through events instead of fixed programs. The events occur under or above different roofs, depending on their structural capacity and seasonality.
The new cultural institution becomes an open framework and cultural condenser. Simultaneously, the project produces a moment of pause and self-consciousness of preconceived ideas of space. Our architecture is an actor that instigates political friction, and therefore societal change. Is this a roof, a block, a building, or the city?
