Against the tide

The School of Architecture of the Universidad de Talca was founded in 1999 by its current director Juan Román and traditionally ends its study course with an end-of-career project that also qualifies as a state examination for professional practice. Projects must be seen through to construction, meaning students must source the necessary funding not only to complete the project but to build it, too.

Talca lies in rural surroundings in central Chile, between Santiago and Conception, a vast area given over to farming and stockbreeding. Most of the students come from campesino families and will very probably work in that context, responding to the problems of their native region. The new professionals trained by the School in Talca will work for this clientele, on their issues and with their budgets.

Students attending the Taller de Arquitectura pass from the world of education to the professional one in the most direct and natural way possible, designing small but essential works that they then see constructed. To date, more than 500 works have been built across Chile, as recorded by the excellent book Talca. Cuestión de educación, produced by the School, published by Arquine and edited by José Luis Uribe and Andrea Griborio.

The curators Juan Román and Jose Luis Uribe, a young professor at the school, seized on the Venice Biennale opportunity and theme to exhibit not so much their students’ projects but more an approach to architecture that sets a new trend. The result is an impeccable yet informal and consistent mix of method, narration, form and the needs or opportunities of an extraordinary area. Although all the small architectural designs selected and shown via small models and video shows are different, they clearly express a shared sentiment and method as, indeed, the interior design of the pavilion conveys at a glance.

A strong sense of subtle but pervasive underlying consistency fills the space, lending form and visibility to the issues of an area and its people, and welding together people and their surrounding landscape in a substantial but joyous collection of mini-projects scattered across Chile. They are small shelters, pavilions in which to rest when taking a break from the draining work, structures offering protection against the heat and rain, basic designs for public or natural spaces, viewing points and removable structures and systems. Nothing could be farther away from the great issues of the metropolitan city and urban development taken to the extreme.

Never has the principle of viable minimum fallen so close to users’ real needs and so far from theoretical and stylistic stances in the search for the absolutely genuine and truthful meaning behind constructing shelters for people, the primordial action that is said to have generated architecture.

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