Complexity stemming from growth entails the emergence of new value criteria that do not aspire to hegemony, but that rather make dominance seem ridiculous. A network, rather than trying to scale the heights of the pyramid, operates horizontally. Floating around above a mechanism it does not understand, the upper part of a pyramid ends up isolated, while all the most interesting things happen down on the ground, beyond its control.
The dominance explanation falls short in an ecosystem with a population that has doubled in the past 10 years, but with unifying criteria that were put in place 15 or 20 years ago. The complexity of contemporary Chilean architecture, the result of the quantitative growth of its component parts, makes it necessary to take a new look at the way in which it is structured. With around 20,000 active professionals in a country of 16.5 million inhabitants, there is one architect for every 825 people. This huge figure is difficult to digest — Chilean architecture is the victim of its own excess.
The structural crisis caused by this excess can be seen in the recent concurrence — previously unthinkable in Chile — of two internationally relevant events: the Ochoalcubo initiative and the Archizines exhibition.
This year, Ochoalcubo, a private initiative that specialises in building second homes, managed to attract renowned Japanese architects such as Kazujo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Kengo Kuma, Junya Ishigami and Atelier Bow-wow, who travelled to Chile to hold workshops, present preliminary proposals and learn about the places in which the homes they were commissioned to build would be constructed. Meanwhile, Archizines, the well-known travelling exhibition of architectural fanzines, was brought to Santiago by Editorial ARQ following its visits to cities such as London, New York and Berlin.
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However, despite these two events being held at the same time in the same country, they had clearly opposing purposes.
Ochoalcubo invited the top 1% of architects to carry out projects for the top 1% of the population, and also held workshops with architecture students from various Chilean universities, with the aim of these top-down meetings between top architects and students helping to improve the future quality of Chilean architecture by virtue of the trickle-down effect.
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Archizines, on the other hand, is an initiative that seeks to highlight editorial dissidence and the proliferation of alternative ideas through the act of (often self-) publishing, not as a route to fame, but rather as a way of bringing an idea into the public sphere so that it can be incorporated into debate. In other words, these publications are trying to open up spaces from the bottom up.
This divergence possibly explains the different response to these two events, because while Archizines is of interest to an essentially specific niche audience of young architects, Ochoalcubo managed to attract the leading Japanese architects of recent years to meet their Chilean counterparts, not to mention eight universities.
This asymmetry can be explained by two facts. The first of these is the excessive regard for constructed works in Chile's architectural panorama over the past 20 years, which has led to a surprising anxiety to build on the part of many young architects. The second fact is that, even among architects keen to follow a different experimental, theoretical or social agenda, the enormity of the competition prevents them from turning down offers to develop, for example, second homes for well-off clients. This is why, even though many of them have openly criticised such strategies and commissions, Ochoalcubo was attended by nearly the entire elite class of Chilean architects. Even though Chile has barely been touched by the economic recession, the uncertainty caused by this excessive competition has resulted in the top of the pyramid apparently preferring to stick to tried and tested models rather than going it alone and exploring alternative mechanisms. Winning commissions therefore follows the same logic as the exploitation of natural resources — it's business-as-usual while things are profitable, but once the business looks to be at risk alliances are formed with the competition to limit the entry of new players.
Fortunately, not everything is defined by this market. The complexity is well established, and it is inevitable that parallel narratives will appear along with it. The fact that an exhibition such as Archizines came to Santiago at the same time as an initiative such as Ochoalcubo is precisely because the glut of architects meant there was an audience for both. In fact, although hidden behind the business-as-usual monopoly, there actually is a new ecosystem in Chile made up of "centres", "groups", "collectives" and "laboratories", similar to the phenomenon currently being seen in countries affected by the crisis. This has the potential to completely transform the profession, because its generational timing and global scale mean it can be put forward as a real alternative to the traditional model of how one should go about architecture, just as Chilean students managed to put forward a totally different model for politics in 2011.
However, for a revolution of this kind to be possible, you need to be operating in a relevant area, and this is where a third event can provide the space for opening up debate. At the end of November the Chilean Architecture Biennial will be inaugurated, this year entitled Ciudades para Ciudadanos ["Cities for Citizens"]. This title refers not only to "the city" as the principal source of problems for contemporary Chilean architecture, but also incorporates the concept of "citizenship", which was rediscovered on the streets in 2011 after having been sucked dry of content by the ideas of the previous decade.
The Architecture Biennial will provide the perfect opportunity for the new ecosystem to expand an agenda monopolised by the business-as-usual approach. However, to achieve this it must be able to focus on problems of general interest, even if this leads to it jeopardising its own romanticism. In a profession affected by a crisis of excess, it is difficult to explain why architects are not seen, why they instead hide away up in the clouds talking about the potential of the land, or remain invisible on small-scale projects playing at being activists. We architects have been unable to either have an impact on or influence any improvement in the quality of life in Chilean cities.
It is a fact. Chilean architecture suffers from excesses and inequalities — both of which are ingredients of an economic crisis that this time can be felt in a professional ecosystem. However, the dangerous mixture of these ingredients is diluted when seen from a different viewpoint. Hierarchical verticality can be avoided by moving away from the seductive yet unproductive dialectic between the "architect-as-artist" and the "architect-as-activist". If the working nodes within a horizontal network are increased however, however, the complexity can be absorbed through the diversity of narratives, each of which contributes, at the same time, to creative thinking about our cities. Organised within a horizontal network, each point becomes a centre of thought, production and dissemination. In this way it is possible to overcome both dependence on the upper part of the pyramid and the inertia of the dominant approach.
We need look no further up nor down, because what we are interested in — the city — is to be found in the middle. In other words, the horizontal network should not operate either from top-down or bottom-up, but should rather spread from the middle-out. Francisco Díaz, architect