The Poetics of Drifts, Acts and the Open City: The Institute of Architecture of Valparaíso, 1952-1972
Open City Inaugural Happening, 1971. Source: José Vial Armstrong Archive, School of Architecture, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso.
“We believe the human condition is poetic; on this account, man lives freely in the relentless desire and courage of building a [new] world.”
The Institute of Architecture of Valparaíso in Chile, founded in 1952, led and founded by Alberto Cruz, an architect, and Godofredo Iommi, a poet, was an experimental laboratory in architectural thinking and pedagogy. Initially, it was composed of a group of architects, poets, painters, and engineers united under the common cause of "removing architecture of its doctrine, buried in mathematics and formalisms, and re-centering it in the poetic word."[1] Distancing architecture from functionalism and technology, their program, not conceived as a solely aesthetic conception of modernism, was based on poetry. It attempted to balance the scientific method with a much more exploratory approach which sought to do away with the divisions between art and life. However, at the same time, they were firmly anchoring themselves to the modern movement. As their mantra, they used a quote by Rimbaud in which he stated, "Il faut être absolument moderne" ("we must be utterly modern"), implying that their type of modernism was an exploration of the unknown. At the same time, they were questioning rationalism by delving into a counterintuitive approximation of the creative process. Their methodology emphasized process and making, rather than the result. In other words, practice and research were of the highest importance, obliterating architecture as a commodified product and placing intuition, improvisation, and experimentation at the forefront.
During the second half of the twentieth century, the Institute of Architecture of Valparaíso was just one among several academic experimentations dispersed around the globe. Currently, these academic undertakings are the focus of comprehensive research conducted by Beatriz Colomina in conjunction with a group of graduate architecture students at Princeton University.[2]The research centers on new methods of teaching implanted by small groups of academics, which despite being scattered and not connected were successful at agitating, influencing, and sometimes impacting the foundations of contemporary architectural pedagogy in serious ways.
In the early 1950s, the Institute of Architecture was annexed to the Faculty of Architecture of the Pontificia Universidad Católica of the legendary city of Valparaíso. A Jesuit Congregation had taken over the direction of the University, initiating a period of innovation and progressive academic change. The architect Alberto Cruz was offered a director's position in the Faculty of Architecture, which he accepted under the condition he could bring in the poet Godofredo Iommi, with whom he had already established a profound intellectual exchange. Together they led a paradigmatic change in the teaching of architecture in the country, one that also caught the attention of numerous international academics interested in the radical innovations offered by their original programming. They understood the centering of the pedagogy in poetry as the architect being more of "a reader who apprehends the transient [that present-day life is] through language, and proceeds to spatial design from this reading."[3] Poetry for the institute's founders was the propulsor, the platform from which the creative architectural process should take off, opening a space of intuitive investigation coupled with scientific observation and research.
However, the institute embraced another factor that arose as a central component of their efforts: since its inception, it was a thinking laboratory of the Southern latitudes, profoundly engaged with its geographical region in search of Pan-American and Chilean identities. These identities struggled with the fractured sense of belonging to Pre-Colombian ancestry, ancient cultural lineage, and European roots. Because of its colonial history, this southern region has the troublesome effect on humans of resulting in "layered places and plural identities,"[4] with people coexisting with differing senses of lineage and cultural ancestries. In the case of Chile, the society still struggles with its multiple identities, making it very difficult to come up with a cohesive Chilean character. These academics wanted to correct the way architecture was being taught with a program and methods that would ensure a close encounter with the locale and its identities. Their activities comprised walking journeys and "acts" (or happenings), which were ritualistic engagements with the location, and both emphasized connecting to the ground, the present and the now, and seemed to be indicating the predominance of belonging to a territory. Such a belonging should have consequences in its manifestations in the man-made physical environment.
The institute of Architecture of Valparaiso pedagogic program was based on drifts (travesías), acts (phalènes), and utopian architecture (the Open City.) At the beginning of each project, reciting poetry was used as a guide. According to Alberto Cruz, it was a "foundational act." For each new construction this foundational act was followed by a series of communal and public events. In turn, these collective happenings converged into the making of architectural arrangements or spaces, made by the students and faculty, in an improvised fashion, and subject to trial and error. Since 1970, these architectural constructions would be built in a piece of land about 30 kilometers North of Valparaíso, an enclave which was named "Cuidad Abierta" or Open City.
Drifts (Travesias)
The Drifts or travesías are landscape wanderings and have their origins before Alberto Cruz, and Godofredo Iommi moved to Valparaíso in 1952 to create the Institute of Architecture. Alberto Cruz was a professor at the School of Architecture of the Catholic University of Santiago, where he would send his students to roam around the urban landscape to observe life and the city. At the same time, Cruz would also organize urban excursions with fellow academic collaborators. He viewed the architect wandering around the city as the perfect situation for observing and experiencing the metropolis, an act that would represent a facilitator for architectural reflection.
Since the beginning, travels, drifts, or "travesías" as they were called, would be fundamental components of the educational program of the institute and would constitute more of a mythological re-appropriation of the landscape of Latin America than anything else. In 1965, Alberto Cruz and Godofredo Iommi with a group of ten architects and philosophers, members of the faculty, initiated a journey from Punta Arenas, the major Chilean city at the southern tip on the continent, to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, in search of the emotional and intellectual energy of Latin America. This drift would constitute the first of such trips and would be designated by the founders to be "the poetic founding of América."[5] Along their journey, the group performed a variety of improvised poetic acts, each of them followed by the construction of ephemeral arrangements of physical inscriptions, or offerings, to the chosen sites. These landscape interventions were the results of the use of local materials, blending local needs, observations, and investigations, and their roaming state of mind fluctuated between the intuitive and the rational.
Planning their journey in 1965 in search of the soul of Latin America, Cruz and Iommi laid an actual physical Southern Cross, a prominent constellation in the southern sky, against the inverted cartography of Latin America. This representation of the continent had been created by Joaquín Torres García (1874-1949), a leading Uruguayan modern artist and was called "America Invertida." It had been drawn by him to get across his belief that there was no supremacy of Europe or North America over Latin America, and claiming its equal status. The planned drift so devised would take them from the tip of the cross resting on the map (Punta Arenas) to the middle of the axis of the cross, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, the city they proclaimed the "poetic capital" of Latin America. They would name this journey Amereida, a word combination of America and Eneida (Aeneid in English), the famous epic poem by Virgil in which the protagonist travels long distances in search of Rome. By utilizing this later reference, the founders of the architectural school make a connection between the architecture of Latin America and its Mediterranean origins.[6] Since 1984, the Journeys through America (Travesías por América) are part of the curriculum of the school, and students and faculty have traversed the whole continent, many times over in every direction.
Amereida
The first travesía later inspired Godofredo Iommi to write a poem in 1967, also called "Amereida," which from then on operated as the manifesto of the school. Through poems and drawings, it illustrates the founders' ideas and principles, invoking an exploration of the interior of the continent, which he calls "inner sea," a calling to revisiting its geography to reassess its significance and creating stronger ties with it.
Iommi acknowledges once again, in "Amereida," Joaquin Torres García's inverted map, signaling that this piece of iconography has a deep-rooted significance to the foundation of the school, and communicating the will to impart education with a profound conscience of its shared continental histories and cultures. Concurrently, the author is also questioning the Eurocentric view of the world and calls for a new stance, one with a new and dignified awareness as a people. Additionally, the fact that the traversías are not nationally but instead continentally bound attests to an emphasis in attempting to create an idiosyncratic vision of Latin America. The book's final statement reads the "road is not the road" and with a play of words, it impels one into a metaphorical space, where things may always have a more profound, mysterious, and mystical significance.
Acts (Phalènes)
Associated with the drifts and the Open City, the "phalènes" constituted collective physical exercises, choreographic works, and public recitations, many introducing games, creative garments, and props, leading to artistic production of some sort. These happenings were ritualistic actions to connect the human body with the site and the future architectural creation, generating a spiritual bond with the location. The "phalènes" were activated by poetry recitations, promoting the participation of all involved and highlighting the unpredictable. The general structure of these acts may have had preconceived general guidelines but were mainly improvised while producing them. In a way, they were understood as poetry versed through the body in interaction with the physical world, and converging, or not, into a physical arrangement. Architecture conceived this way is reflective, experiential, also speculative and intuitive, but above all, exploratory and open-ended, a central aspect of the pedagogy of the school. These acts contained a playful aspect and very often were performed in a circle (or "ronda" in Spanish) to facilitate the participation of all members of the group. In a course called the Body Culture, the phalènes were established as core components of the methodology of the school.
Open City
After several years, the institute needed a physical place from which to conduct an essential part of their activities. After twelve years of existence, the school found a location, the Open City, in an open-air site to develop in physical form their experiments, constituting a sort of research lab and workshop. It is noteworthy that even during the years of the dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990), this enclave acted as a space of creative freedom. The institute could continue their functioning during that period by exercising self-censorship and by disengaging from the political sphere, concurrently to keeping on using innovative ways of teaching architecture. The military did not see their poetic language, performances, and assemblages as upfront threatening, and most probably, they did not understand it.
The "Ciudad Abierta" (Open City) is not a city or a village. It is an architectural laboratory created in 1970 by the founders of the Institute of Architecture and located at about 30 kilometers North of Valparaíso in a locality called Ritoque. It occupies an approximately 750-acre lot of land on the undulating Pacific coastline, and consists of dunes, coastal shrubs, and bushes ending in a small river inlet and a bird sanctuary. It is the site of experimental architecture which accommodates several structures mostly made of reclaimed materials, built by students, faculty, and collaborators over thirty years. The location contains several "hospederías" (residential homes), a chapel, a cemetery, a sanctuary, an amphitheater, a music room, a foundation for a library, student workshops, and a sports field. These structures are unconventional formations, the result of long processes of improvised construction, many of them never fully finished.
The creation of the Open City provided a further disengagement of the educational endeavor from the institution of the Universidad Católica and would constitute a place of freedom and iterative learning. The students were afforded the opportunity of learning while making, and hence inevitably involved learning through error. It meant they had the advantage of being able to correct their missteps and receive feedback from the experience of making. The making would always involve collaborative work with classmates and faculty.
The pedagogy of the institute was developed with a method that Kristen Kreider and James O'Leary define in the following manner: in the Open City, "students were encouraged, in the first instance, to generate a poetic text. This then prompted a series of questions about architectural space and form, particularly as these related to phenomena and experience. This line of questioning was then pursued through a drawn project, with the resultant architectural proposal evidencing an interdependent relationship between poetry and architecture, text, and special research. This relation would later become the hallmark of all building work in Open City."[7]
These architectural experiments do not conform to a single functional or useful purpose but instead are conceived as the body involved in physical production, as a means of study and research, ultimately with educational consequences. It is here more than in any other educational methodology utilized by the school that there is an emphasis on the process and not the product.
The school had a uniqueness difficult to find anywhere else. Defining the sui generis quality of the Open City, Kreider and O'Leary stated "Throughout its history and development, Open City has occupied an eccentric position: institutionally, as an adjunct to the main Catholic University of Chile; politically, in relation to the political upheaval in Chile, particularly under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990); culturally, in relation to the perceived capitals of theorizing modernism."[8] This entity had, from its inception, a will to remain and operate in the margins of institutionalized education.
The Founders' Philosophy
The Institute of Architecture is the product of two intellectuals with an unusual and peculiar kind of minds. Alberto Cruz and Godofredo Iommi were both born in 1917 in Chile and Argentina, respectively. In the mid-forties, Iommi had already participated in an improvised journey through the Amazon with four Argentinian poets. This trip constituted the precedent of what was going to turn into a recurrent form of educational wandering of the School of Valparaiso. Before 1952, Cruz, working as a professor of the School of Architecture at the Universidad Católica of Santiago, coincidentally would send his students on excursions outside the classroom to observe the life in the city. These early drifts were meant to be catalysts for architectural thinking. Presumably Cruz and Iommi were converging into similar frameworks of thinking, albeit each coming from different fields, and the fusion of their separate but already established interests in the wanderings would make them connect their disciplines even further.
Cruz and Iommi met fortuitously in Santiago in 1952. They started a deep-seated intellectual interrelation, merging their thoughts about architecture, poetry, drifts, and their particular take on modernity, which is interested in experimenting and trying novel forms. Subsequently, the two artists moved along with their families and a group of young architects to Valparaíso initiating a collective and egalitarian style of living. They settled in a group of houses in the Valparaiso hills, at the Cerro Castillo, collecting their salaries and putting them into a shared pool and distributing it according to the members' needs. This style of living intermingled all areas of life, including family, work, and leisure, establishing a communal lifestyle that would inform their research and teaching and would create a myth surrounding the Institute of Architecture and the Open City in Ritoque.
Both intellectuals contributed to the elaboration of the school's principles, ideas, and methods of teaching. Their background, their way of thinking, and above all, their belief in poetry and language as being the originator of the creative process set the tone for how things were executed at the school. Cruz and Iommi had a peculiar way of utilizing language as if their minds inhabited a different plane, a dimension from which language was processed in a different manner, a more abstract and metaphysical way of understanding reality.
Alberto Cruz was against an architecture that postulates a dominance of men over nature. He was for an architecture that maintains a distance from it and does not meld with it, but at the same time does not proclaim its subjugation. Most importantly, Cruz claimed that poetry is the original temporal unit that impregnates the constructed space. He believed that the poetic word is the essence of what is to emerge. To him, the architect must be prepared to know how to read the environment and to know how to build the appearance that life will have in space. This knowledge is to him connected to "a lived life" and of its intimacy with it. Finally, he also used to argue that life and space are ultimately meant to construct moments in the present.
To understand the involvement of Godofredo Iommi in the pedagogy of architecture, is it paramount to analyze his views concerning poetry. In a master class titled "One Must Be Absolutely Modern," held in 1982, he described his thoughts in this regard. He argued that the essence of the poetic words is not to say what is already known, but instead to say what is not known. He emphasized that when the word (palabra) says what is known, it just constitutes a conversation, announcing nothing new. In his lecture, he equated "acclamation," in its "adulation" implication, in front of the wonder of the world, to "recognition." He implied that real recognition is, in fact, an exploration that turns into knowledge, signifying that acclamation without recognition does not lead to knowledge.
Additionally, he argued that in the poetic word, there is no truth or falsehood; consequently, that poetry is not judgment. To him, the poetic word is a myth, and that myth is just word. He indicated that myth contains the combined meanings of "mystery" and "mystical," which both converge into contemplation. He believed that, in essence, poetry occupies itself with the unknown. Ultimately, poetry is produced in the encounter of dislocated elements illuminating unknown zones. In the lecture mentioned above, Iommi referenced the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) in the title of the lecture and indicated that because of him, modern poetry and the avant-garde were not interested in meanings. He further asserted that meanings were shredded after the devastations of the Second World War, elaborating that having been liberated from meanings, poetry represented the rescue of an open field: that of the adventure.
We can extrapolate from the statements of Cruz and Iommi described above, that in the pedagogical program they devised, some basic principles stem from their beliefs. Speculating on how these ideas could be translated into the architectural field, one can conclude that the constructed environment should emerge from the poetic word, should be respectful of the environment, and should announce the new. To the founders of the Institute of Architecture of Valparaíso, poetry is fundamental to channel the creative process into a space of direct sensorial experience, and a space of metaphysical connection with the objective physical dimension in order to create a non-verbal language with elements of the physical world.
As a basic pre-disposition, the architect should be able to observe and "read" the physical surroundings through her/his involvement within it in a deep, immersive experience. In the creative act, the architect should be open to connecting to the wonders of existence, to be able to acclaim it, and recognize it to access the knowledge of the environment which she/he will have to act upon. Poetry must be used to have access to the unknown, and to be able to connect the unarticulated elements that the architect has to deal with (location, identities, meteorological conditions, the people for whom they will be ideating spaces and so on.)
Poetry recitations, drifts, and phalènes encompassed a series of imaginative ways of teaching the creative process akin to what years later would be called Design Thinking and which was so intensely analyzed by Niger Cross.[9] The institute’s pedagogy was not a linear way of thinking; it relied on experience, trial and error, experimentation, and iteration, in addition to being collective and interdisciplinary, all elements described by Cross as being omnipresent in the processes of the creative fields. These processes were just liberated and exposed in Cruz's and Iommi's way of teaching, constituting an interesting case study to analyze for their visionary stance.
In the contemporary architectural field in Chile, the Institute of Architecture of Valparaíso occupies a legendary place: it is a myth. This Institute acted as a counterbalance to the canonical modernist movement which had a privileged entrance into the landscape of the country. Above all, the Institute of Architecture was the expression of a certain resistance, a push and pull against the classical modernist architectural expression of the times and an attempt to annunciate the necessity of forging a more local disposition. The Institute has always represented a looming presence in the mind of architects and it remains so even today. It represents a calling to a more idiosyncratic architectural language, inclusive of the recurring question of identity of the Chilean character as well as the belonging to a bigger amplitude, that of the Latin American continent.
Meanwhile, the Chilean character continues to be fractured with its multiple senses of belonging. The Institute of Architecture never answered any questions but certainly raised many important queries. The constructed environment is a cultural phenomenon among many others that expresses a sense of the collective, rooted in a location. Conversely, it might do the opposite by not paying attention to its role in participating in the construction of a physical idiosyncratic idiom. This way the Institute of Architecture of Valparaíso was also a call for a collective construction, for it is in the collective that consensual narratives (ephemeral or not) are elaborated, giving the unified society under such narratives a sense of belonging, inclusion and kinship.
Finally, the creation by the school of an alternative channel for pedagogy, disentangled from the institutional claws and liberated from conventions, invokes the view of Guy Debord in "The Society of the Spectacle," where he states "As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep." The Institute of Architecture of Valparaíso created an unusual opportunity for those involved to have the privilege of connecting to reality outside of the "bad dream" as Debord names it, breaking free from the tentacles of society to dream their necessities in order to stay awake through poetry and lyrical gestures.
NOTES
[1] Luis E. Carranza and Fernando Luis Lara, Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia (Austin: Texas University Press, 2014), 257.
[2] “Radical Pedagogies”, Case Studies, last modifies 11/10/19, https://radical-pedagogies.com/search-cases/
[3] Mario Gomes, Trans. Michael Turnbull, “The Poetics of Architecture,” accessed 11/10/19,
https://www.diaphanes.com/titel/poetry-must-be-made-by-all-not-by-one-4720.
[4] Jill Traganou, “From nation-bound histories to global narratives of architecture” in Global Design History, ed. Glenn Adamson, Giorgio Riello and Sarah Teasley (London: Routledge Publishers, 2011), 166.
[5] As stated by Godofredo Iommi in his book Amereida.
[6] Luis E. Carranza and Fernando Luis Lara, Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia (Austin: Texas University Press, 2014), 258
[7] Kristen and James O’Leary, “Volver a no saber: Poetry, Architecture and the beginnings of Open City” in The Routledge Companion on Architecture, Literature and the City edited by Jonathan Charley (New York: Routledge, 2019.)
[8] Kristen and James O’Leary, “Volver a no saber: Poetry, Architecture and the beginnings of Open City” in The Routledge Companion on Architecture, Literature and the City edited by Jonathan Charley (New York: Routledge, 2019.)
[9] Nigel Cross. Design Thinking: Understanding how Designers Think and Work. (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011.)
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