Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

How is an architectural project formed? What is the role of the compositional principle in the process of a project? How can a compositional principle be deduced from the design problematic? How does this organising principle of form, which contains all the potential morphological development, define the elements that enter into the composition, their behaviour and their relation with the other elements?; how does it contribute to the coherence of the individual parts in the whole and make them remain within the same formal family?; how is a compositional principle developed morphologically until it reaches the final composition? and how is a compositional principle evaluated and valued? These are the main questions addressed in this essay that deals with the compositional principle within the architectural project process.

The review entitled Bruce Mau: from the end of the world to the world as medium, comments on and analyses the documentary "Mau" (2021) by the Austrian filmmakers Benji and Jono Bergmann. It highlights not only the figure of the internationally renowned designer, but also the narrative construction of the film product itself, because it is considered that its construction favours the highlighting of qualities of the person and work of the designer in question. Thus, the biography, the scenes of everyday life and the short interviews to break down the designer's thoughts are distributed with an attractive balance, while the different designs and their strategies appear and disappear like characters crossing a room in a scene.

Visual essay

Artículo Visual

What realities are activated when we abstract our gaze and gestures from the lights of our time is a question that summons the ideas that follow. Such an ignition seems to be possible from multiple positions: the one proposed here is a navigation of the possibilities, or paths, that remain for a Design stifled by the dispositions of modern progress. Stripped of guiding determinations, what should be the subjects and occupations of design in the world? Our current ways of shaping the world, how we understand and approach the real, seem impossible to transform. Various paths seem to open as the density of the project dissolves: the nostalgic temptation, the alleged absolute objectivity of data, reactionary design. However, in a scenario like the current one where certainty or forecasts are overshadowed by issues such as the political and environmental crisis, or our submission in the era of hyper-information, a shift of the gaze to territories other than those assumed can reveal other potencies. Even from the most unsuspected places - a collapsed delta, a short story - we can begin to pay attention to the shadows that slip out of the corner of our eyes and find new ways of understanding how we design. Also, other spatialities from which to reconsider a new design culture. Being able to work attentively with our given environment and reconsider our project for the future - constructing new ways of narrating ourselves - can result in a total disorientation, an absence with respect to our time that dissolves the limits of what we understand as the real world.

The act of drawing can be an interpretation and reading tool that allows the integration and organization of information and experiences, configuring political mobilization. If drawing can be recognized as a political act and it is based on observation, covering issues of memory, knowledge, senses and perceptions, intention and action, in the face of the rupture with place and bodies, in which way the drawing would be emptied of its political sphere and its civic dimension? Seeking to answer these questions, the construction of this text allowed an investigative path, as a design methodology to the new demands brought by the instantaneity of contemporaneity, captured by the commodification of spaces, plans and dreams and the fragmentation of memory. The essential issue of drawing is here recognized as ontological, and the act of drawing corresponds to representation of different ways of being and inhabiting Earth. Thus, the immaterial character of memories and identities are fundamental for the understanding and recognition of the multiplicity of worlds and meanings. The process of de-atomization of drawing, in which memory can be recognized as an instrument of resistance and opposition to relations of power and dominance, allows subjects and collectives to be made visible, according to a counter-hegemonic perspective. In this sense, (re)thinking the design of the city requires considering the particularities of those who are part of it, considering its cultural landscape, which represents aspects that shape its identity and memory. Making visible what was hitherto invisible is one of the paths to the pluriverse world.

Tactical urbanism is presented as a counter-hegemonic way of thinking and building public spaces in the city. (Brenner 2016, 9) "emerges in a context of governance crisis", in which citizens, organizations and urban groups mainly, seek answers celerity to problems of urban quality that have transcended for years and that every day deepen the spatial and social gaps. This paper study the concept of tactical urbanism, its possible theoretical support and the methodologies and tools that characterize it; present in a succinct manner some experiences of tactical operations in Latin American, with the aim of visualizing some of the interpretations that have been given to it with project approach, identifying common spatial qualities, methodologies and urban themes of approach, actors involved and design tools.   The microscale approach is conceptualized as the place where neighborhood identity and culture are sustained and nurtured, where encounters are generated and relationships are built; It is understood that there is a gap in the spatial approach structures from the urban plans in which the microscale should appear as a starting point for a networked, comprehensive, heterogeneous and larger-scale city construction. (Gehl 2010, 118) “Among all the issues that a planner must attend to, the most important is to pay attention to the small scale”. Tactical urbanism frequently acts on this microscale through processes that claim participation, the use of public space, and collective management processes.  

I present a compilation continent of a series of representative moments of the becoming part-time teacher of Chilean university education in the areas of design, art and architecture. It is the result of the exercise of remembering and reconstructing a workday with the attempt to generate a spontaneous state of affairs (statistically not representative) of the relationships, meanings and displacements that we generate in the search for a dwelling that can resist the prevailing homelessness and the absence of sufficient route signs for the configuration of an architecture of meanings that enables the different processes of transformation, which still function as an ancient aspiration, in these areas and latitudes. It is an attempt to weave a patchwork of moments devoid of any aesthetic and historical intention, but protected by a constant operation of autobiographical convocation and escape (continuous process of creating the present). It is a commitment to collide some experiential nuclei with the purpose of discovering the hidden abyss between the gaps in academic knowledge, the cultural and productive needs of our region, and the expectations and hopes of young people and their homes. This work does not intend to be representative of the status of these areas of knowledge in Chile, but I believe that it does show the existence of a territory full of dislocations and implausibilities that could be conformed into hope. From a certain marginal perspective, it is an attempt to generate a spoken portrait of concealment, distinguishable from job insecurity, education as merchandise, or the discourses made possible by elite perspectives.

This article deals with the problems of the transformation of the city of Santiago in the context of the social revolt in October 2019. For this, theoretical lines have been defined that visualize the city as a stage in which various symbolic universes of its inhabitants flow and that are exacerbated in crisis contexts through performative intervention processes that are manifested by individuals and groups in processes of political mobilization. The focus defined for this article is conditioned to answer the question: how is the city resignified from the performative actions of individuals and groups in the public space of Santiago de Chile? This is done through the autoethnographic method that focuses on the systematization process of the very experience of inhabiting the crisis. Realizing the existing relationships between the various symbolic contexts, theoretical references and field observations. In this sense, the proposed text reveals the crisis as a dispute that allows an exercise of deconstruction of the urban fabric, a decolonial performative action that claims a place in the city by groups and individuals, who are part of dissidences, indigenous groups and migrants, amalgamating a syncretism in the urban ethos, which leads us to think of a turning point and why not say it too, a starting point to consider design in a real world in constant disputes for legitimacy.