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

In the year 2025, a new virus strikes the planet with potentially catastrophic consequences. Given the end-of-the-world scenario, global lockdown is required. The mutated virus spreads faster than previous ones and cannot be eliminated by known scientific methods. The world is facing a health and economic collapse in which individuals are resisting confinement in limited spaces that provide neither safety nor quality of life. Latin America is one of the areas most affected by the pandemic. Reimagining the future of a Latin American city reveals the fundamental role that architecture plays in the productivity and quality of life of its inhabitants. Practicality will become the main factor in the design of living space. The building, as an object, will have to function as an autonomous and sustainable organism. Taking Quito, an Andean city, as a prototype and study laboratory, four possible architectural, typological, and urban scenarios that respond to survival through sustainable food production are explored. The results support two approaches, technological and phenomenological, in which the health of the human being is the parameter of all design decisions.

The objective is to elucidate from the original configuration of the outer sacred space of the churches of Chiloé declared a World Heritage Site, from its missionary - pastoral function, and from the urban conformation of the peoples of the archipelago and its evolutions in time. This diachronic analysis of the settlements has not been studied, and given the existence of new archival documentation, plus some studies on missions in the insular space and those related to architecture and urban planning, it is intended to make contributions that allow a better understanding of the sacred variable of the spaces, beyond the church that has been the constant in the studies on this heritage. Methodologically, 16 models are compared and classified into typologies according to urban form and historical interpretation. The main findings lie in two basic typologies: free or open esplanades and landscaped squares, in both cases, the urban void is a permanence and with little transformation over time, except that in the first the sacred function is the main one and in the second it is more symbolic.

To Know the origin of a project implies know the landscape to which it belongs, knowing the causes and sources that have motivated it.This landscape is a complex landscape, built over time and that becomes visible at every opportunity to build a project. In this context, the mental space, own space, the referential world and how much of that world we allow to become visible, constitutes an inexorable operator in the action of projecting. The project as a still photo, as a mental artifact, as proof of the persistence of the idea of an author's work. Comparison between the two projects; a family shelter in Oropesa (Toledo) and a museum (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), allows us to show not so much the reproduction of one design within another, but the displacement of the architect's thinking, able to respond to a program and some needs different from the original ones. The case study is presened the idea of copy, not as the simplest path in principle, but as a review of an origin where, despite the change in program, it continues to collect an essence linked to living.

As a whole, the stairsways of Puerto Montt constitute an architectural element that articulates the city, responding to its topographical condition, and that allows other uses beyond pedestrian traffic. In them there are instances of recreation, socialization and appreciation of the landscape. Despite the value they possess, Citizens perceive them as unsafe or dangerous places, which may be due to the lack of attention from the institutional framework and the bad practices that some pedestrians develop in them. Given the current lack of public spaces enabled in the historic center of Puerto Montt, the stairs and their diversity of uses make even more sense. This research investigated 3 stairs in particular as a methodological essay that provides concrete data for various studies. The applied methodology was mixed, combining quantitative and qualitative data, with an ethnographic approach, whose base considers the tools provided by Jan Gehl to study the city and its public spaces, and the hand sketch as an observation instrument. In this way, patterns of pedestrian use were identified.

In the architectural projects historiography, architectures are built social syntheses and even the result of technical capacity in different societies. The shaping generative potential of non-Euclidean geometries and the difficulties inherent in working with complex surfaces invite us to re-discover the Baroque period as one of the germinal moments of the architecture project ideation in relation to the experience of space. However, the creation and visualization of the architecture project with BIM do limit the possibilities of projecting directly with these virtual twin digital tools, just because of the difficulty of working with these surfaces. The article makes a comparison between the projectual, geometric and representative techniques of the different projective stages, resulting in the baroque space and the contemporary project of complex surfaces. Finally, the paper highlights the danger for students training in the Architecture Schools due to replacement of the project process by the development of digital constructs as a merely artistic graphic construct.

In recent years, in a perspective of some global processes such as the climate crisis and the consideration of the limited nature of natural resources, architecture has begun to problematize the material condition of the built fact with greater emphasis. Taking into account that architecture tends to order a quantity of material, to provide the necessary space within which the daily activities of the human being take place, a contingent question to elaborate is whether said matter -which in general terms does not disappear but rather transforms-, it can be recovered to once again give it an architectural advantage, lengthening its useful life and improving efficiency in terms of economy and environmental care. Perhaps the possible answers to this question are those underlying the design of the house presented below: based on the dismantling, transfer and selective recovery of the wood from an old shed and the repetition of its structural typology, it intends, on the one hand, to establish a reading of heritage rescue, and on the other hand, to testify about the condition of environmental sustainability with an emphasis on material restitution and recycling.

As a discipline, architecture manifests the material values of the society that produces it. Since Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999, the Bolivarian Revolution has substantially transformed the city and the social fabric, to spread its political speech through public works. Using a critical approach, this essay explores the most significant architectural examples that have been developed in Caracas, many of them still unfinished, to explore if the Bolivarian Revolution speech has privileged ideology over the recognition of architecture’s and city values. At the same time, it seeks to offer a panorama where the disjointed and discontinuous practices imposed by the State try to rewrite the capital’s physiognomy and history.

Spatial experience is a key phenomenon in a person's relationship with the world and is an essential concept for those designing living spaces. Here, the objective is to theoretically define spatial experience from conceptualizing the human being as sensorium, which is conditioned by culture and in turn contributes to its definition. The research problem is to understand the relationship between perception and spatial experience, in the corporeal dimension and orientation in the world and in the existential dimension when inhabiting. The strategy was to resort to the texts of the founding authors of the concepts: sensorium, perception and experience from the phenomenological perspective and totexts that neuroscience offers to approach an understanding of the cognitive processes of perception and episodic memory; thus, analyze and integrate them; thereby propose a model for understanding the spatial experience. In this way, three stages in the spatial experience are identified: the sensory, the perceptual and the existential; the experience was established by theinterrelation between the corporeality that constitutes the sensorium and the being-beingconstituted by the consciousness, the cognitiveprocesses and the culture of the subject in a space-time.  

This article addresses a crucial period in the history of architectural restoration in Chile and covers the first set of restoration projects overseen by the National Monuments Council in the mid-twentieth century. Part of broader research, it offers a historical overview of early architectural restorations carried out under the country’s first piece of legislation on National Monuments, passed in 1925. The study focuses on the period between 1950 and 1954, during which the first tranche of funding was allocated for the repair of buildings identified as significant to national heritage. It covers restoration work conducted at the Forts of Valdivia, the Pukará de Lasana, the Tarapacá Church, and the Matilla Church Bell Tower, sites that, at the time, were in an advanced state of deterioration. National Monuments Council session minutes and Internal Bulletins were collected, and a documentary review and qualitative analysis conducted. Results reveal a structured action plan encompassing a variety of restoration works motivated by increasing recognition of the value of the country’s colonial and pre-Hispanic past.