The Faculty of Architecture and Art at Universidad del Desarrollo held activities as part of the Detonating Experience II 'Contact with Matter,' which takes place three times during the program and aims to introduce future architects to each curricular cycle. Each exercise brought students closer to the construction and design of full-scale objects. The "Table" Workshop was led by the prominent firm Grupo Talca, featuring architects Rodrigo Sheward and Martín del Solar, while the EDII "Mast" was directed by professors Yanko Bugueño and Diego Martínez along with teaching assistant Magdalena Gallegos.
Valentina Galleguillos Negroni, Academic Coordinator of Architecture at UDD, states that "students approach the Architectural Experience when they are able to reflect on the expressive qualities and virtues of materials, as well as the problem-solving capabilities that define the character of architectural design. When these two aspects intersect, the appropriate field for design exploration begins to emerge."
Meanwhile, Miguel Nazar Daccarett, Director of the UDD School of Architecture, explains the activities titled 'a Mast and a Table' as testaments to collective work: 'A single School body acting on these elements. A Mast, from Concepción to Valparaíso to build memory. From Valparaíso to Concepción to build School. A Mast that speaks of a horizon. A Table, fragile and precarious. Like a piece that will sustain the spoken word, in conversations about architecture and life. It proposes a spatial order, a unique way of building, by 150 students. Our students.'
Read on to discover what each activity consisted of, in the words of Grupo Talca, the leading professors, and participating students.
The Mast
The first activity was 'The Mast,' where 17 third-year students from the Concepción campus designed and built a wooden structure assembled in front of the faculty building. The piece was later transported to Valparaíso during the XX Architecture Biennial to be installed at the Crucero house in Cerro Alegre. The Mast served as a support to project various exercises related to the 1:1 scale.
Description by leading professor Yanko Bugueño: We are a group, a group like any other, with a history, a past, and a present. We are those who are here, but we are also those who were, and above all, those who will come. Without a doubt, it is up to those of us here to fulfill the inescapable duty of leaving a legacy, of making that distinctive, transversal mark on the timeline that allows future generations to pause and dedicate a rightful moment of attention to the past.
By 'inescapable duty,' I mean paying attention and taking special care with every step we take, because they will all become part of the past. Diverting our focus from this purpose weakens our legacy, and our footprint could fade into oblivion.
The Mast, a structure native to our School, conceived from a respectful anonymity with no greater aspiration than being an academic manifestation, reflects the work of third-year Architecture students. Shortly after its creation, however, and without intending to, its very nature projected it toward a destination far beyond the classroom, transcending the boundaries of our school to exhibit itself and spark an open dialogue with the community.
Conceived as a modular structure of a changing nature, it reveals its primary purpose: to allow for growth and shrinkage within pre-established dimensions, enabling a seamless fit into an ever-changing environment, making adaptation its greatest achievement.
Its second objective, which stems from its morphology, relates to orthogonal lines formed by a subtle framework of wooden slats. Together, they create a distinctive signature that projects an image of fragility and, at the same time, suggestive lightness.
Its ductility allowed it to fold and compress, making it easy to transport across the territory.
Our mast may mutate today, changing its shape many times, but it will never cease to be an echo of the past for future generations. On its shoulders and within its essence will rest fragments of our School life... for as long as its fragile existence allows.
Description by the winners of the Studio III proposal, student Pedro González: The creation of an ephemeral landmark, Cerro Alegre. This project was born from the search for an architectural, structural, and spatial response that could be integrated within the dimensional limits of the provided site. To begin, we identified the need for a low-impact visual design to respect the historical heritage of Cerro Alegre, Valparaíso. We developed a series of tests to explore potential constructive systems and proposals, along with their assembly and development systems.
After falling into proposals that were overly iconic and complex in design, we decided to take a few steps back and create a proposal based on a simple construction system. This system is capable of transforming according to the idea we sought to represent, where its parts are fundamental to executing the proposal structurally; this structure references a metabolism that allows it to respond to new design-enriching conditions. It is a structure with weak foundations, fragile individually but functioning as a collective whole, where the force of its own weight distributed across each vertical wall exerted on the ground is equal to its total weight divided by the number of vertical walls on which it rests.
Although the proposal is understood as an element of great vertical scale, it scales down when placed next to the existing volumes on the site. This creates a drop in height adjacent to the Crucero house, culminating at the Miramar - Álvaro Besa curve, where our 1:1 construction experience concluded on Saturday, November 4, atop our structure called 'The Mast.'
The Table - Workshop
The second exercise was the "Table" workshop, which lasted three days: two for design, estimation, and prototyping, and one for construction. To carry it out, 150 students from first to fifth year designed a table called "Mesa Sur Sur" (South-South Table), as an element symbolizing school life centered around conversation. Its goal was to become a platform for classes, lectures, and discussions within the faculty.
Description by Grupo Talca: From the craft, approaches to the vernacular. The Beetle and the Pine Nut. When we talk about territory and how it is inhabited, we must speak of a special kind of person, and how to enter into a dialogue that reveals their unique way of constructing their way of living.
During a visit to the Araucaria forests surrounding the Lonquimay Volcano with naturalist Sergio Elórtegui, we paused. Sergio picked up two highly similar elements covering the ground, showed them to us, and pointed out that these two nearly identical objects were the seed of the pehuén (pine nut) and a very similar beetle of the same size, color, and shape.
He then explained that this was possible thanks to a face-to-face relationship established between the beetle and the seed. This resemblance was only possible due to the beetle's devotion to that face-to-face encounter, which has occurred for millions of years. This, in turn, was only possible through the relationship between every part of the forest—araucaria with araucaria, the wind enabling their reproduction, insects, and human and non-human inhabitants.
This is how we understand the depth of this unique person's wisdom—a wisdom that does not develop solely in the mind, but is necessarily established through the body and its relationship with otherness, the other. This type of person knows very well that they are just another part of a system we can call an ecosystem, never placing themselves above it.
This direct relationship between their body, their hand—which already embodies wisdom—and otherness, is what is capable of constructing a very balanced way of living on the earth, based on wisdom embodied in a physical form. This wisdom is built from the same devotion the beetle has for the pehuén, but in this case, a devotion to belonging and cohabiting in a highly fragile territory capable of transforming a body.
Description by the Director of the Architecture Program: MESA SurSur. One of the great differences between Sculpture and Architecture is air—essentially, the absence of space.
A table is even closer to Architecture: it proposes a spatial order that gives form to the act of conversation, requires structure to achieve verticality and horizontal expansion, and involves concepts of balance. Even in its simplicity, it requires composition criteria centered on an idea and detailed thinking for construction. Just like Architecture, a table must function.
This Table, our School's table, aims to be a valuable piece from its very conception. Conceived and built by 150 UDD Architecture students, its result is beautiful in itself, through what it evokes—from conversation and celebration to how it ages.
A scarcity of economic resources demands an abundance of creative resources, and that is precisely what this Workshop proposes: to transform, in the words of GRUPO Talca, material into Matter.
Common sense regarding a specific way of doing, which positions us to use existing resources—wood, steel, stone—as valuable materials from the Concepción territory, will give shape and substance to our Table.
Through their reflective, design, and construction inquiries, and with their own hands, students will embark on a path native to the Architect: from head to hand, from hand to matter, and from matter to the built work.
This article was written by Fernanda Amaro. The translation is powered by AI.
