Earlier this year, the Ministry of Cultures, Arts, and Heritage, through the National Cultural Heritage Service (SNPC), launched the bidding process for the design of the Valparaíso Regional Archive. The future building not only aims to preserve historical documents and collections and promote research and access to information, but also represents a major opportunity to value and reactivate the ruins of the historic Palacio Subercaseaux in Valparaíso's Barrio Puerto, Chile.
Following an evaluation of the 13 accepted bids, the winning proposal was submitted by architects Cecilia Puga, Paula Velasco, and their team. Their design defends and protects the urban profile, showing us how to connect the new with the old. Below, discover the winning project in detail, along with the other awarded entries.
Winning Project: Competition for the New Valparaíso Regional Archive
Architects: Cecilia Puga, Paula Velasco
Associate Architect: Maximiliano Parada
Collaborating Architects: Alberto Calderon, Claudio Araya, Giancarlo Acosta, Magdalena Vergara
Structural Engineering: Pedro Bartolomé, Cristián Sandoval
Restoration Consultants: Alan Chandler, Luis Cercós
Energy Efficiency: Antonio Espinoza
Text description courtesy of the project team.
Content and Container
As a team, we believe one of the greatest values of this state initiative is the opportunity it offers to lay the foundation for an urban renewal process in an area that is highly fragile due to severe deterioration and abandonment. The achievements of the Palacio Subercaseaux project will likely serve as a model for future interventions. Therefore, we feel compelled to respond responsibly to the challenges posed by this project, both in this part of the city and within this specific urban element.
Defending and protecting the urban profile is of utmost importance to us. Pressure to densify historic sites has generally reduced heritage protection to a process of gutting both density and meaning—facadism—where historical, cultural, and material depth is reduced to a shell or outer skin. This makes way for interiors where real estate and urban development pressures erect volumes that definitively break with the heritage values contained and preserved by the original urban massing.
We are currently in a transitional phase between the colonial city of continuous facades and a city of self-contained, standalone buildings. What remains today of Palacio Subercaseaux is a container without content, a cup unable to hold the volume of liquid required by the program; its style, materials, and form clash with these requirements. This dilemma forces a new approach to the “building as facade.”
Retaining the facade and the street it frames complies with the principles of the Charter of and the assumption is ‘what remains shall stay.’ However, when ‘what remains’ is merely the surface and not the substance of the architecture, a new approach is required. The inherent risk within this site and brief is facadism: retaining ill-fitting historical garments to conceal a disguised contemporary body. This creates a double negative, where the new is compromised and the old becomes meaningless.
Exemplary European strategies for the rehabilitation of ruins include Scarpa's Castelvecchio and Fehn's Hedmark Museum. At Castelvecchio, a continuous, handcrafted intervention weaves a whole out of the existing structures. The fine detailing creates a tracery that binds the raw masonry so well, in fact, that the new work provides more visual fractures than those remaining within the original fabric: visual and spatial reminders are needed to reconfirm that one is standing within a historic ruin.
At Hedmark, the ruin was less spatial, consisting simply of walls. The new construction joined and connected events located within the ruin using a sympathetic yet distinctively modern materiality, which was employed to orchestrate a sequence of appreciation. Together, this turns the new architecture into historical architecture—a vehicle for storytelling.
What these examples teach us is the value of weaving—both materially and programmatically—as a way to link the new with the old.
Project Description
Based on the original typology of the palace—which featured a central “third” volume between two main facades, flanked by two lateral volumes facing the side alleys—the key programs are distributed. Once excavated, the debris-filled basement becomes the only opportunity to walk within the palace's original interior. Consequently, the basement allows visitors to walk through its corridors and experience its material nature when visiting the auditorium and public spaces.
The new interior fills the space freed up by the destruction of the original. The load-bearing relationship between the new interior and the fragile existing facade is ambiguous. Does the original masonry facade support the thin, technical spaces of the archive, or does the archive retain and restrain the facade?
We do not want to answer this question, as doing so would give either the old or the new more status than it deserves. By giving neither priority, focusing instead on their relationship, we achieve a single building rather than an excuse for two.
The facade and its interior are structurally interwoven without becoming Semper's ‘Bekleidung’ or curtain wall. This structural connection offers both an ephemeral refinement and a layered density reminiscent of a Cy Twombly drawing. By consciously positioning the solution between ‘either’ and ‘or,’ we achieve both: conservation and contemporaneity, connection and discretion, past and future.
The facade itself documents its own history. Who are we to rewrite or erase it? To do so would mean rendering meaningless the life of the street the building serves. Can we say that people and their actions are insignificant? What we can do now is show care. We sustain what is durable, retain what is intact, and replace what is damaged (such as plasticized paint that traps water within the masonry) with compatible materials. We are also pragmatic. Just as the needs of the street historically altered the facade, we are installing a fire escape, creating a vent, and providing services, but doing so with grace and sensitivity.
The street is to the facade what the facade is to the interior, joined to reject their separation. The consistency of the colonial city conflicts with codes that allow height to dominate the skyline. Our team's first priority was not to build upward, but to concentrate the program as much as possible. This maintains a scale and proportion where the historic piece defines the character of the new entity, allowing past and present to coexist seamlessly. Obviously, this requires sacrificing some of the building's interior performance. It means opting for a compact, dense structure that meets the client's requirements while always prioritizing urban massing.
At the urban level, the building develops in three layers: the first connects clearly with the historic city, extending Serrano Street's level into the interior of the plot and organizing all the Regional Archive's office programs there. The second layer, occupying much of the height of the historic ruins, houses the repositories across three open floors. The third layer, much like the hills of Valparaíso, relates to the geographic and territorial scale, housing the offices of the Regional Heritage Service. In a way, the building represents the two ways of experiencing Valparaíso: on the flat ground and on the hills; at the scale of the city and at the scale of the landscape.
We developed an architectural proposal that articulates all these scales and responds to the contemporary requirements defined by the client's specific program (new technologies, new needs, new times). Subercaseaux demands a strong negotiation, in which we must take a stand.
Second Prize: Competition for the New Valparaíso Regional Archive
Team: Tomás Villalón, Nicolas Norero, Sebastian Jara, and Lucas Olivares
Heritage Advisors: Patricio Arias and Lia Karmelic
Text description courtesy of the project team.
“The Shelf and the Desk”
Palacio Subercaseaux in Valparaíso is currently a ruin, a masonry building that retains fragments of its facade as a testament to its palatial past, yet its interior expression presents it precisely as a mass of brick supported by its own weight and thickness.
The passage of time has endowed the palace with a beautiful contradiction: on the outside, a colorful, stuccoed mask; on the inside, its most authentic material condition. What began as an expression of stuccoed masonry representing the elite culture of the era has, over time, acquired the patina of truth, achieving its greatest success by standing as an honest expression in the city.
2.1 First Ring / FACADE AS A BODY
The standing facade is a testament to history. The palace's form as a block-type building with four edges informs how the city of Valparaíso was shaped on its flat grid, carrying the prestige of nineteenth-century construction.
The first step is to build the edge, consolidating the facade as a new body capable of reconstructing its thickness and providing a state of conservation that returns the urban edge to the city.
Likewise, this first layer features a perimeter path on its roof that overlooks both the city and the interior, creating a new and unprecedented urban experience within the building.
2.2 Second Ring / VOID AS A PORTEÑO INTERSTICE
The building facing the city will be preserved in its original state, while the new volume will introduce a new use. This volume articulates with the next through a narrow, vertical void—an interstice that introduces light and ventilation while establishing a distance between the old and the new.
This space also enables cross-views and relationships between spaces. In a radical way, this brief gap allows the two elements to stand apart, drawing a clear distinction between the new and the old.
2.3 Third Ring / REPOSITORY AS AN URBAN SHELF
This volume is defined by a new body that complements the element reconstructing and preserving the original building's facade. This block, conceived as an urban-scale shelf, articulates a new profile on the block, establishing a negotiation between the old and the preserved, and refounding the building with a different use.
The volume houses the repositories as a vertical warehouse that defines an interior. This new building defines the new role of both the project and the block: while the exterior fosters workspace activity by rescuing the ruin, this building offers the city an urban showcase, displaying a vertical repository open to the public.
2.4 Fourth Ring / PUBLIC GROUND
The repository building defines the third volume while containing a fourth void—perhaps the most important one.
The interior void of the block recalls the patio-style houses of the city's flat plain, allowing the public ground to connect the entire block, with the archives displayed in its center like showcases to the city.
Third Prize: Competition for the New Valparaíso Regional Archive
Team: Alberto Moletto and Sebastián Paredes
Collaborators: Joaquin Diaz, Matias Ramirez
Structural Engineering: Carlos Perretta
This article was written by Fabian Dejtiar. The translation is powered by AI.
