Architecture School

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This has to be the most original, off the wall thing I’ve seen in Chile. Guidebooks don’t talk about it since it’s out of the way and not particularly touristy. I only found it through a wikipedia article I read for Spanish class.

La Ciudad Abierta de Ritoque (Open City of Ritoque) is a project developed by the Architecture Dept. at Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. They wanted to create an unconventional, experimental city, where the buildings were designed as responses to poetic impulses, human needs, and the natural environment. Architecture professors live in the city with their students and teach classes there.

The whole thing seems a little Burning Man-ish, but more academic. It surprised me to find this here in Chile, but Valparaíso is the perfect place. People there put mosaic tiles in cement sidewalks and art installations on street corners. An experimental architecture school fits right in.

We drove up the coast from downtown Valparaíso to the deserted beaches near Ritoque. When we found La Ciudad Abierta, it was marked inconspicuously, but we could see the gleaming modern buildings over the hillside. The city was closed. So sad. We thought we would have to make due with admiring its buildings from the street when we realized there was a narrow doorway built into the wooden fence.

It was like they wanted to let people in– as long as they were willing to take the time to look around. Too good to be true.

Archeologists discovering lost cities must have felt the way we did walking up this hill. The earth was sandy but surprisingly tough. The plant life was completely foreign, and traces of human presence were everywhere. Faded tire tracks. Scraps of cement. I found one piece so buried in the sand that I imagined it was something bigger. “Look,” I called, “I found Atlantis!”

Yes, it was a joke. Don’t worry. But as we trekked further up the hill, La Ciudad Abierta really started to feel more like a lost city. We found an odd little building that turned out to house water pipes, and then a crazy geometric sculpture that pointed us straight to a pine tree. Crawling under the tree, we found an open, cavern-like space. I don’t know if it was man-made or not, and I don’t know what purpose the sculpture could have served, but this was better than being a kid in a candy store.

Even though there were more sculptures and buildings to see, we had to leave right after that since a friend wasn’t feeling well. Even so the mystery in this place fascinated me. It’s not well-known in the States. A google search doesn’t yield too much… one architecture student who visited posted some very cool photos. Most notably, an MIT professor wrote a book about The Open City in 1996. I read the bits and pieces of this that google books gave me. The book digs into the history of Ritoque and the implications of its design philosophy.

I want to know more about this in the worst way. There’s something special here.

 

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