LIGA 33: Amunátegui Valdés
Compendium
October 2020 – May 2021
The exhibition “Compendium” by Amunátegui-Valdés shows a myriad of objects, prints and scale models, creating a Wunderkammer of architectural ideas. In the text written by the architects for the exhibition, they look back upon the painting La Città Analoga (The Analogous City) , made by Arduino Cantafora for Aldo Rossi at the 15th Milan Triennale and his lesser known La città banale (The Banale City) and Hans Hollein’s MAN TransFORMS exhibition, and they conclude that “this is the potential some postmodernism saw in architecture: estrangement over naturalism; interdependences, rather than singularity; relations, more than objects.” Instead of retreating into the safety of a well-outlined architectural discipline based on abstraction, composition, unity and rigor, the Chilean duo adventures into the complex world of reality, historic continuance and the correlation of high and low culture.
When we learn that besides their architectural practice, Alejandro Valdés is running a furniture workshop in Santiago de Chile and Cristóbal Amunátegui is teaching history at UCLA in California, their desire to play with scale and time, becomes evident. And so does their predilection for the showcased examples: tabernacles, ships, theaters, libraries, submarines and machines … an architecture that is more object than building, more tool than form. Their realized projects are a provoking and enigmatic set of proclamations, reworking Lutyens, Loos and Rossi. Within the landscape of a Latin American architecture based on tectonic integrity and material composition, they introduce an inquisitive vector that engages history and deliberately questions our contemporary disciplinary methodologies. As Anna Neimark concludes her text on the exhibition, “they carry on forward, with an image of history in their rearview mirror”.
Photography: Arturo Arrieta
With an image of history in their rearview mirror by Anna Neimark
