Cifra

Ciudad Abierta, Ritoque, Chile - November 2014
 

Ciudad Abierta was founded in 1970 by the Argentinian poet, Godofrodo Iommi, the Chilean architect, Alfredo Cruz, and other members of what had become known as the Valparaíso School of architects. Part of the Catholic University of Chile, Ciudad Abierta was conceived as a radical pedagogical experiment intended to embody the ethos and principles of the Valparaíso School. Here teachers and students would live and, together, work to build Ciudad Abierta. All architecture would be interrelated with poetry, and all building work would be initiated through the ‘poetic act’. The emphasis with any act of construction would always be on process over product: a process guided by intuition and realised through improvisation. All the while, careful attention would continually be paid to the specificity of the site: its unique light and wind conditions, its relation to the sea, its ground of shifting sand. Through this, Ciudad Abierta has developed to encompass numerous architectural elements including an agora, a chapel, a palace, a garden, a cemetery, a music room and a number of hospederías. As a poet and an architect who collaborate to make work in relation to site, both researchers and educators in our fields, we felt a call to go.

Pursuing this, we ventured to Ritoque with the aim of studying Ciudad Abierta in detail. We spent a number of days moving through the site, contemplating building works, inhabiting public spaces, observing activities; all the while drawing, photographing, writing and filming. We spoke with some members of the community, both students and staff; however, we were left primarily on our own to meander through and imagine into each piece of Ciudad Abierta’s urban semiotic.

We concluded our visit with an ephemeral architectural intervention: a method of study that seemed appropriate and in keeping with the ethos of Ciudad Abierta, which is open to and opened through newness, discovery and imagination as well as the material, spatial and ephemeral conditions of site. Entitled Cifra, the intervention took place in the remnants of what had been the Casa de los Nombres in Ciudad Abierta (Open City), which was constructed on the shifting sands of the Ritoque Dunes. Designed and built over the course of two years, the original building was intended to serve as an exhibition space and place of congregation for 400 people to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Open City. Following the event of the anniversary, however, the building was abandoned as the movement of the dunes ran counter to the anticipated sand movement vectors. The building’s foundational grid of twenty-nine concrete pillars, originally 20m high, are now buried by the ongoing movement of the Ritoque sands. These pillars served as the architectural foundation for ‘Cifra’.

Through ‘Cifra’ we construct a transient memorial figure for the Casa de los Nombres while using the experience of working on-site as a method of studying Open City, its principles and practices. True to Open City’s ethos, our architectural-scale construction was instigated through the poetic word. The following line of poetry, randomly selected from Amereida, founding text of Open City, initiated the work: A causa del gran circulo.

See related essay "Volver a no saber: Poetry, architecture and the beginnings of Open City" in The Routledge Companion on Architecture, Literature and The City, edited by Jonathan Charley (London: Routledge, 2018).

Open City Links: http://www.amereida.cl

Cifra

A Film Essay by Kreider + O’Leary (2024)