Detournement

D\’tournement1. PresentationThe colonization of the Chilean desert, located between the 20th and 30th southern parallels, is historically connected with mining, shepherding communities and exchange dynamics between the high land and the coastline. The density of events derived from this occupation has marked the land with buildings, earth movements and imprints; many of which have been absorbed into the landscape to the extent of blurring their outlines.Just as such representation as the debris photographed by Sophie Ristelhueber (1), some examples of these imprints appear on the abstract plain of these arid lands, far from the story of their origin.Once the emotion of this story has gone, all that is left is geometry and material.The retaining walls of an old dock, remains of dry-stone walls from a shepherd village and the imprint of a train line, are all part of these remains: located on parallel 29 south and longitude 71 west, 70 km north of the city of La Serena, there are examples in parts of the installations of the El Tofo mine and its area of influence. The first is an industrial ruin (the remains of what was the dock of Puerto de La Cruz Grande, which belonged to the El Tofo mining site), the second is a group of areas with the beginnings of an urban system (dry-stone walls from an old shepherd settlement), the third is the imprint a line which may connect them (drawn from the old electric train that once carried iron material from the mine to the boats tied in the docks).Interpreting this reality that has been modified by man as a new material nature, avoiding all sacralization and \”institutional\” operation on the fragment and defining new architectural and constructive identities constitute the center of the work of this studio.2. MethodContrary to dismantling as a strategy for tackling the industrial remains and associated settlements, where mitigating construction erases experience, the studio understands material remains (constructions and imprints) and virtual remains (photographs, plans, geographic charts and texts) as inherited elements, , as valid platforms to begin new constructive and architectural realities.From these elements the students will re-construct an assumed preexistence, and will create a collective place in the Chilean desert, induced from afar with some remains of indications of architecture which will comprise a constructive inventory which should form part of the personal intervention strategy.This inventory is oblique, it is an invention which looks to generate a possible constructive imagination: Mono-material, low-tech, non-institutional, fragility, opportunity-randomness, outside time, self-construction, are words which will help define the examples proposed by the studio and the character of the complex to be designed.-Molds from a Water Tower -Half moon-Amereida Aqueduct.-Wooden warehouse on the road to San Juan.-Wooden basins in a thermoelectric plant.-Mining structures recorded by Bernd and Hilla Becher-Refrigeration towers recorded by Bernd and Hilla Becher-A poor circus tent-Walnut-wood greenhouses -Stone Horreos in Spain-Shepherd housing structuresThe studio is based on the idea that the shape of an object is not relevant. The aim, pedagogically speaking, is to be able to control and generate subtle variations within an existing and shared entity, applying to it diverse formal and constructive logics. 3. Programmatic setting / TourismMarc Auge, in his critical description of Center Parcs, refers to a tourism model which assumes a user who plays, who \”acts as if\”, who looks for an ideal that is not present in reality but in what is real remodeled by intelligence and imagination, that is, the idea (3). Along these same lines, Mark Neumann (4) refers to tourist places