amereida: the discourse of modernity through text and architecture.

Modernity is  centered on  the advancements of technology  and industry, for

there can  be no doubt that  industrialization configured the modern world.

The "spirit  of the  machine" coupled with its  "quantity production" became

the  benchmark of  a  new aesthetic,  and served  as the  frame for  all its

definitions.   The   School  of  Architecture  of   Catholic  University  of

Valparaiso in  Chile (founded  in 1954), departs from this understanding. For

them, modernity is captured  through language.  Their epistemological ground

is  that  of    poetic  discourse .   The  Valparaiso  group  forwards  this

understanding through  a text called  amereida.  Amereida  (1964) forwards a

tectonics  of language.   It provides  a territorial  call.  It  presents an

inhabitation  directive  that  guides  all architectural  endeavors  of  the

school.  With  this text poetic discourse  guides the building activities of

the school, manifesting the word in space.

Amereida  inherits Mallarmé’s  demand that  the initiative of  modernity "be

given only to  the word."  In un coup de dés  (written in 1897 and published

in  1914),  Mallarmé  opens   the  ground  for  a  tectonics  of  text.  His

understanding of modernity goes  beyond the hegemony of machine-production.

For him,  texts (poetic texts) become the  foreground of this new experience

called  modernity.  Other  examples, such  as Wyndham  Lewis'  Blast (1914),

Marinetti's  les  mots  en la  liberté (1919),  Lissitzky's  Of  two Squares

(1922),  and  Kurt  Schwitters   W  (1924) demonstrate  the  importance  and

reception of  Mallarmé's ideas.  Even Le Corbusier  is aware of these ideas,

for  Vers  une Architecture  (1923), City  of Tomorrow  (1929) and  Croisade

(1933) exhibit  his influence.   Yet these experiments failed  to produce an

architecture  guided by  these  principles.  Modern  architects, seduced  by

industrial technology, moved ever  more closely to engineering solutions and

processes.

The Catholic  University of Valparaiso (UCV)  rejects the "mechanical sense"

as the  source of modernity. They  do so because it  fails to understand the

modern on  two grounds.  First, it ignores the call  for the totality of the

work.   Second,  it  misunderstands   the  forms  of  technology.   For  the

Valparaiso group, technology is the basis of all modern practices.  In this,

they follow  the main discourse of  modernity.  Yet, they differ  from it in

that they do not see technology solely as an industrial event.  The UCV sees

language as the foundation of technology, for they understand language to be

the  first technology.   By looking  at modernity  through language  and not

through industrial  change the  Catholic University of  Valparaiso distances

itself  from the  main  architectural sources  of the  modern  movement, but

positions itself within the core of a modern praxis.