Character and composition of place in the architecture of Luciano Kulczewski.

Residential complexes in Providencia, Santiago de Chile (1929-1935)

Abstract

This paper addresses two housing complexes ignored by the official historiography, carried out by the prominent architect Luciano Kulczewski between 1929 and 1935 in Providencia, Santiago de Chile, neighbourhood that already had showed the first modern urban proposals inspired by the garden-city concept. Along with making them known, this article does not only seek to enhance its architectural merits, directly related to its creator’s aesthetic sensitivity, but also recognizing how these houses reflect the intricated socio-cultural processes experimented by the country, regarding both the role assumed by the State as responsible for promulgating the laws that allowed the complexes’ construction, and the communities’ role in order to achieve the cherished dream of owning a house. This writing focuses on these spaces’ dwelling dimension, considering that Kulczewski would have put particular care in architectural and urban design aiming to favour in their users a sentimental projection and achieving the understanding of their houses as ‘places’. Thus, the careful management of expressive capacity, or ‘character’ (Rowe 1980), in both the residences and the complexes, is unavoidable.