karl heinrich brunner 1: santiago of chile 1929 - 1934

Santiago of Chile: proposal of architectonic structure of the central area of the city. KHB, 1932.

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The presence in Chile of the architect Karl Heinrich Brunner (Vienna, 1887/1960), comes to actually introduce a flexion in the ways and styles to the French to the use city-planning South American woman. Also, it introduces modifications in the own chilean practice, until those years overwhelmed with planimetric and geometrizantes proposals, and with an exaggerated arterialista vision, others.

Architecture of the central places

Of all these proposals, the plan of improvements formulated by Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, in already the distant year of 1872 , are the unique one of these documents that execute partially their main proposals: channeling of the Mapocho river , channels of cleaning and irrigation, opening of tapiadas streets, creation of the urban park of the Santa Lucia hill and seats of districts, and construction of scholastic and sanitary equipment, among other performances. Of Vicuña Mackenna in ahead, the transformation projects were many and varied. Although some - such as the formulated ones by the architect Carlos Carvajal Miranda- they were on the verge of being applied, all of them only can be understood as intellectual exercises and their proposals not even constitute conceptual supports of the future activity that was going away to develop from the arrival of K.H. Brunner.

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The performance of Brunner in the American city, as of 1929, pays a permanent attention to the behavior and the repercussions that register their city-planning ideas, proposals and facilities on the city already constructed. Actually, Brunner considers of greater relevance the results and balances reached about the transformations in the new resulting scenes, that the own isolated formal signs that arise by these performances. We will never find in Brunner a proposal seated in a traumatic intervention, making table strickles of the existing thing, in the style of which by those same years they postulated the plans written up by some representatives of the Modern Movement (Le Corbusier and Cia(m)) . We will not either observe in its work the terminalista sense that it is possible to find in the city-planning overseas French (advocated by Prost and Agache, mainly), more interested in westernizing the colonial city that in paying attention to the own cultural elements of the place:

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(...) many people are waiting for of my part projects of monumental characteristics (...) Nothing else easy to take the rule and to draw on the plane of the city (...)

Santiago of Chile: proposal of esponjamiento around the palace of government and creation of the civic box. KHB, 1932.

In order to take ahead to this practical letter with the dialogue between the existing support and the new proposal, Brunner identifies key pieces on which to install performances that reaffirm the preexisting morphologic attributes and give rise appropriate to the new functions derived from the own modernization of the urban life. The presence of a building of exemplary architecture ( the Palace of the Currency , for example), constitutes a factor of centralidad and joint of these key urban pieces. The expansion of the surrounding space, by means of the liberation of the neighboring volumes, and the creation of masses constructed coherent with this centralidad, is the chosen attributes to form new morphologic signs of the architectonic structure of a central place. Aspect that already had considered years before in a reflection on Viennese the architectonic contributions of hofe.

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Brunner considers that the layout in grid , similar to which presents/displays other american cities of Hispanic origin colonial, is the fundamental condition to obtain that the morphologic structure of Santiago of Chile presents/displays an architectonic character:

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(...) The city of Santiago also is a city of quadrangular layout, but, pordepronto, this are only one base that hopes to be developed. In order to get to be a city of architectonic character, it is necessary to establish the relations between the streets and free spaces with its monumental buildings (...) the system of blocks (manzanas) of the city of Santiago of Chile, like also the one of other cities of analogous layout - like Buenos Aires, by example brings like consequence that almost all the buildings public are not located well to fulfill with the decorative roll and of representation within the city (...)

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This way, Brunner opens the colonial weave of Santiago to form new centralidades and axial relations, assigning to the public space a compositivo protagonism in the form urbis of the city.

This new conception of the space organization, by means of an architectonic reasoning of the public space, allows, in addition, to attenuate rigid monotonía that imposes the grid and the long rural routes transformed into urban arteries, by mor of the growth. The opening of diagonals, complementary of basic the road structure, reinforces the hierarchial structuring of fragments of the constructed weave, by means of its triangulation and functional connection with the republican extension of residential nature. It is not a triangulation overturned in if same, but that the use of diagonals considers to reinforce a centralidad. Later, in a proposal for the Civic District, the buildings of exemplary architecture will constitute the visual closings of the institutional axes.

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In the perimeter of the central city, Brunner designs urban parks ( Bustamante and Sur East parks) with the purpose of incorporating released lands of infrastructural uses and defining the development of new residential areas. In the South flank of the city, in the study for the urbanization of the commune of San Miguel , the Viennese architect raises a synthesis of the proyectuales strategies and the operations of urban design already applied in the central area and the Eastern perimeter of Santiago of Chile.

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Before its transfer to the city of Bogota, Brunner develops the preliminary expositions of the first regulating plan of the commune of Santiago (1934). Plan that with several modifications, is approved year 1939.

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In spite of to have laid the the fundamental foundations of the city-planning task and the capital contents of the academic formation of the Chilean city planners, many of the proposals formulated by Karl H. Brunner have only stayed as theoretical manifestations. Nevertheless, good part of the conceptual limitations that registers the developed city-planning practice in these last seventy years in Chile, finds in the exercise of Brunner its possible exits.

Jonás Figueroa, 1996

Bibliography

1. Karl H. Brunner. Santiago of Chile, its present state and future formation. La Tracción, Santiago of Chile, 1932.

2. Karl H. Brunner. Manual of Urbanism, first volume. Municipal Print, Bogota, 1939.

3. Museum of Modern Art of Bogota, in charge of arqtos. F. Corte's and K. Brunner, 1989.

4. Revista de Arquitectura Nº 8. Monographic K.H.Brunner, charge of arqto. M.I.Pavéz, FAU - UCH, Santiago of Chile, 1996.

dedicated to maria isabel pavéz, professor arqto. 

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