Stadium

On 29 September 1979, 250,000 filled the seats of Chile’s National Stadium in Santiago. The event that was meant to transform the attendants from mere dwellers into proprietors. Prior to it, a booklet circulated that featured a plan of the stadium showing the space of its stands subdivided into boroughs and shanty towns. The people summoned were mostly beneficiaries from a national self-help housing programme responding to a severe housing crisis by offering people a plot of land within the city. Stadium: A Building that Renders the Image of a City tells a double story of that 1979 event in Santiago de Chile: that of a building, with its dissimilar and even contradictory past uses, and that of a city, with its atomised housing underpinning an unequal development. Both parts are overlaid here, where the stadium’s floorplan, rather than delineating the stands, visualises another city marginalised from its centre and arresting different scales in a spatial and temporal panorama. Arranged in four chapters, the book features short essays as well as rich visual material.

Published to accompany the Pavilion of Chile, 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, 26 May-25 November 2018.

Text in English and Spanish