Proyecto Fondecyt Iniciación
Folio 11221005
































1900 — 1940
The historics interiors of the city as an archive of its public sphere



























 

Santiago Microcosmos


The historic interiors of the city as an archive of its public sphere





The early twentieth century public interiors in Santiago are the objects of this research project. Put at the service of the historical understanding of our public sphere, they are a conceptual instrument to confront the phenomena of the present, such as the crisis of representation and the fractures of our common construction. 

This is a historical research fed by a present-day concern; some of these interiors have been subject to institutional changes, their decorations have been removed and replaced, or they simply lay empty. Nevertheless, their current state accounts not only for what they originally represented, but also the status they culturally symbolise today as fragments of the city.  This raises a political and cultural issue, and also an architectural one: after a hundred years, what is their role today?
This period represents a hinge between the opulence of great private palaces and the austerity of the modern movement. This material change reflects a larger paradigm shift in how the notion of the public had been understood until then. 

This new urban rooms formed a typology in the emerging metropolis of the chilean Centenary, intermediate between furniture and building. Institutional buildings, sociability spaces and cabinet rooms are all containers of normative discourses, cultural and gender codes, ideological frameworks and implicit political orders. Both due to their high internal complexity – marked by ornamentation, architectural design, and furnishings – and their repetition and interconnection as specific pieces of the city, they constitute a microcosm of interiors.






RESEARCH TEAM

Researcher:
  • Alejandra Celedón F.


Research assistant:
  • Nicolás Navarrete C.
  • Felipe Pizarro P.


 Thesis students:
Javier Anguita, Magdalena Bustamante, Manuela del Río, Santiago Eguiguren, Juan Huaiquín, Francisco Milla, Aarón Salin.
2022 — 23 — 24








Proyecto Fondecyt  Iniciación Folio 11221005
2024  — FAAD, Universidad Diego Portales
2022-23   — MARQ, P. Universidad Católica de Chile