Two private Houses

By Luca Maria Francesco Fabris - 3 July 2017

Unless anyone is still unaware, Chilean architects are having a glory moment. So different from one another yet so similar, they really do form a school of thought. An intriguing, stimulating group they are too - and incredibly trendy. This is because most of them show they have taken on board the European lessons of the last hundred years yet remain totally free spirits. They are among the few who have metabolized Modernism and the tenets that set the tone of contemporary world architecture - and produce something entirely new. One of the brightest stars in this firmament is Smiljan Radić. Based in Santiago del Cile, Radić rose to world fame in 2014 with his temporary pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, commissioned by curators Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans-Ulrich Obrist who had seen his work at the 2010 Venice Biennale. It put the retiring Radić - until then known only in his long Andean country - firmly on the world map. For as incredible as it sounds in our completely interconnection globalized world, Radic is wholly “unconnected”. Still today he doesn’t have a website. What you see on the Internet is “reported”, a subjective selection by someone else. While this might seem the ultimate snobbery, reading the interviews Radić has given on several occasions, it’s clear that he really does consider himself a manual craftsman, his work the fruit of meticulous research and an intimate understanding of the materials he employs in a juxtaposition of stresses that produce perfect “im-perfection”. Radić is an advocate of direct intervention on the project even at the worksite phase, taking his cue from the technical drawing to create something unique and unrepeatable. The result is an exquisite gesture of ineffably lightness guided by intuition that bestows an assured timeless beauty to an entire work. This house in Santiago for two friends, completed between 2012 and 2014, is a clear...