When thinking about the links between ARQ magazine and the School of Architecture UC, an intuitive image appears: through certain projects, the magazine helped establish landscape architecture within the school. Thus, the following text moves between this personal opinion and a more general framework within which this conjecture should be discussed. Oscillating between a first intuition and different questions and concerns that allowed adjusting the selection, ten projects were chosen.

Now, as a collection of projects and architectural works, the magazine is an odd creature. We are so used to its format and transmission that its strangeness rarely amazes us. The magazine places architectural works between an experimental nature and a state of hypothesis; that is, as projects. Thus, works are doubly removed from reality: first, from their physical reality into an image, and second, from their multiple dimensions to just two. In this physical suspension, not only the reader’s imagination comes into play - as he or she must try to understand the work through the information published - but also his or her memory, since the reader must link the project to the references the publication refers to. In only a few occasions the project’s publication is a work in itself, with its own unity. Inevitably, the question of whether a work should be chosen according to the place it takes within the magazine or its actual feasibility arises.

When grouping projects by themes, different constellations emerge and thus one can ask, how do landscape, architecture and the city appear? How do design and heritage appear? Where are they located and what happens when foreign works are added? One also questions - or would like to understand - how specific subjects arise through the gathering of buildings, single-familiy, collective and social housing, schools, exhibitions, and the accustomed topics for studio or graduate.

It is interesting to acknowledge that there are projects that remain as such and other that are transformed into buildings. There are even some that no longer exist. When selecting, we are faced with the dilemma of whether these should be influential projects within architecture or projects that had have an impact on the school. This distinction is partially made. Another differentiation is that one thing is the building itself, which is different from the building and the architect; the building and its time; the building and architectural positions; or, the building and its publication. Hence, it was decided - in general terms - to select the work itself. The major projective dimension of many architects’ written ideas has thus not been considered for this selection.

An issue only outlined is what projects or buildings should have been chosen and have not been included. In turn, the question of how to discern between the school’s influence on the journal or the journal’s influence on the school is an open one.

To sum up, the relationship between the works published in the journal and their influence on the school is rich and diverse and, altogether, it is indirect and non-linear. To choose among that diversity is a difficult task; however, consciously questioning that relationship would enrich both the school and the magazine.

The selection criteria consisted of not differentiating between building and project; in recognizing those remarkable works that, among other things, shape the daily life of the school and its campus; in those distant works that, by being opposite, provide useful lessons; and, finally, in works that prefigured and outline, partially, the understanding of our landscape and collaborated in the creation of the Magister en Arquitectura del Paisaje (Master in Landscape Architecture) program.

In short, these are lessons and buildings - familiar and yet remarkable - where the school’s life develops, along with other more distant, valuable lessons and works that polarize a profession, and lessons and buildings that helped to outline landscape as a disciplinary field.

ARQ 67 (December, 2007): 52-59

Figure 1 Centro de Información y Documentación Sergio Larrain García-Moreno / Taller de herramientas. Cecilia Puga, Patricio Mardones, 2006. 

ARQ 4 (July, 1981): 8

Figure 2 Portal Lyon. Larrain Murtinho y Asociados, 1982. 

ARQ 59 (March, 2005): 54-57

Figure 3 Casa SLGM. Sergio Larrain, Jorge Swinburn, 1960. 

ARQ 82 (March, 2005): 68-75

Figure 4 Casa para el poema del ángulo recto. Smiljan Radić, 2012. 

ARQ 16 (March, 1991): 8-16

Figure 5 Parque Cerro Blanco. Mario Pérez de Arce y Asociados Arquitectos / Mario Pérez de Arce L., Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, Teodoro Fernández, 1990. 

ARQ 39 (August, 1998): 46-51

Figure 6 Plaza de Armas de Santiago. Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, Sebastián Bianchi, Leonor Camaño, Álvaro Salas, 2000. 

ARQ 85 (December, 2013): 82-87

Figure 7 Mapocho 42k. Sandra Iturriaga, Juan Ignacio, Baixas, Francisco Croxatto, Paulina Ibieta, Francisco, Quintana - Equipo Mapocho 42K, 2013. 

CRISPIANI, Alejandro (ed.). Concurso Palacio Pereira. Historia de una recuperación patrimonial. Santiago: Ediciones ARQ, enero de 2014: 154-163

Figure 8 Concurso Palacio Pereira. Cecilia Puga, Paula Velasco, Alberto Moletto, 1999. Not published in ARQ. 

ARQ 35 (April, 1997): 40-43

Figure 9 Hotel Explora San Pedro. Germán del Sol, 1998. 

Recuperación de grandes vacíos urbanos. La frontera interior de Santiago. Proyecto de título Roberto Moris, Marcelo Reyes, 1999. Published in: Not published in ARQ

Note: this project was not published in ARQ having the merits for it.