"The Search For A Latin American Identity": for more than five years, a group of Latin American architects have been searching for this architectural and cultural identity, because in Latin America there was not a Modern Movement, there was what they call the International Style. It's absolutely different. And because of that, towns and cities, and particularly the architecture, was deeply influenced by the International Style. For more than thirty years at least, that means by the beginning of the 70s, very many buildings and towns and Cities were designed under the International Style's rules. So this group of architects were quite worried about the fact and started looking for our identity, and we started making very many researches and trying to design our buildings) that were commissioned, upon the elements that were in the cities. But what were those elements? When the Spanish conquered Latin America, they imposed a very interesting pattern, a grid called a 'manzana'. The 'manzana' is what we can describe as an urban block. It is a grid of one hundred and thirty eight 'varas' each side 'vara' is a measure which is more or less one metre - absolutely square. This grid all over the cities becomes the pattern that organises every single town in Latin America. That is to say that the Spanish, when they conquered Latin America, they imposed that grid. They start designing eight 'manzanas' or urban blocks in each town, and from that starting point the city has to grow. But afterwards the influence of very many external trends coming particularly from Europe modified the local architecture, and the mixture of the manzana that we have described with this different type of styles too produced a rather interesting mixture of a very eclectic architecture. I'm talking of one hundred years ago. That is what we think is our identity, because we didn't have an important Baroque style or nothing similar. The reinterpretation of different styles that we used from Europe particularly and we produced our own architecture. But, as I said, after the International Style, that, for me at least, finished with all this interesting interpretation of the different styles, we have started again looking for that. Our projects, and the projects of most of these Latin American architects are based upon, again, this sort of international reinterpretation of styles that took place in Latin America one hundred years ago.

This is an office building in downtown Santiago. The problem was a problem of context. Because it is placed in a very civic area of Santiago surrounded by old buildings, and because we thought that the context was very, very important, we decided to base our designs using the existing elements that other buildings provide. That is to say, the use of a plinth or a base was important.