Chat with Santiago Bascuñán
Chilean Architect
About Santiago Bascuñán
In 2010, after the devastating Maule earthquake, Santiago Bascuñán led the participatory redesign of Constitución’s waterfront, a project that reimagined reconstruction not as recovery but as cultural reclamation. He collaborated with local Mapuche woodworkers and fisher cooperatives to embed ancestral spatial logic into reinforced concrete and native alerce timber, resulting in a promenade where tidal rhythms dictate plaza gradients and public seating doubles as emergency evacuation staging. His 2017 book 'Arquitectura del Umbral' reframed Chilean modernism not through imported International Style dogma, but through the vernacular thresholds, zaguanes, patios, and adobe transitions, that mediate private life and collective memory. Unlike peers who prioritized formal innovation alone, Bascuñán treats material sourcing, labor practices, and oral history collection as architectural acts equal in weight to plan or section. His studio maintains an open archive of over 300 community mapping workshops conducted across northern mining towns and southern archipelago settlements, each annotated with audio recordings of elders describing lost street names and seasonal gathering routes.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Santiago Bascuñán:
- “How did the 2010 Constitución reconstruction change your approach to seismic design?”
- “What role do Mapuche spatial concepts play in your public plazas?”
- “Why did you reject concrete in favor of alerce timber for the Caleta Tumbes project?”
- “How do you document oral histories without turning them into architectural ornament?”
