Tarapacá, Chile. 2005 to 2007
TARAPACA PROJECT

Project description: Culture House, Heritage town intervention strategy

Tarapaca project in the Atacama desert aims to develop an intervention strategy to recover damaged heritage. The town devastated by 2005 earthquake is a key part of popular devotion, its annual parade gathers a hundred thousand people from all over Atacama in a pilgrimage that transcend borders.
What was lost was irreproducible. It had been built over centuries by peoples and crafts long forgotten: Then how to restore the towns heritage not as a monument, but as a heritage compound. Our approach was to interpret ‘heritage values’ as an abstract quality featured by traditional architecture. It was the spatiality that propitiates every-day’s life rituals, the constructive adequacy to climate, the crafts and materials what had to be drawn to the the context of contemporary production.