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“This building reflects the working spirit, creativity and commitment of the Chilean People as represented by: Its workers—its technicians—its artists—its professionals.
It was built in 275 days and completed on 3 April 1972 during the popular government of Comrade Salvador Allende G., the President of the Republic.”
Inscription on stone plaque commissioned to Samuel Román.
Archivos de Sergio González, Miguel Lawner, José Medina
In the early 1970s the progress of the Unidad Popular (Popular unity) government in Chile was being followed worldwide. The “vía chilena al socialismo” (Chilean road to socialism) was seen as a “test bed” for democratic revolution, and thus as a possible alternative for developing countries. It was as a result of this international interest that the Chilean government was invited in 1971 to host the Third United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD III). Although the country lacked the architectural infrastructure required for the event, the state decided to build it and President Salvador Allende undertook to open the event in Santiago in April 1972. As soon as the challenge had been taken up, a law was enacted to allocate the necessary resources and the Chilean Commission for UNCTAD III was created. Then an interdisciplinary team of architects, engineers, artists, and workers created and carried out the project in an extraordinary 275 days, creating a Latin American landmark of architectural modernity and constructivist utopianism. The law establishing the Commission also provided that once the event was over “the real and movable property of UNCTAD III will be transferred to the national treasury and administered by the Ministry of Public Education, to be used for national and international meetings and congresses and for activities of all kinds to benefit popular culture.” Accordingly, the planners looked for a design that would allow for partial use of the venue and for different events to take place simultaneously. The location of the complex also had to be consistent with its future public use. These challenges were taken up by the Corporación de Mejoramiento Urbano (Urban development corporation [CORMU]), which selected five professionals from the country’s leading architectural studios of the time to work on the project. The members of the team were Sergio González, José Covacevic, Hugo Gaggero, Juan Echeñique, and José Medina, and CORMU appointed its executive director, Miguel Lawner, as project coordinator. It was proposed that use should be made of an unfinished section of the San Borja remodeling project, a large urban residential complex under development at the time. This would give UNCTAD III a prime location in the center of Santiago. The idea of integrating it into the urban fabric was also driven by the desire to distinguish it from Emilio Duhart’s well-known modernist design for the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), inaugurated in Santiago in late 1966, which was criticized for its isolation from the city. The UNCTAD III project consisted of two buildings, a large low-rise building, and a tower. The former was a 170-meter-long two-story block with a floor area of 24,000 square meters. On the main floor were two conference rooms, each with a capacity of 350 persons, and a plenary assembly room holding 2,300 persons. The entry floor contained additional meeting and conference rooms and the delegates’ room. Communication services, a cafeteria and a self-service restaurant holding 600 persons were situated in the semi-basement, while the lower basement was used for parking. The 70-meter-high tower contained 400 offices distributed over 20 floors, with a total floor area of 15,000 square meters, and had a heliport on the roof; it was initially used for the administrative work of the event. The two buildings were connected to each other by bridges and to their urban surroundings by tunnels leading to adjoining streets, a metro station and a riverside park, the Parque Forestal. The need to finish everything in eleven months—three years would normally have been required at that time for a project of this size—meant that it was necessary to maximize the resources available and make full use of local technological and production capabilities. As planned, the San Borja remodeling site was used, including one of the residential buildings (Tower 22, which was already under construction), with the necessary adjustments being made to turn it into the UNCTAD III complex. The circumstances required the development of new construction techniques, such as advance installation of sixteen pillars to support a 9,000-square-meter superstructure that was to function as the roof of the low-rise building, allowing the rest of the edifice to be worked on simultaneously. The use of local materials meant that only ten percent of inputs had to be imported. For the first time in Chile, the coordination of an entire architectural project was computerized, which partly explained the tremendous speed with which it was completed. Construction was carried out in three shifts, seven days a week. Allende visited the site almost daily to encourage the more than three thousand of workers there. The UNCTAD III project was conceived as a collective process in which all those involved, be they architects, engineers, designers or workers, were treated as technicians. Artists and artisans representing the leading tendencies in Chilean art were also invited to participate by creating artworks that would form a structural part of the architectural project. Eduardo Martínez Bonatti, appointed as artistic adviser, coordinated these artists’ contributions. They were involved in designing furnishings and lighting and finding technical solutions to problems of acoustics, spatial distribution, and ventilation, as well as creating murals, paintings, and sculptures. The signage was designed by a group associated with the industrial design department of the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (Production development corporation [CORFO]), headed at that time by Gui Bonsiepe. Once the event was over, the low-rise building was renamed Centro Cultural Metropolitano Gabriela Mistral (Gabriela Mistral metropolitan cultural center) and Irma Cáceres de Almeyda was appointed as its director. The self-service restaurant was opened to the public, serving affordable meals at a rate which reached 1,500 a day. Numerous cultural activities, concerts and exhibitions were also hosted, including exhibits belonging to the Museo de la Solidaridad (Museum of solidarity). When the coup d’état took place on September 11, 1973, the government executive building, the Palacio de La Moneda, was bombed and partly destroyed. The military junta decided to use the best and most modern public infrastructure available at the time as the new seat of government. This was how the Centro Cultural Metropolitano Gabriela Mistral came to be renamed Edificio Diego Portales (the Diego Portales building) by the military regime, which blocked up its large windows and enclosed the area, turning it into a great mass isolated from its surroundings. By law, and despite the return to democracy, it is now in the hands of the Ministry of Defense. In early 2006 a major fire badly damaged the low-rise building, leading to a public debate about the possibility of employing it again for civic use.
Appendix
Text prepared from information supplied by Miguel Lawner and David Maulen and from Revista AUCA (Santiago), no. 22 (April 1972)
All illustrations Courtesy Archivos de Sergio González, Miguel Lawner, José Medina
