ARCHITECTURE & LANDSCAPE
UNDERPLAZA, Plaza Italia, Santiago 2010 V.A., Francis Bitonti, Bradley Rothenberg, Pablo Kohan
The islands of Plaza Italia are hollowed out: a hollow might be 3 stories deep, 1 story deep, 2 stories deep – a hollow might be wide & deep, or wide but shallow, narrow & shallow or narrow but deep. The hollows are filled to the brim, packed with millions of brambles…But they’re not brambles, not sticks, not wood: they’re steel, tubes & pipes of shiny, glittering steel, brambles of tubes, tangles of tubes, tubes & tubers, packed yet ordered, small to large & large to tiny, miniscule, grains & fibers, particles & pixels, the air is thick here… The statues, the monuments, memorials, are upside-down here, underground: all that is visible from above, from outside, is the underside of each base of the statue… Nothing extends above-ground but the sloping beginnings of tunnels, shaped by brambles & grains & tubes, that burrow underground: you cross the street & go down through an entrance into a tunnel that spirals underground. (You don’t have to enter from above-ground, you don‘t have to dodge traffic to enter one of these underground islands: you might have already entered from below, from the subway-station below – to & from the subway station is a circulation-route of intersecting tunnels underground. But, sooner or later, one way or another, you burrow down or up these underground upside-down ant-hills for humans, though by this time you might be robo-humans, or huma-robots…)
like a hole, a doorway, but something you can slip off into, as if you’re slipping into a sleeve…You’ve slipped into something you might not even have noticed from the tunnel: it’s like the insides of a sphere, but misshapen & squashed so that it huddles around the people inside…It’s a place for 3 or 4 people, or maybe 4 or 5 (maybe a few more can squeeze in but no more than 10 or 12)…You sit on the tangles that form the edge of the hole, you’re grouped together…You stay here only as long as you’re active together, one of you leaves while another meanders in…When you’re ready, whatever it is that makes you ready, you take a deep breath, or maybe you shrug your shoulders, & come back up, onto & into the city…
Our project learns from Plaza Italia as it is now: a plaza divided into a multitude of islands… A bustling public space is potentially a politically active space, but it becomes that only when it’s subjected to a shared idea or a single leader; to become a political arena, the plaza (an old model of an open public space) gives up the possibilities of being a democratic space & becomes authoritarian…The plaza remains democratic only when it breaks up into clusters… So let’s divide Plaza Italia the way Plaza Italia is already divided: sub-divide it further, like fractals…The cluster houses 3, 5, 9, 12, no more than that: the cluster is small enough that each person within has the chance to speak for him/her-self without having to ask for that chance, without needing to be granted a privilege…
As you walk up or down a tunnel, inside any of the islands, here & there there’s an opening to the side: not an opening 28