“La Queda: temporary shelters for fishermen and seaweed collectors, assembled with residues and debris dragged by the rivers down to the rivers' outlets.”
This work addresses the comprehension of built spaces. However, not from the perspective of architectural theory or structural techniques, but from its most primitive dimension, the idea of the dwelling as a transitional shelter, in this case, inherited from the nomadic peoples that inhabited the Pacific coastline.
In this contemporary society, hyper-technologized and stimulated by massive volumes of data, as architects, we design everything virtually and from pre-established narratives. The relationship with matter and its ephemeral condition is generally limited to experimental allegories to reflect on technique and the meaning of the practice. Unlike the fishermen in the north, -in the city- we rarely experience the real need for the self-constructed, an extreme example that allows us to consciously understand the limits between inside and out, as an extension of our own body, as a line tracing the landscape, exactly the moment we stretch out a cloth to shield us from the sun or the rain.
This is how La Queda invites us to reflect on both time and occupation, and as Martin Heidegger stated, the acts of building and dwelling are indissolubly intertwined; “Building is not only a means and a way to inhabit a space. Building is already in itself dwelling.”
La Queda, from its own weightlessness, raises an epistemological question concerning ways of intervening the territory; from the perspective of the early Camanchacos, the shelter was not intended to leave any trace; its permanence was directly related to the very temporality of being, what they left behind were not the ruins of their cities, but the traces of their existence.
Diego Baloian Gacitúa | Architect