Chilean house

Chilean house puts together different materialities and display formats which have historically registered and represented archetypes of domestic scenes in Chile: photographs, drawings, paintings, videos, movies, clippings or press reports, objects and real size models. The exhibition is organized through six axes, corresponding to the different solutions that have originated as a response to the housing issue. Under the premise that all these axes take on a variety of expressions, the curators deployed each chapter in plural: Territories, Densities, Economies, Disputes, Singularities and Temporalities. Starting from them, they organize the concepts, which explain the different types of houses among their investigation.

Curators portray more than 100 cases in the exhibition, completing nearly 300 pieces related to the characteristics a house, as a cultural object, adopts. The exhibition gives an account of houses for community living; houses in complex climates and territories; houses determined by economic resources; houses that reflect their architects and owners’ taste and aesthetics; houses which constitute a family’s greatest dream; and houses that grow, are adapted, or whose uses are modified, among others.

Chilean house presents a selection of images and objects that represent realities, as diverse as our modern society. The review through geography and time of an element so essential and necessary for our society like a house constitutes an unprecedented approach that accounts for its versatility and multiple conditions. Chilean house. Domestic images is not defined as an architects’ exhibition, but as one of architecture, that shares the problematization of ways of providing an answer to a need as basic as housing. At times in which the social outburst in Chile has questioned the development model that has guided this country for the past few decades, as well as our current ways of living, Chilean house is an invitation to look deeply into this cultural object, which is fundamental for everyday life, and through it, to address this country’s cultural, social and geographic diversity, by the way of an architectural exhibition.

Without a fixed definition, but in accordance with the times and societies in which it is built, a house is both a property and a cultural item; it is a way of life; it is family and home. The exhibition Chilean house. Domestic images invites us to ask ourselves: What does a house mean to each one of us? Done this, to start re-configuring our idea of how to inhabit the country we yearn for.