Arquitecto: Alejandro Aravena.
Colaboradores: Juan Jose Hurtado, Juan Ignacio Cerda.
Proyecto: 2004.
Ubicación: Santiago, Chile.
Render: Juan Jose Hurtado, Juan Ignacio Cerda.

A slight tower for Santiago

The competition guidelines asked for a structure at least 300 meters high to serve as a communication tower and viewpoint.

We don’t have a tradition of towers. Our height experiences are of geographical nature: pre-hispanic cultures used the hills as kind of ready-made pyramids and today, telecommunications anthems “climb on giants backs”, taking advantage of the mountains surrounding the valley.

In fact, we thought that a tower for Santiago, only made sense if it could raise above the electromagnetic shadow of the hills adjacent to site. Actually if the tower was not higher than them, it provided no visual gain compared to what the hills already offer.

So if the goal was to achieve a 300 meter height, we thought it would be much easier to build a 1 meter high platform on top of the 300 meters high San Cristobal hill. We believed instead that if we were to build an artificial structure, it had to be at least 1 km. high to make the operation worth the effort. From that height, instead of dominating visually the entire valley, we would be able to see, from the Andes to the Pacific Ocean in one single glimpse.

The problem is that gravity makes it very difficult to achieve that height. And on top on that, Chile is an extremely seismic territory. So the only solution that came to our minds, was to reverse the problem, using gravity as an anchor instead of considering it an obstacle to defeated.

We thought of a gaseous tower, working in traction instead of compression, an airship instead of a building, oscillating slightly over the Santiago sky, horizontally stabilized by light engines, coordinated digitally according to the direction and strength of the wind, combining the sophistication of the information technology era with an elementary physical principle.