El Edificio

EL EDIFICIO

Chile’s National Stadium was for a day a building and a city. On the 29th of September 1979, the building was filled by 37,000 people for a massive operative which provided ownership titles to dwellers (pobladores) fixing decades of makeshift land occupation and policies. A blueprint of the stadium with the outline of shantytowns instead of bleachers was prepared, rendering the genesis of Santiago´s current layout within the drawing of a building. 

PLANTA

A blueprint of the stadium with the outline of shantytowns instead of bleachers was prepared, rendering the genesis of Santiago´s current layout within the drawing of a building. On the 29th of September 1979, the building was filled by 37,000 people for a massive operative which provided ownership titles to dwellers (pobladores).

EL EDIFICIO

STADIUM exhibits this privatised city through a compact and public building. The National Stadium’s Coliseum derives its name from the colossal proportions of the Flavian amphitheatre, yet its ultimate reference is its typological flexibility. In other words, a building that remains; multiplying and reconfiguring itself through the singularity of events it accommodates and accumulates over time: from death camp to pilgrims’ destination, sports centre to spectacle platform, as historians Mary Beard and Keith Hopkins have analysed in The Colosseum. One of the ironies of the whole event was that this festival of individual property ownership and of the privatised city came to be celebrated in one of Santiago’s most public buildings. Since its inauguration in 1938, the National Stadium had played host to many of Chile’s moralising governmental policies, all of which typically gave strong emphasis to the public state as a pillar to educate the population, instil core values and maintain the image of the nation. In addition to celebrations of internal governmental policy—including presidential inaugurations, closing of political campaigns and fundraisers. From its outset, then, the stadium satisfied a double condition: that of a building as a viewing platform through which a spectator could take in an event, but also as an indoctrination platform through which the spectator themselves was the subject of the event’s ingrained propaganda.

STADIUMS OF THE STADIUM

Bajo la imagen se lee: 'La juventud de Santiago frente a la Moneda pidiendo el Stadium' (1909)

Publicada como 'Vista panorámica del Monumental Coliseo'

Inauguración Estadio Nacional, 3 diciembre 1938

Baltazar Robles, Estadio Nacional, Santiago, 1949

Miguel Rubio Feliz, Competencias deportivas en el día del estadio, 1948

Miguel Rubio Feliz, Competencias deportivas en el día del estadio, 1948

Personas se aglomeran en el hall del periódico 'La Nación' para ver por primera vez las transmisiones del Mundial en un televisor. En: 'La Nación', 31 de mayo, 1962

Mario Castro Avaria, Chile vs Italia ('la Batalla de Chile'), 2 de junio de 1962

Papa Juan Pablo II en la cancha, 2 abril 1987. 'La Tercera', 3 abril, 1987

Juan Carlos Cáceres, Concierto Amnistía Internacional, 1990

Manuel Trucco, Cierre campaña presidencial Gabriel Gonzalez Videla, 1946

Claudio Espinosa, Concentración de Büchi en el Estadio Nacional, 12 octubre 1989

Armindo Cardoso, Cierre de la visita de Fidel Castro a Chile, 2 dic 1971

Jack Ceitelis, Celebración 50 años Partido Comunista, 2 ene 1972

Miguel Rubio Feliz, Grupo de inmigrantes en el Estadio Nacional, 1943

Miguel Rubio Feliz, Grupo de inmigrantes en el Estadio Nacional, 1943

© Koen Wessing / Hollandse Hogte, Chili September 1973

© Marcelo Montecino, Estadio Nacional, 1973

© David Burnett/Contact Press Images, cortesía del artista

© Rolando Morales C. Estadio Nacional tras su remodelación, mayo 2010

Stadiums of a City

[EXTRACT] Valentina Rozas-Krause

«At once a technique, a language and a practice, the plan develops its own history, which is a process of accumulation of various functions, meanings and scales. It becomes nothing but the site of articulation of complex relations between ‘intimate distributions’, political formations, institutional mechanisms, state policies and regulations, legal procedures and customary practices. In this respect, the plan is not to represent a well-defined, bound space. Instead, it is the graphic inscription of a process that enables the production of a particular geography (and history) of positional relations, in which individual bodies and collective dispositions can establish their relevance.»