The Building

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).

Archivo

THE BUILDING

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.1 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.

Published as “Panoramic view of the Monumental Colosseum”
Source / Fuente: Maffet, H (ed.) Ñuñoa: 58 años de vida comunal (Santiago, 1953)
Go to the Archive

Stadiums of the stadium

Written under the image: 'Santiago's youth in front of the government house demanding the Stadium (1909)'
Source / Fuente: Ministerio de Instrucción Pública de Chile, Antecedentes sobre el Stadium Nacional (Santiago, 1910)

Published as 'Panoramic view of the Monumental Colisseum'
Source / Fuente: Maffet, H (ed.) Ñuñoa: 58 años de vida comunal (Santiago, 1953)

Inauguration of the National Stadium, December 3, 1938
Source / Fuente: Consejo de Monumentos Nacionales (ed.) Tres miradas al Estadio Nacional de Chile. Historia, Deporte, Arquitectura (Santiago, 2005).

Baltazar Robles, National Stadium, Santiago, 1949
Source / Fuente: Subcolección Chile, Colección Archivo Fotográfico, Archivo Central Andrés Bello, Universidad de Chile.

Miguel Rubio Feliz, Sports competitions during the day of the stadium, 1948
Source / Fuente: Colección Museo Histórico Nacional

Miguel Rubio Feliz, Sports competitions during the day of the stadium, 1948
Source / Fuente: Colección Museo Histórico Nacional

People gather in the hall of 'La Nación' newspaper's offices to watch the World Cup transmissions on a TV for the first time
Source / Fuente: Archivo Diario La Nación, CENFOTO - UDP

Mario Castro Avaria, Chile vs Italia ('the Battle of Chile'), June 2, 1962
Source / Fuente: Archivo personal Mario Castro

Pope John Paul II in the field, April 2, 1987 in 'La Tercera', April 3, 1987
Source / Fuente: Biblioteca Nacional

Juan Carlos Cáceres, Amnesty International Concert, 1990
Source / Fuente: Fondo Fortín Mapocho, Archivo Nacional de la Administración

Manuel Trucco, Closing of Gabriel Gonzalez Videla's campaign, 1946
Source / Fuente: Archivo personal de Manuel Trucco

Claudio Espinosa, Concentration of Büchi supporters at the National Stadium, October 12, 1989
Source / Fuente: Fondo Fortín Mapocho, Archivo Nacional de la Administración

Armindo Cardoso, Farewell act for Fidel Castro's visit to Chile, December 2, 1971
Source / Fuente: Archivo Fotográfico Biblioteca Nacional

Jack Ceitelis, Celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Communist Party, January 2, 1972
Source / Fuente: Fondo Ceitelis, Archivo Fotográfico Biblioteca Nacional

Miguel Rubio Feliz, Group of inmigrants at the National Stadium, 1943.
Source / Fuente: Colección Museo Histórico Nacional

Miguel Rubio Feliz, Group of inmigrants at the National Stadium, 1943.
Source / Fuente: Colección Museo Histórico Nacional

© Koen Wessing / Hollandse Hogte, Chili September 1973

© Marcelo Montecino, National Stadium, 1973

© David Burnett/Contact Press Images, courtesy of the artist

© Rolando Morales C. National Stadium after its remodelling, May 2010

Stadiums of a City

[EXTRACT]
Valentina Rozas-Krause
“(…) While that day the National Stadium accommodated the working-class peripheries of Santiago, ever since its construction it has played the role of the model and the stage for multiple versions of one city: the modern, the popular, the militarized, the neoliberal, and the memorial. The immutability of the Stadium’s concrete walls is only apparent; its history reflects that it is a building capable of transforming along with the city that surrounds it.”
The Book