I think I’m one of those Chilean architects who has been inspired by the spirit of indigenous or local traditions, updating them to connect them with the world, without remaining anchored in the folkloric or purely local, selecting from the local that which is most universal, following in the footprints of poets such as Jorge Teillier, Nicanor and Violeta Parra, Pablo Neruda, or Gabriela Mistral, of architects such as Carlos Martner, Fernando Castillo, Hector Valdés, Mario Perez de Arce, Alberto Cruz, and Jorge Elton, among may others, of painters such as Court, Burchard, Juan Francisco Echenique, Caco Salazar, Francisca Sutil, of philosophers such as Gastón Soublete and Ernesto Rodríguez, or of archaeologists, such as Carlos Aldunate, and so on and so forth.
My attempt to relate the city with the culture and nature of remote places is to find them their own sustainable destination, one which makes them unique or inimitable, without setting them in a global world, where the remote no longer exists. It has been a contribution which has been appreciated and followed, as has been the case with our proposals to ensure that Wines of Chile do not adhere to the French model of a mediaeval castle, rather their appeal be sought in the quality they can confer to the rite of coming together.
Generally speaking, I feel that we have helped to liberate the forms of architecture, with the freedom we have inherited from the modern world. All lines come out haltingly, as we follow the order of the steps, the order of life, and not order for order’s sake…If, for example, we wished to house the route of a shepherd who goes out in the evening to gather his sheep under one roof, its shape would most probably be more like the Nazca lines than a Mondrian painting…