Atacama Deserta

“I have seen a number of desert cyclists in the Southwest, and talked to some – the ‘California or Bust’ type with bulging backpacks, or a memorable couple of tough-talking girls from Chicago fettling their ten speeds in a gas station forecourt outside Cortez, Colorado. And – something I would have dismissed as hallucination did I not have a witness to bolster my grasp on reality – an elderly lady in a print dress and wool cardigan riding a tall dignified English bicycle that looked about the same age as herself, the sort that has an elaborate tracery of cordage to keep Edwardian skirts out of the back wheel and a wicker basket on the front of the handlebars. She was headed south about ten miles out of Shoshone, California, in a direction in which there was neither help nor habitation for another seventy miles. To astonished to do anything else, we said, ‘What was that, for God’s sake?’ And looked in the mirror and there was, already almost a hundred yards astern, pedaling peaceably onwards with a background of bright green creosote  bush (it had been a wet season) and rounded, striped, salty hills beyond. Wherever she was going, I have not shared her experience of cycling on the desert roads, even though I am a dyed-in-the-wool cyclist, and bike to and from campus every day under normal circumstances. But I do not have a kind of desert cycling experience, not on the roads but on the salt flats; something which started as a stunt or a joke with a folding cycle we had brought with us in the back of the four-wheel drive, and finished as an exhilaration quite outside any pervious cycling experience. Given a really hard, smooth soda surface like that of Silurian lake, north of Baker, which is almost glassy and without crackle patterns over much of its area, one can move with a completeness of freedom a cyclist cannot enjoy anywhere else. Swinging in wider and wider circles or going head down for ever-retreating horizon, the salt whispers under one’s wheels and nothing else is heard at all but those minute mechanical noises of the bike that are normally drowned out by other traffic. Swooping and sprinting like a skater over the surface of Silurian Lake, I came as near as ever to a whole-body experience equivalent to the visual intoxication of sheer space that one enjoys in America Deserta.”

Reyner Banham, Scenes in America Deserta (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), p. 99

Reyner Banham at the Silurian Lake, California

Photo Credits © Tim Street-Porter, 1980

Riding Banham's Bickerton at the
Tebenquiche Salt Lagoon in Atacama Deserta

Photo Credits © Tim Street-Porter 2011

Record / Argument by Jose Hernandez

Final Image 'Proclaim' by Jose Hernandez

Record / Argument by Elizabeth Wagemann

Final Image 'Proclaim' by Leon Duval

Final Image 'Proclaim' by Christoper Caceres

Final Image 'Proclaim' by Camila Diaz

Final Image 'Proclaim' by Francisco Vergara

Final Image 'Proclaim' by Alberto Fernandez

 

Final Image 'Proclaim' by Tomas Ortuzar

                                                       Lecture by Rodrigo Perez de Arce

Thomas Weaver and Enrique Walker in conversation

                                                                  DESERTA Final Jury

Final Jury

      Enrique Walker, Alejandra Celedon,

Christopher Pierce, Rodrigo Perez de Arce,

Sebastian Irarrazabal, Wren Strabucchi,

Pilar Cereceda.

                                                              Final Image by Camila Diaz

                                                           Final Image by Carlos Chauca

Final Image by Daniel Concha

                                                          Final Image by Jose Hernandez

                                    DESERTA at the Tebenquiche Salt Lagoon in Atacama Deserta

                                                            Lecture by Francisco Forster

Tim Street-Porter at the Ghost Saltpeter town of Pedro de Valdivia

Pedro de Valdivia - Ghost Saltpeter Town in Atacama Deserta

Deserta AA - PUC / Programa Publico Miércoles 12 de Enero

Miércoles 12 de Enero

Deserta AA - PUC / Programa Publico Miércoles 12 de Enero
Ciclo de Cine
1:30pm Percy Adlon, Bagdad Café (1987) 
3:30pm Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger (1975)

Charla
6:00pm  Thomas Weaver y Enrique Walker en conversación              Santiago, Auditorio FADEU

Thomas Weaver estudio arquitectura en Bartlett (University Collage of London) y la Universidad de Princeton. Ha trabajado como editor senior de la revista ANY en Nueva York y actualmente es el editor de la Revista AA Files en Londres. Se incorporó a la AA luego de trabajar en Foster + Partners, donde fue el ghost-writter de Norman Foster, y editó varios volúmenes de su serie de obras. Entre sus escritos recientes se incluyen ensayos sobre Poundbury en LOG; un ensayo sobre edición en arquitectura, en el libro 20-20; y para el catalogo de la exhibición sobre Giambattista Nolli y el postmodernismo a realizarse en el Museo V & A de Londres. Ha sido profesor de taller y teoría de la arquitectura en la Universidad de Princeton y en Cooper Union, y enseña actualmente en el  MA History and Critical Thinking Programme en la Architectural Association.

Enrique Walker es Arquitecto. Actualmente es profesor en la Universidad de Columbia en Nueva York y es director del programa de master en Advanced Architectural Design. Entre su publicaciones mas recientes destacan los libros Tschumi on Architecture. Conversations with Enrique Walker (The Monacelli Press, 2004) y Lo Ordinario (Gustavo Gili, 2010)

                                     

                                           AA/PUC Visiting School at the Tebenquiche Salt
                                           Lagoon in Atacama Deserta

                                            Tim Street-Porter's photographic session at the
                                            Tebenquiche Salt Lagoon in Atacama Deserta

                                           Pedro Alonso riding Banham's Bickerton at the

                                           Tebenquiche Salt Lagoon in Atacama Deserta

DESERTA ON FILM

All films to be screened in Room 31 / Lo Contador Campus PUC

Saturday 8^th  

1:30pm  Claire Denis, Beau Travail (1999)

3:30pm  David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Sunday 9^th

1:30pm Stephan Elliontt, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)

3:30pm Bernardo Bertolucci, The Sheltering Sky (1990)

Monday 10^th

1:30pm Alejandro Jodorowski, El Topo (1970)

3:30pm Werner Herzog, Lessons of Darkness (2004)

Tuesday 11^th

1:30pm David Lynch, Dune (1984)

3:30pm Sergio Leone, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1962)

Wednesday 12^th

1:30pm Percy Adlon, Bagdad Café (1987) 

3:30pm Michelangelo Antonioni, The Passenger (1975)

Thursday 13^th

1:30pm Wim Wenders, Paris, Texas (1984)

3:30pm Ron Underwood, Tremors (1990)