León Duval — Spatial Possibilities

In the context of the XXI Architecture and Urbanism Biennial of Chile in 2019, I was appointed to create the Universidad Finis Terrae School of Architecture´s pavilion for the Academic Exhibition of the Biennial. Jaúkén proposes a dialogue with the visitor through the image of the word and the representation of spaces that are shown by means of an oneiric and linguistic space. This work was thinked, designed, and developed along with a multidisciplinary team of teachers, students and artists from inside and outside of the school. 

We decided to develop a pavilion to visually display the way the Universidad Finis Terrae understands the territory and teaches architecture. The organisation provided each school of architecture in Chile with a generic wooden cart of nine square metres to be used. Therefore, as a team we decided to develop a pavilion as a designed device to engage and experiment with the image of the word as a poetical and experimental trigger of the project, in allusion of the characteristic methodology utilised by the UFT ́s school since its foundation. 

To achieve the materialisation of the concept we started by composing the interior as an opposition of its generic exterior, as a binary. We designed the space of the word in the interior of a cart as a dark and mysterious room which could turn as a device to metaphorically travel to those extreme lands in Patagonia, that the university wanted to achieve. This phantasmagoric room-device was deployed then to evoke unseen distant territories by light lines and retro-illuminated words provoking a sensorial experience and journey.