HSS

One day, and in an unprecedented geological collision, the tectonic plates of Lebanon and Chile warped into one spiral land form. Chilebanon was created.

Chile and Lebanon have always displayed a deep connection between their respective geologies and material cultures. Their disparate sizes notwithstanding, the two countries have often used their length to explain the varieties of cultures and architectural forms. But in Chilebanon, the once-parallel latitude lines and the varying landscapes and ways of life that populated them now cross and blend. North connects with South and East with West. Climates also change. Plant seeds are carried by short breezes across. Typologies of buildings hybridize and move laterally as well. A house by the sea can now serve as an adequate house in the Andes and a farm in Patagonia can shelter the animals in the Bekaa valley. Suddenly, the essentialized differences between cultures once justified by geography lose their rationality, and ideas and forms freely flow back and forth unimpeded neither by distances of mountains. 

CHILEBANON is a provocation to imagine, through architectural form and with the help of the students from UNAB, new connections between cultures and climates in a warming, changing world, and how ways of life and typologies could now shift, cross continents and work laterally as well to produce unexpected and new forms of life and new forms of architecture.