La ciudad ideal
by Cristóbal Palma
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2025', 2025
Category: Representations of Space, Architecture, and Conflicts
Through the documentation of a specific building type in Santiago constructed after the return to democracy in 1990, this series proposes an anticipatory archaeology of the ruins left behind by the unfulfilled materialization of the political and economic model’s promise of modernization, a process initiated during the military dictatorship in the 1980s.
These buildings, conceived as symbols of progress, efficiency, and institutional stability, now appear as traces of a suspended future. Observed from a temporal distance, they reveal the contradictions between ideological projection and material outcome, between the image of an ideal city and the uneven realities produced by its implementation. The series reflects on architecture not as a finished object, but as a political and cultural artifact, embedded in longer cycles of expectation, failure, and transformation.