English versions of the following articles are available online

Title: Spaces of transformation. Art and Community
Author: Tranvía Cero Collective, Quito, Ecuador: Pablo X. Almeida, Pablo Ayala, Karina Cortez, Martín Samuel Tituaña.
Abstract: The southern Quito communities got involved in a series of art projects that bring together art and everyday life. The events trigger an augmented use of public spaces and deepen the links between the neighborhood and its inhabitants.
Keywords: urbanism – Ecuador, urban art, community, architecture and politics
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Title: Animitas. An informal and democratic expression of the right ot the city
Author: Lautaro Ojeda. Professor, Universidad de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile.
Abstract: Animitas are small structures that involve popular devotions, irregular geometries within work in progress and -in some degrees- seizure. However, being cultural capital, they have gained social recognition as a cultural, collective, urban assemblage.
Keywords: popular architecture – Chile, syncretic spaces, urban palimpsests
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Editorial. Space for culture

To open this edition dedicated to cultural spaces, it would be fitting to mention a man that embodied a radical point of view with respect to such matter. Pontus Hultén, art historian and curator, born in Sweden in 1924, described his exhibit, Utopians and visionaries 1871-1981, taking place in 1971 in the Moderna Museet of Stockholm as such: “.it was the first open air show of its kind. One of the sections was a centennial celebration of the Paris Commune, in which the work was grouped in five categories (work, money, school, press, and community life) reflecting their subjects. There was a printing service in the museum. People were invited to produce their own posters and copies. The photos and pictures were installed in the trees. There was also a music school directed by the great jazz musician, Don Cherry, Neneh Cherry’s father. We built one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes in our studios and had a wonderful time. A telex allowed visitors to ask questions to people from Bombay, Tokyo and New York. Participants had to describe their image of the future, of how the world would be in 1981”. Forty years ago, from the core of the institutional realm (as director of the Museum) Hultén mounted a participative and multidisciplinary operation in open air that used constructive and communicational technologies to celebrate the anniversary of a key political episode in western history.

With this and other shows, like Poetry must be made by all!, or the controversial Hon (the enormous structure built 1966 together with Nikki de St. Phalle, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt, with the form of a woman lying down within which a Greta Garbo movie was being projected, while in the right chest there was a cafe, to the left a planetarium and in one of the legs a gallery of reproductions of masterworks) Hultén made it clear that a museum was literally “available space” for the marginalized expressions of the theater, opera, the sciences or the arts in general: all that lacked space in the established cultural circuit should have a place in a museum. That attitude announced his future as the founding director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, inaugurated in 1977 with eyes set on the utopias of the late seventies.

This perspective encourages the reflection that ARQ81 aims to stimulate: if culture comprises all ways of life, beliefs, and mannerisms of a group or time, the space for culture must be by necessity a col – lective, participative environment; an instance of exchange, play and encounter, and, above all, an unresolved field where available space still exists. This issue presents the immunity to social and legal norms of the Chilean animitas, the massive Catalan street festivals, rethinking the structure of the public library in Seattle and the art projects in the districts of Quito. All of them speak justly of that blank space that raises barriers and enables the spontaneous, collective construction of new realities.

Summary

Editorial

Space for culture / Patricio Mardones

Opinion

Los museos en el siglo XXI / Iñaki Ábalos

Lo público del espacio / Alberto Sato

Works and projects

Parque Bicentenario de la Infancia, Santiago, Chile / ELEMENTAL

Teatro Municipal de Constitución, Constitución, Chile / ELEMENTAL

Museo de la Memoria, Santiago, Chile / Figueroa, Fehr, Dias

Casa do Chile, São Paulo, Brasil / Figueroa, Fehr, Dias

Parque Cultural Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile / HLPS Arquitectos

Teatro Municipal de La Serena, La Serena, Chile / HLPS Arquitectos

Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, España / Ábalos + Sentkiewicz

Espacio para la experimentación teatral, estructura itinerante / Al Borde Arquitectos

Galería AFA Portfolio

Galería AFA / Elodie Fulton

Readings

Reporte: Biblioteca Pública de Seattle, OMA 1999-2004 / Giulia Foscari, OMA

Spaces of transformation: Art and Community / Colectivo Tranvía Cero

La ciudad común en fiesta. Espacios para la construcción cultural / Juan J. Tuset

Animitas. An informal and democratic expression of the right ot the city / Lautaro Ojeda