Architect Cecilia Puga, whose work has been exhibited in the United States and at the Venice Biennale and who also directs the Pre-Columbian Museum in her country, advocates a construction model that repairs not only buildings, but also ecosystems and communities.
“Repair is an obligatory term for the contemporary world today,” Puga, who is in favor of restoring structures from a perspective that has to do “with some social problems related to the climate crisis,” explains to EFE and of which “the “Architecture has to take charge.”
Puga’s work has gone around the world and has won several international competitions that have valued the initiative of a woman who develops her work between her studio, which she runs with Paula Velasco, and the Pre-Columbian Museum, to which she is linked. for more than two decades.
Repair or create
The perspective of Puga (Santiago de Chile, 1961) regarding the challenges facing global architecture goes through “repair” before “creation”, without mutually exclusive, a thesis that has been debated in the Real Academy of Spain in Rome with the Spanish architect Benjamín Gallegos.
“If in the 1920s the idea was to create, invent and innovate, at this moment we must take it into account, but from a perspective of repairing our environment, social relationships, the way we live…” he explains.
When a repair is made “there is damage, a crack”, but, through it “air flows and there is a possibility of the future”, although this is not incompatible with creation, since “when it is repaired, it is is creating.”
“One can be doing contemporary work and innovating in technology, and at the same time that construction makes a difference in terms of climate and the circular economy,” he says.
Environment and housing
Furthermore, this idea of repair must “run in parallel” with the creation in cases where there is a housing deficit in countries like Chile, where there are “500,000 rooms missing for a population of about 17 million people.”
This reality, increased according to Puga in the countries of the southern hemisphere, makes it difficult to transfer “discourses and debates” from Europe to Latin America, such as stopping construction completely, an idea currently promoted by “young radical architects.”
For her, every activity related to architecture must have a perspective of respect for the environment, something that should be overcome and about which “one should not talk”, just as, when constructing a building, it is assumed that It must stand or resist earthquakes.
“Environmental issues should not be talked about,” he insists, and asserts that technological innovation is now necessary to face the environmental challenge in architecture.
Furthermore, Puga proposes an architecture that is not limited to the dilemma of energy saving and respect for the environment and denounces that, today, debates in this regard are “too simplistic.”
Museums and colonial review
Another facet of this successful architect is the cultural one, thanks to the work she has been developing at the Pre-Columbian Museum of Chile as director for three years, when the covid-19 pandemic endangered a model dependent on income from visits.
“During the pandemic we found ourselves with a very big budget crisis, but we are beginning to recover,” he assured.
In the museum he directs, works from before the arrival of the Spanish to the new continent are exhibited, a highly debated issue in Latin America after the announcement by the Spanish Ministry of Culture to “overcome a colonial framework” in its museums.
“I think it is valuable, necessary and inevitable,” said Puga, although he clarified that the “colonialist” view cannot be solved by “returning the pieces” and highlighted the interesting fact that for the first time it is “the State (…) that instructs its museums in this sense.”
