“Pinochet left a legacy that has not been resolved”

Like many Chileans born in the mid-20th century, Cristian Castillo Echeverría (Santiago, 1947), the recent National Architecture Prize winner, has lived several lives.

He was a student at the Catholic University in the 1960s, he was a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), he was a political prisoner of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, he was exiled in London, and he also returned to Chile after the return of democracy and was one of the architects of an emblematic popular housing project, such as the Ukamau population of the commune of Estación Central.

Son of one of the leading figures of national architecture (Fernando Castillo Velasco) and the artist Mónica Echeverría, as well as brother of the filmmaker Carmen Castillo, his work will be exhibited during the upcoming XXIII Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism of Chile, to be held in 2025, and which will be accompanied by a keynote lecture open to all members of the order.

He celebrates “this new award, given by my peers, highlighting my work as a professional who enhances participatory architecture, fundamentally dedicated to social housing.”

Biography

He himself, when asked why he wanted to study architecture, responds that “I am part of a generation of profound changes, educated in a Jesuit school when Jesuit education made a difference.”

“They were the first to highlight the need for commitment to those who might need it,” he emphasizes in dialogue with El Mostrador.

He left school the year Eduardo Frei Montalva assumed the presidency of Chile, in 1964, when “the changes proposed by the Revolution in Freedom forced everyone in this country to take a stand.”

“My father was part of that process and brought the spirit of change into our home, a center of permanent discussion and reflection. A father and mother committed to a better country and children who, under their gaze, began to make their own commitments. I felt in his example, an architect of the new, a mayor who raised dreams and built them with the active participation of residents and neighbors, that architecture was a profession that allowed for active commitment and that from it one could face changes from any position that one occupied in the responsibility that each one had to assume,” he recalls.

“To this day, I do not regret the decision I made. Being an architect, without ceasing to be one, has allowed me to do different professional activities and be part of different realities throughout my life.”

First experiences

In the mid-60s he lived one of what he describes as milestones of his life: having participated in the mid-60s as an architecture student in self-construction construction of the 1600 homes that make up Villa La Reina in the commune of La Reina, under the mayoralty of his father Fernando Castillo Velasco.

“It was my first real encounter with a world of men and women who, despite their differences, faced the solution to their housing problems together and on their own,” he says today.

Castillo studied Architecture at the School of Architecture of the Catholic University of Chile. In 1965 he entered a school that, as he remembers, was characterized by an education focused on architecture, “only related to its natural environment and with very little participation in the political events that crossed our country in those years.”

However, the school and the university itself “were seething with the need for change led by a conservative and backward church.”

“The reform arose from the students with the urgent need to change the focus of university education. Even today I feel proud to have been part of the Reform of the Catholic University that led my father to the rectorship of the University in 1967. And we changed the school and we did it under the parameters of the Reform. A school committed to the reality of our country. And our projects as students changed their focus and began to serve residents who were seizing land, unemployed workers in their industries.”

From there, Quinta Michita emerged (today part of the architectural heritage) as a graduation project by him and his cousin Eduardo Castillo, a community project that, after graduating, together with his father, they decided to transform into a reality by creating the first community with young professionals from the university in reform who decide to share their lives with other families and for their children to grow up sharing their lives with others who will be their friends forever.

At that time he experienced another milestone: being part, as a partner, of the Imporei Company, a self-managed company dedicated to the manufacture of cement pipes for sewage.

It was a company built with layoffs from families who built their homes by self-construction, with the support of the State that bought the production to be used in social housing projects.

“The company provided salaries equally to each of its partners, each one fulfilled a task and part of the income was used to purchase food baskets for the family.”

It was one of the experiences that was cut short by the coup d’état in 1973 against the constitutional government of President Salvador Allende, “when we were building the community.”

“At that time I was already a member of the MIR and had to go underground. Unfortunately I was not able to see the works finished and occupied by the community members.”

Militancy in the MIR

As already mentioned, while he was a university student, Castillo participated in the change processes at his school. A strong student movement achieved the change of dean of the school to begin the reforms they advocated in the curriculum.

In this fight he was vice president of the School’s Student Center and a member of its University Council. Internal contradictions in the school led to his division and from that moment on he was the president of the Student Center of the Department of Works of the Faculty of Architecture of the University.

In this process he radicalized his positions, not only regarding university policies, but also in relation to the policies that the government carried out, which he compromised upon joining the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). He was in this militant commitment at the time of the 1973 coup d’état.

“In addition to my university duties and commitments, I had militant work in the Industrial Belts organized by the MIR at that time, raising the demands of the workers, residents and students in the sector in which I had to develop my work. At the time of the coup, my militant work was focused on emphasizing our relationship and our influence within the Armed Forces, seeking to raise awareness that would prevent this coup that seemed inevitable.”

Like each of the militants, at the time of the coup he assumed the tasks that were designed for this circumstance and went underground under the slogan raised by Secretary General Miguel Enriquez (“the MIR does not seek asylum”), thus responding “to our commitment to the Chilean people.”

Kidnapping and exile

He paid dearly for his militancy. As head of the party’s Documentation Apparatus, in 1975 he was kidnapped by the intelligence services of the Air Force (SIFA).

“I was detained in the clandestine houses of the Sifa and then in 3 Alamos, from where I was expelled to the United Kingdom,” he summarizes.

The exile he experienced from then on was a learning experience, “forced at the beginning and full of strength and creativity afterwards.”

“The Chileans, we, at that time, were a people deeply rooted in their land. The borders were distant or difficult to cross. We liked the simple, peasant world in which we lived. Going out forced us, it is very possible that we would not have done it if we had not been forced, to be part of a world longer and wider than ours. To live it, to understand it, to be part of them,” he explains.

“I would say that it was difficult every time I changed countries and good once I managed to understand who they were and what they were like, once I managed to assimilate their languages ​​and customs, to understand how I should communicate with others. I lived in Cambridge and London in the United Kingdom, in Paris, France and in Caracas, Venezuela.”

All these lessons, I learned to communicate in different languages, to understand different cultures and adapt to them, “to love images and bodies that were not ours but that became an indivisible part of our history.”

Also to work in as many jobs as exile demands, “to count the days until your return until you stop counting them because they have adopted you forever.”

The postgraduate studies in London, England, gave him a dimension of architecture and its worlds that he had not had the opportunity to experience in Chile, while working in the office of Borja Huidobro, in Paris, gave him an experience that brought him closer to work in social housing.

In Venezuela, meanwhile, he built “a world in my work with Cubans as a tour operator opening the island to international tourism, and as an audio visual producer making more than 100 titles for national productions and production services for Europe, the United States and various Latin American countries and a small architecture office so as not to forget the trade.”

“An exile that lasted 25 years, but that I do not regret,” he summarizes.

Return to Chile

Maybe, finally, he returned to the country, “when I understood that the time had come to return.”

“The exile had been very long. Here were my parents, part of my family that we were never able to reunite in its entirety, here I had begun to walk, here I felt that I had to finish doing it. It wasn’t easy, I knew little and few, my friends and family were scattered everywhere.”

He admits that it was difficult for him to adapt, because it was no longer the same visitor who came every six months and shared time with his family and old friends from school and university.

“It was the real world and this world, in this Chile where we live, was not easy at all. At least it was very different from the one I had left behind. But we had already learned to adapt and together with my father and my cousin Eduardo Castillo, with whom we had done the title project for Quinta Michita, we resumed the work of the Castillo Velasco Communities.”

From then on, between teaching at the Arcis University, the Communities and the residents who came to the office asking for help in the social housing projects they were carrying out, he ended up, after the death of his father, committed to the process of social housing in Chile as a fundamental part of his process as an architect.

Villa Grimaldi

In the meantime, he also found time to become a member of the Villa Grimaldi Corporation, the first memorial site in Latin America as such.

“I have been a partner, member of the Board of Directors and Vice President of the Board of Directors of the Villa Grimadi Peace Corporation for many years. It has been a commitment to truth and justice, to defense and education in rights. A path to not repeat our history, to prevent differences from being resolved with the massacre of those who think about life and society differently,” he says.

“Those of us who were imprisoned in the Intelligence Services of the Air Force have not had the possibility of building our own Memory Centers. The FACH War Academy, a detention, torture and extermination center, and the FACH Hospital, the place of death of many comrades, are spaces, even today, unlikely to be recovered as Memory Centers. The clandestine houses that they used as places of detention and torture were destroyed or their whereabouts are unknown. Faced with this reality, I committed my work in human rights in a space that has special significance for the MIR.”

This is because the vast majority of companions who disappeared or were murdered in that space belonged to their party, many of them still unrecognized.

“It seemed like the place where I could support human rights work by keeping alive the history of each and every one of those who experienced torture and were killed or disappeared from that place. We have built a memorial site, a park, which today preserves the memory of those who raised the flags of resistance against the dictatorship and died fighting for a better world. A place of unity for all the political organizations that participated in the resistance against the dictatorship, which is reflected today in the recently inaugurated Plaza de los Memoriales,” he analyzes.

Work with the Homeless

Castillo has already explained that he returned to a very different Chile. The Chile where the State had the goal of guaranteeing housing as a right has been transformed into another one, where housing is subject to the vagaries of the market.

Even so, he continued with his streak of working together with the popular sectors on this problem.

“One million families is, more or less, the housing deficit in Chile. Five million Chileans and migrants living in our territory who do not have a decent place to live. Camps and overcrowding are the reality we live with today,” he says.

And he adds a phrase that can be applied to so many sectors of daily life:

“The dictatorship left a legacy that democracy has not been able to resolve.”

In his opinion, in summary, the neoliberal model, which brought with it real estate speculation and land as a factor of capital accumulation, dominates the landscape of Chile’s cities and towns, and territorial and urban planning does not exist, which leaves territorial development in the hands of companies.

“Laws and rules are there to be broken. The Regulatory Plans are not part of the work in many communes and if they do have them, they are out of date in time and fail to adapt to the new realities. Corruption has also become part of the problems of housing, neighborhoods and cities. It is a business issue and the State accepts and assumes that it is private companies that must develop the solutions,” he states.

It also points out that “distrust in the people’s ability to be protagonists in their lives and their work drags on government after government.”

“They do not trust the people and assume the right to represent them and solve their problems. Housing production hopefully reaches 25,000 units per year, a number never sufficient to alleviate the deficit. Land is increasingly scarce and what there is has costs that social housing resources cannot cover. The State, despite the existence of a Housing Emergency Law, does not use the prerogatives that the law gives it to expropriate unused or poorly used land”, to which is added that the Armed Forces “do not return the land stolen during the dictatorship, “They speculate with their property by selling it at exorbitant prices and the governments do not exercise the right that the law gives them to recover it.”

As for the Ministry of Housing, “which for years has been conceived as a ministry of social support, this government has not achieved its goal, and whose presidential program for Territory, City and Housing proposed a completely new way of looking at this problem with proposals for transformation has not been able to advance as expected and the goals remain far from the objectives set.”

Strong

In this context, their work in the Ukamau community is key. It is a series of buildings with 424 apartments located in the Estación Central commune, the result of several years of struggle by residents to own their own home. It was inaugurated in November 2020.

For him, families organized into Housing Committees, what we sometimes call the “Homeless” are the fundamental reason why the State has been forced to change its way of carrying out neighborhood and social housing programs. .

“They have become leading actors in the process, seeking and finding solutions for their demands on their own. In an increasing number, the Housing Committees reach the Serviu or the ministries with floor solutions that can be used in their projects and with architects and construction companies that accompany them in the process.”

Ukamau, in this new reality, plays a fundamental role, in his words.

“This group of residents, inhabitants of the Estación Central commune, children and grandchildren of workers and peasants who migrate to the capital and settle in what were at that time the outskirts of the city, are organized to fight for decent housing. In a systematic manner and with the support of professionals who join the process, they define the tasks and the path they must follow to find a solution to their housing demands,” he says.

He adds that they look for land, make its purchase and sale feasible (EFE sells, Serviu buys), seek and find support from a team of architects and engineers to design their housing complex, demand that Serviu act as Sponsoring Entity (first project of this magnitude for which they assume this responsibility), impose a design unprecedented until that date (it stops being a subdivision and becomes a condominium), increase the surface area per apartment from 55 m2 to 62 m2, for the first time gas reaches the kitchen and cylinders are not used, agree to the installation of a weak current network (internet) not considered in social housing projects.

“This experience has served as an example for many projects that have continued to force the authorities to establish a different way of relating to demand. Normally, the path that a family follows is to apply for a subsidy and wait patiently for the State to build housing complexes where they are assigned a home.”

In this case it was different, and it was part of a route that the professional continues to travel.

Today there are several projects in which he is participating. Among them are the beginning of the construction of Maestranza 2, in the commune of Estación Central, a community of 200 homes also with the Ukamau Residents Group; the development of the Building Permit for the Futura Esperanza Project, a community of 299 homes in the commune of La Reina with the Futura Esperanza Committee Group; a project under development in the commune of Huechuraba, 155 homes with the Vida Digna Residents Group; and a work in development for a group of families from Santiago Centro grouped in the Santiago Multicolor Committee, a project of 320 homes developed on Navy land in the commune of Santiago Centro.

It is also an active part of the group of Committees that fight for the recovery of lands that belong to National Assets, but that are in the hands of the Armed Forces, “which are not used in military functions and are without justified use.”

Outburst and Convention

Finally, Castillo was another of the millions of Chileans who experienced the social upheaval of 2019 “as the hope that the dreams of a better country were possible.”

“All the frustrations and dreams of thousands and thousands of Chileans were represented there. Everything seemed possible. The changes seemed like a short-term reality,” she says.

At that time, the first Convention “was a dream that advanced more than our society was capable of understanding and the second a setback that our people were not willing to allow either.”

“Nobody won and we lost a huge opportunity to be different, much better than what we are. The important thing about the first Convention was the recognition of the constitutional right to housing. A fact that, if achieved, would have forced the State to assume it as an unavoidable responsibility. It would certainly have helped to greatly improve the situation of the cities and towns of our country,” he concludes.