A book about Sergio Larraín García-Moreno, founder of the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, will be released next November.
It is “Conversations with Sergio Larrain, founder of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art”, written by his granddaughter Juana Puga, which will be presented on Monday, November 10, at 6:30 p.m., at the Museum (Bandera 361, Metro Plaza de Armas).
The book, under the Borrasca imprint of Editorial Ceibo, recovers the voice of the influential architect and founder of the Museum, and covers his life.
Credit: Granted
The activity will feature the participation of the National Architecture Prize winner Fernando Pérez Oyarzún, the archaeologist and first director of the Chilean Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, Carlos Aldunate del Solar, and the author of the book and granddaughter of Sergio Larrain.
The launch event is free entry, with limited places upon registration in this form.
The publication brings together the work begun in 1988, when Juana Puga agreed to write a biography of her maternal grandfather. The forty-three pages of the text collect, in an entertaining and colloquial way, his voice and his story.
It shows the very diverse areas in which this multifaceted, restless and visionary architect and art collector ventured during the last century in Chile.
Likewise, it allows us to see the evolution of his appreciation for architecture and art. This led him to defend and implement modern architecture in Chile, marked his passion for the pre-Columbian art of America and led him to found the Museum.
Path
Larrain was born in 1905 and graduated as an architect. While working with Jorge Arteaga, he built the first modern building in Santiago: the Oberpaur. He obtained the National Prize for Architecture and was Councilor of the Municipality of Santiago.
At the request of Pablo Neruda, he created the anti-Nazi group Defensa. Likewise, he was Chile’s ambassador to Peru. At the Catholic University, he was dean of the School of Architecture; He founded the School of Art and Design, and the Interdisciplinary Center for Urban Development (CIDU).
In 1981 the Museum was inaugurated, the first to bring together pre-Columbian art from all the cultures of America. It is also a place of research and study.
About the author
Juana Puga Larrain has a degree in Literature and a professor of Spanish (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 1990); PhD in Philology (University of Valencia, 1996); master’s degree in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language (Antonio de Nebrija University, 2006); Master in Anthropology (Austral University of Chile, 2024).
He wrote the collections of poems El Cautivo (El Conejo, 1999; Kultrún, 2021) and Aral (Kultrún, 2021) and the lyrics of two songs by Tikitiklip Precolombino: Poki y Taki and Las Coplas del búho (Ojitos Producciones, 2011). She is the director of the documentaries Gonzalo Rojas: the house, the fire, the river (2004); Mariano Puga, fifty years of priesthood in Chile (2009); and, with Roberto Nieri and Gabriela Urrutia, from Curiñanco for three voices (2024).
She is the author of books and articles on attenuation in Chilean Spanish. Among them are Attenuation in the Spanish of Chile: A pragmalinguistic approach (Tirant lo Blanc and University of Valencia, 1997); How we speak when we speak: attenuation in Chilean Spanish (Ceibo, 2013); Seven hundred and three examples of attenuation in Chilean Spanish (Ceibo, 2013). He taught at the University of Concepción (1996-2008); She was director of the School of Pedagogy in Spanish Language at the University of Las Américas (2015-2018); Since 2010 he has been a professor at the Diego Portales University.
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