Double MAC

Assadi Pulido, Pavilion for the XVI Chilean biennal of Architecture

Abstract

For the 16th Architecture Biennial in Santiago, Chile, held in 2008, architects Felipe Assadi and Francisca Pulido were engaged to design a temporary exhibition pavilion to expand the inadequate space that was available in the Chilean capital’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo.

Located across from the museum in the city’s main park, Parque Forestal, the pavilion designed by Assadi and Pulido is a unique paradigm of the «relationship between transparency and opacity, accessibility and inaccessibility, scrutability and inscrutability».

That’s because this small pavilion has laid bare the logic behind a kind of architecture – the experimental architecture found at biennials – that is often cryptic to most people, hidden away within the spaces of museums and galleries, invisible from the outside, or better yet, in old, isolated infrastructures that are hard to reach.

The same thing probably would have happened with the Chilean Biennial as well, had it been held only within the MAC. But the need to expand the area available for the event made this project necessary.