Identity and inclusion. The housing complexes made by the Chilean architect Luciano Kulczewski (1922-1956)

Abstract

Luciano Kulczewski was a professional who played a key and distinctive role in the first half of the 20^th century, a period considered as crucial for the development of Chilean architecture, since it is the moment that brought the advent of modernity to the country. One of the most eloquent illustrations in this regard is the corpus, that collects more than a dozen housing complexes aimed for the middle and the working classes. Today, we recognize in these solutions not just the fact that they are in sync with the web of social, political, cultural, and economic processes that characterized the beginnings of the past century in Chile, but that they also have, among their most notable merits, having been conceived in terms of what we would understand today by “inclusion”. This article seeks to investigate these parameters, which range from urban proposals - that approached the city in "inclusive" terms - inasmuch as they did not push for these housing proposals to be in the metropolitan peripheries - to more particular issues, such as the stylistic management of homes as a tool to serve identity causes, in order to achieve the integration of the user with their environment.