Development of the steel industry and avant-garde architecture of the 20th century in Chile: Unidad Departamental Acería CONOX y Colada Continua (1976), and the Central de Alimentación y Casino (1973), in the CAP-Huachipato plant, as examples of the brutalist paradigm

Abstract

The Huachipato steel plant located in San Vicente Bay, Talcahuano, was set in motion in the mid-20^th century as a state initiative (personified in CORFO), to create a national production center in the Bío-Bío area and to promote economic and social development, in response to the 1930 crisis and the Chillan earthquake, in 1939. Within the first decades of operation, the Compañía de Acero del Pacífico (CAP) implemented a series of expansion plans to improve and increase production, modernizing machinery and constructing buildings to accommodate both the new industrial processes and the service equipment that the workers would use. In this context, in the 1970s, two buildings of notable architectural quality were built: the Unidad Departamental Acería CONOX y Colada Continua, and the Central de Alimentación y Casino de Trabajadores. In this study, the information available in Revista AUCA (1979), where said projects are published, was collected, and later the characteristics of these buildings were analyzed, highlighting their values as architectural work -morphological, spatial, aesthetic, structural-, reviewing the theoretical foundations and the relationship with other key architectural works, to understand the concepts of “brutalism” and “mat building”. In summary, the results reflect that these works, on adapting to functions that are so different to each other, as the industrial production and workers’ facilities) are, reflect the modern paradigm of 1959’s X CIAM and the design criteria of the architectural avant-garde of the 1960’s, becoming both industrial heritage and architectural heritage of Chile.