Location: Orella 115, El Arenal, Talcahuano. Chile Engineering: Gastón Klein Construction: Erwin Lagies Site Area: 3.450 m2 Project Area: 2.363 m2 Photography: Pedro Mutis Johnson
Sigdo Koppers (SK) would celebrate 50 years with a big party in 2010 but due to the earthquake and seaquake on February 27th plans changed. The celebrations were cancelled in all their business-related countries. Instead, they decided to build a Technical Training Center (TTC) in Talcahuano, a city seriously affected by the disaster, and the place where the company was founded in 1960.
This cultural educational initiative, led by the SK chairman Juan Eduardo Errázuriz and the mayor of Talcahuano Gastón Saavedra, would help regeneration and recovery of the city, and would allow more than a thousand young people to study technical degrees regarding technology, trade, and administration with 80% student scholarship holders. The land chosen for this new institute used to have a school that was damaged by the earthquake and seaquake. The building was a cloister, with a central yard like a typical Chilean Landlord’s house.
The new TTC building recovers the idea of a perimeter building with an interior central yard but open at one of its sides to the street and to the corner, the most public place. This makes the building to be more inclusive inviting people to come inside, being the central yard a public square functioning as an entrance and resting space. At the same time, the building has a theatre open to the community. The central square is a base slightly raised looking for a view of the sea in the far distance, with a gesture of somebody who avoids the wave that arrived and the one that could come.
The building is entirely made of concrete. People can go around it through a protected porch, where movement of people ends in the public square and protects the rooms from the external noise. All the column system gives a shape for every pillar, a telluric thing itself, like recovering the memory of something appalling, as one of the most terrible earthquakes in history happened there. Through the pillars, the building proposes something that must be in people’s memory, because it was a drama, but now it represents hope.
