TAMING THE RIVER AND BUILDING THE CITY: INFRASTRUCTURE AND PUBLIC SPACE IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE

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1 TAMING THE RIVER AND BUILDING THE CITY: INFRASTRUCTURE AND PUBLIC SPACE IN SANTIAGO DE CHILE FERNANDO PÉREZ OYARZUN 1 Address: Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Estudios Urbanos. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. El Comendador 1970, Providencia, Santiago, Chile. fperez@uc.cl ABSTRACT The paper poses the question about the possible relationships between infrastructure and public space. It examines the case of Santiago de Chile during the second half of the eighteenth century, when borbonic policies promoted a significant infrastructure building process. It underlines the ways in which they were made possible thanks to the availability of new technologies and human resources, including architects and military engineers. Special focus is made on those works connected to watercourses, particularly those attached to Mapocho River, including bridges and protecting walls (Tajamares) against the usual floods suffered by the city.the generation of public spaces connected to the Tajamares seem to have been intentional in a project that anticipates further operations happened during the 19 th century, when the canalization of the river actually happened. 18 th and 19 th century attitudes question some of the current infrastructure constructions, in which specialization seems to dominate without much concern about the consequences of those infrastructures upon the urban fabric. This attitude causes the loose of the opportunity to detonate a more holistic and balanced urban development. INFRASTRUCTURE AND CITY FABRIC The role of infrastructure in urban development has been strongly underlined in contemporary city planning literature (Baxter, 2001). Massive effects of transport infrastructure, such as motorways, underground railways or service networks, upon urban form and life, seem today widely accepted. Infrastructure is not any more something located underground, which plays a material or technical service to buildings or public spaces. The tracing of new streets or sewage networks; the availability of water, gas or electricity has been many times responsible for orienting the city growing or even configuring the city fabric. Thus, infrastructure should be considered not the consequence of urban development but the cause of it. The complexity and sophistication of modern infrastructure has caused that it has become the subject of increasing technical specialization. The tracing of motorways 1 Fernando Pérez Oyarzun is professor at Universidad Católica de Chile. He currently runs the Doctorate Programme in Architecture and Urban Studies and The Cultural Heritage Centre. This paper is a result of an on going research Project financed by Fondecyt under the tittle of One city, two cathedrals; transformations in the cathedral ensemble and the urban modernization process of the late colonial period,

2 C i t i e s, n a t i o n s a n d r e g i o n s i n p l a n n i n g h i s t o r y or electric lines are nowadays in the hands of specialized engineers who have systematized the objectives, methods and solutions, which very frequently follow international standards. The technical precision gained in this approach, very frequently collides with a more holistic view about the urban project. Our cities often suffer being the result of a mere superimposition of a series of systems each one following its particular logic and not necessarily well articulated. Given the importance of infrastructure investments one can ask if is it possible to ask them some additional services to their primary technical objectives. Can therefore a new motorway be sensitive to public spaces, promote them or at least not damage them? That seems to be one of the challenges of present day planning. But is it this only a contemporary problem or a tension that can be detected in past times? At the same time one understands better the importance of infrastructure, one gets aware that, at least in part and probably with less sophisticated technical tools, that happens also in the past. After studying a similar kind of problem at the end of the XIX century (Pérez, Rosas, Valenzuela, 2005, Pérez, 2011), the present paper wants to focus on exploring the urban role of infrastructure in a Latin American city of the second half of the XVIII century, aiming to find similar tensions between a technical rationality and a wider urban concept. The building of significant protections against Mapocho River floods in Santiago de Chile the so called new Tajamares- provide an interesting case in which infrastructure and public space appear tightly connected. In a wider frame this will be an opportunity to examine the connection between technical knowledge, public policies and urban development and life. SANTIAGO, THE CITY AND THE RIVER Founded in 1541 by Pedro de Valdivia, Santiago de Chile developed as not much more than a modest village, in spite of being the capital city of the Capitanía General de Chile (Echaíz, 1975, de Ramón, 2000). At the end of the XVIII century Santiago reached a population of inhabitants. The city fabric followed the well-known pattern of a regular grid, very similar to that one Pizarro had used in Lima Peru. This corresponded to a strictly regular grid pattern, consisting of square blocks, designated as classical model by René Martínez (Martínez, 1977). The only explicit public space included within the foundation plan was the public plaza or Plaza Mayor. Originally, it consisted in an empty block around which the main religious and public buildings were settled. Religious processions, formal or informal commerce and even criminal public executions took place there. Complementary public spaces emerged as the regular urban grid evolved and specialized. Small plazas emerged in front of significant churches, or public buildings, due to a slight recession of the building line in front of them. These public spaces enriched the repertory of public spaces they didn t affect the predominant role of the Plaza Mayor as a main and unique public space within the city.

3 Figure 1- Manuel de Sobreviela (nationality, life, dates). Plano de la ciudad de Santiago del Reyno de Chile, c. 1790, map, [Martínez, 2007]. Santiago initial urban fabric went from the Mapocho river course to the north, until a dry branch of the same river to the south. The Santa Lucía hill originally named Huelén by the Indians- was its natural boundary towards the east. Thus the city was tightly linked to the river and other topographical accidents from its very beginnings. The river performed as a geographic boundary, provided water for different purposes and was a significant landscape element. Geographically speaking Mapocho river was a torrent. Therefore it experimented dramatic changes in its watercourse from summer to winter. A small canal used to run throughout the dry branch, which turned part of the river course when floods happened in winter or spring. These lasts happened very frequently and provoked serious damages to the city. These experiences stimulated the building of protecting walls called Tajamares. After a first generation of Tajamares, a second and technically more efficient one was built during the XVIII century, implying significant investments and technical skills. BORBONIC REFORMS AND CITY DEVELOPMENT. It is a well-known phenomenon that during the second half of the XVIII century various social reforms were promoted by European monarchies. Within them, many of those reforms affected the city, its administration and its hygienic conditions. The Spanish Empire, at that time rule by Bourbons family, was not an exception to that rule. Kings such as Carlos III were champions of these reforms. He is well known because liberated commerce with the colonies and expelled the Jesuit order from 3

4 C i t i e s, n a t i o n s a n d r e g i o n s i n p l a n n i n g h i s t o r y the empire. Following those policies, which included significant urban reforms, informal markets were retired from plazas and new regulations were applied to police and various public services. Different works of infrastructure were undertaken as part of those policies. They included the construction of fortifications, bridges, new roads and public buildings. In many cases this meant the introduction of new technologies and the support of well-trained human resources. In the Chilean case, the presence of various military engineers such us John Garland, Leandro Badarán and Pedro Rico (Guarda, 1990, 1997) made possible a radical enhancement of building construction technics and new scale interventions such as the fortifications in the southern region of the country near Valdivia. The arrival of Joaquín Toesca the first professional architect coming to the country can be related to this particular moment in which a new enlightened knowledge arrives to America, even to such distant places as Chile. When independence from the Spanish Empire was declared at the beginning of the 19 th century, this same intellectual environment, would nurture the political and cultural development of the country. In the case of Santiago, some of the most significant infrastructure works built during the second half of the XVIII century are associated with watercourses. A new solid stone bridge got across the Mapocho River. The Calicanto bridge as was popularly known, solved for the first time the frequent interruptions of the traffic between the northern area and the city centre, during the winter season. A new canal, today known as San Carlos, was planned to irrigate the valley around Santiago connecting Maipo and Mapocho rivers. A new road from Santiago to Valparaíso port was traced by. Among these series of works, a more definite series of Tajamares were built to keep the city safe from floods. The Calicanto Bridge was considered, since erected, as a significant urban element, being represented in every map of the time. It had to get across the non-canalized watercourse and had to be adapted to resist the considerable winter water currents. For those reasons, it had to have a considerable length, being accessed through ramps. The bridge served the city for around a century and was considered part of the cityscape by most of Santiago dwellers. Following its erection, shops were installed over the bridge. This contributed to turn it into a kind of Commercial Street, giving continuity to the urban fabric. The demolition of the bridge in 1886, supposedly due to structural damages, but mainly because of a canalization project for the river, produced considerable complains and rejection from part of the population. Other significant public buildings, in terms of their scale and technological complexity, were erected at the period. The Palacio de la Moneda at the Time Casa de Moneda- and the new cathedral, illustrate well the kind of changes happened in the city, both at formal and technical levels. The Casa de Moneda was conceived as an industrial building destined to the coinage industry, which had developed within the country due to the availability of minerals. It was a huge building for a city of no more than inhabitants. In its conception Joaquín Toesca had followed the pattern of the industrial palace, typical at the time. It included space for offices, a house for the ruler and the industrial section including the melting ovens. The fact that this building was adapted for presidential palace during the 19 th century, gives

5 an idea of its quality and significance, being probably the only case of an industrial building adapted as presidential palace in Latin America. The case of the new cathedral is slightly different: it implies the replacement of an already existing cathedral for a new one. The idea had emerged when the 1730 earthquake severely damaged the old cathedral, which ran north-south by Plaza de Armas. The cathedral had from suffered similar damages in previous earthquakes and fires. Therefore the need of a new cathedral emerged both because the temple was considered too small for the population and because a strongest construction, able to resist earthquakes, was urgently needed. Begun in 1747 by the builder Matías Vasquez de Acuña there is little available information about the design authorship. The new cathedral was considerably larger and changed its north-south orientation to east-west. To do all that, a neighbouring piece of land had to be bought. However, the church followed the traditional pattern of Chilean colonial churches: a rather simple box of massive stonewalls reinforced by buttresses. The death of Vásquez de Acuña stopped the building construction. The recently arrived Joaquín Toesca, educated in Italy and professionally trained in Madrid, where he worked with Sabatini, was hired to make charge of the construction in He apparently made no significant changes in the original plan but decided to design a new façade towards the Plaza de Armas. The new cathedral, whose planning was the subject of great discussions, represented a significant technical improve in the local construction practice. Toesca didn t introduce significant changes upon the original design, but followed a neoclassical scheme in the Plaza de Armas façade. THE TAJAMARES CASE The Tajamares, strong protecting walls against the Mapocho River floods, were built in several steps along the 18 th century, as a reaction against continuous disasters suffered by the city. According to Gabriel Guarda (Guarda 1997), different initiatives had been undertaken in 1700, 1726, and 1765, this last one with the participation of the engineer John Garland. All these are known as the Old Tajamares. The serious floods of 1783 provoked the decision of building a new series of protecting walls, able to produce a safer city. Joaquín Toesca was asked to write a preliminary report and engineers such as Leandro Badarán and Pedro Rico were involved in the design. Following the discussion about the assignment of the commission gives interesting clues about the urban meaning of the intervention. Toesca was proposed by Manuel de Salas superintendent of the building works, against prestigious military engineers, due to his technical skills, plus his ability to conceive architectural details. That seems to suggest that the New Tajamares were conceiving from its beginning as a mix artefact, having to fulfil technical, aesthetical and urban conditions. The commission was finally assigned to Toesca, who was at the time in charge of La Moneda, against the opinion of many. As other public buildings of those years, the New Tajamares represent a serious attempt to overcome the technical problems of the old ones, through the possibilities offered by a new state of the art in building construction. Building works of the New Tajamares prolonged until 1808 when Toesca had already died. The initially considered fourteen cuadras, that is approximately one 5

6 C i t i e s, n a t i o n s a n d r e g i o n s i n p l a n n i n g h i s t o r y and a half kilometre were expanded up to thirty, that is 3.6 kilometres during the building process. Thus, the massive walls of more than 5 meters high, running all along the northern edge of the city turned into one of the most significant infrastructure works of the Hispanic Empire. Figure 2- Pedro Rico. Planta y elevación de una porción de Tajamar Archivo Nacional Santiago. Tajamares plan and section, [Guarda, 1997]. The New Tajamares followed a different trace with respect to the old ones. In fact, they involved a kind of primary canalization project of the river, since they took part of its course gaining a piece of urban land along the riverbank. From time to time the walls were interrupted allowing the people to get across the river, since except for the Calicanto Bridge and a minor wooden bridge, there were no other options to get across the river. Those interruptions of the Tajamares walls were provided with ramps, which permitted to reach the watercourse. Thus, despite the massive condition of the Tajamares, they still allowed this kind of physical contact with the watercourse, lost when the river was canalized one century later. Once the Tajamares got built, they began to be intensely used as a public promenade. This happened in two ways: the coronation of the walls provided a kind of public path where the most conspicuous people in the city went to encounter themselves and to enjoy the magnificent view of Los Andes mountain range. Additionally, in part of the ground gained to the river, trees allées were planted and adorned with fountains, becoming one the most significant public promenade in the city. That was recognized by various travellers writings, as those of Vancouver and Haigh. The privileged position of the river course, especially in its eastern section, and the continuity provided by the Tajamares helped to configure those public spaces. Numerous painters and illustrators have captured this environment along the 19 th century.

7 One can interpret the construction of the New Tajamares jointly with the urban spaces generated around it as a kind of anticipation of future interventions happened during the 19 th century. This is the case with the canalization of the river finally undertaken in The Tajamares anticipated the canalization both at a technical level, because of the difficulties and ambition of the intervention and at that of its urban consequences. The Project was largely discussed taking in account its technical, economical and urban implications. Financially, it was conceived as a public and private intervention in which the costs of infrastructure were partially financed by the urban development resulting of the ground gained to the river. Due to the canalization and rectification of the river course, a series of metallic bridges were built enhancing the connectivity between both banks of the river. Parque Forestal one of the most characteristics parks in the city and the urbanization built beside it, were also a result of this primarily infrastructural intervention. The association of all these operations made the canalization more profitable and convenient in economical terms, but also more complex and effective at an urban level. Figure 3- J. Espejo, Malaspina Expedition. Vista de la ciudad de Santiago con parte del Tajamar del Río Mapocho desde la Quinta Alegre, c. 1790, Drawing showing Tajamares walls, [Museo Histórico Nacional]. One can ask if these same criteria are currently applied in the recent and very significant infrastructure interventions undertaken in the city of Santiago, such as the case of Costanera Norte motorway, once again associated with the river. This can be considered a virtuosic engineer exercise, running without problems along a tunnel underneath the river course. However consideration of its consequences in terms of public spaces or other urban improvements seem not to have been a significant priority in its conception. A more technically oriented intervention, which of course can be discussed in its own merits, but perhaps the lost of an opportunity 7

8 C i t i e s, n a t i o n s a n d r e g i o n s i n p l a n n i n g h i s t o r y of a more complex and holistic approach to transport infrastructure. Costanera Norte not only didn t include the generation of new public spaces along the river, but also generated some difficulties to produce them in the future. Figure 4- Carlos Wood Taylor. Vista del Tajamar con una de las bajadas a1 lecho del ria, Museo Histórico National, Santiago, c. XIX, Oil painting Tajamares Promenade, [Guarda, 1997]. CONCLUSIONS. 1 During the second half of the 18 th century Santiago de Chile experienced significant transformations. They are the consequence of a wider modernization policy undertaken by the Spanish Empire. It includes significant works in the field of urban and territorial infrastructure as well as the initiative of founding new cities. The construction of the New Tajamares, the completion of a new cathedral and the Palacio de la Moneda are among those works. All of them involve the participation of the Italian Architect Joaquín Toesca. 2 The arrival of Toesca is not an isolated event. He is part of a crew of technicians, mainly military engineers, arrived in America and to the country. Their presence means the availability of new technical skills, which made the erection of many public works possible. They set a new standard in terms of the quality of construction. 3 The Mapocho River concentrated a significant part of the infrastructure investments in the city of Santiago. They include the New Tajamares and the Calicanto Bridge. This fact underlines the importance of Mapocho River to the city: even being a torrent it kept the city under threatening and made a barrier between the city centre and the northern neighbourhood.

9 4 The building of the New Tajamares was a gigantic project with respect to a small city like Santiago. It involved a massive construction effort and changed significantly the relationships between the city and the river course. Such initiative involved a series of professional tensions and conflicts. Behind them there was a way of conceiving the urban meaning of infrastructure and its importance to the city development. 5 The New Tajamares, commissioned to Joaquín Toesca, not only contributed to produce a safer city but to enrich it with new and significant public spaces. They contributed also to monumentalize the landscape role of the river as an articulator between the urban scape and the geographic condition of the valley. 6. The 18 th century infrastructure projects built along the Mapocho River provided us an interesting example about the way in which infrastructure can perform as an active element in the configuration of a more qualified and sustainable city. REFERENCES Baxter, Alan Infrastructure and cities IN Echenique, M., Saint, A., (Ed.) Cities for the new millennium, Spon Press, London De Ramón, Armando. Santiago de Chile ( ): historia de una sociedad urbana, Sudamericana, Santiago de Chile, Echaiz, León R. Historia de Santiago, Santiago de Chile Guarda, Gabriel El arquitecto de la Moneda Joaquín Toesca : una imagen del imperio español en América, Ediciones Universidad católica de Chile, Santiago de Chile, Guarda, Gabriel Flandes Indiano, Las Fortificaciones del reino de Chile, , Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, Martínez, René, El Modelo Clásico de la Ciudad Colonial Hispanoamericana, ensayo sobre los orígenes del urbanismo en América, Universidad de Chile Pérez Oyarzun, Fernando Del centenario al bicentenario, un nuevo horizonte para Santiago IN Greene, Margarita, Rosas José, Valenzuela, Luis, Santiago Proyecto Urbano, ARQ, Santiago, 2011 Pérez Oyarzun, Fernando; Rosas Vera, José; Valenzuela Blejer, Luis, Las aguas del Centenario en ARQ 60,