Usuario:JaviTP/Taller

Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes , former Correos.

Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes
Localización
Dirección	Plaza Sotomayor, Valparaíso, Chile
Historia del edificio
Construcción	1936-1942
Arquitecto	Marcelo Deglin Samson
Datos arquitectónicos
Tipo	Government agency
[/ Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes, Valparaíso Sitio web oficial]

Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes en 1936

History

Origins

Originally, this property was extended to the square and was divided into two lots. On the corner of Cochrane Street, the Banco de Depósitos y Descuentos de Valparaíso​, became operational in 1855, becoming the first Chilean bank. On the corner of Prat Street there was the Resguardo Marítimo (port security office) until the Casa de Correos was built in 1868, work of  the architect Manuel Aldunate Avaria. There was a building that converged with both streets, where the stock exchange and the fire department were located until 1858. For more than half a century, the postal building has been one of the institutional buildings that have contributed to the character of civic square in the plaza Sotomayor.

In the early 1930’s, the mayor Lautaro Rosas decided to standardize the square’s building line. Both of the buildings were demolished, and the expropriated pieces of land were combined leaving an 890 m² facade. In 1936 a new project was developed in favor of the new Servicio de Correos y Telégrafos​ (Post Office and Telegraphs) building which total area reaches 5,740 m².

Inauguration

Its inauguration dates from 1942. It was one of the first buildings with modern architecture in Valparaíso, clearly inspired in Erich Mendelsohn’s Schocken Department Store in Stuttgart and the Oberpaur building​ in Santiago, the first modern building ever built in Chile. Consistent with modernist progressivism, the eclectic historicism of most of the buildings until then was left in the past introducing the open floor plan, solving the luminosity problem with an empty space in the center.

Importance

Also, there is a “main block building” that thanks to its location it is able to play a role as a relevant part in a larger group. The longitudinal porteña block that goes along with the land taken from the sea, and at the same time it shows itself as an object, a “place under the sun”. This is a tipical, paradign in modern architecture. This condition is then replaced by a compositional management, and the solution for both corners strengthen the perception of the building as an object.

After moving the post office to the outskirts of the city, in the year 2002 during Ricardo Lagos’s government, it was decided to set up the recently founded Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes (National Council of Culture and Arts) in this building. This new public institution of culture was born confident of the fact that the cultural density of this port city, would make it possible for it to become Chile’s cultural capital.

The value of the architectural production of the twentieth century and the importance of the urban context of this building in order to make this place a site open to the community. The rehabilitation project​ seeks to open the building at street level and project its fifth facade towards the hills and the horizon.