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The Entrepreneur Architect

Part 2 Dissertation 2008
Juan Pablo Urrutia
University of Chile | Chile
From 1980 up to now 43 new Schools of Architecture have began teaching in Chile. In the last ten years there have been 26 Schools started and 17 of them don’t have yet their first graduates because of their early age. If in the mid nineties the average titleholders were bordering one hundred per year, today they are almost a thousand, and if we consider these 17 Schools, the number of new professionals, in a few more years will border the 1500 graduates every spring. The increase of graduate architects in the last 10 years is of a 500%, and if in the same period we observe the total of constructed surface in Chile considering new buildings and extensions, in public and private areas, there only exist a growth of a15%, nothing compared to the new professionals. Then it is possible to ask ourselves “What are these new architects working on?” If in our methods of education, the most common practice is the request, in which the professor enters the room and he has to transform himself into the client who we all wish to have, ordering us what we have to develop, given an architectural program where, in general, the budget is not a problem, and in some cases requests ask for “something kind of sexy”, as if we all were a Rem Koolhaas, who by the way holds on to the phrase “more is more”. Are these scenarios recreating the real labor possibilities for an architect in Chile? Apparently not. On the contrary, he who projects to construct is the one who does not just responds to a request, but to his capacity to identify community deficiencies.

Those who dominate the mechanisms of public and private management are who manage to argue with a political and commercial language or their proposals will indeed be socially and economically profitable.

In this investigation we consider the entrepreneur spirit and its inherent tools, as a possible solution to work professionally, to recover lost work fields, to find new niches and to install the architectonic speech at a Country level.

Juan Pablo Urrutia


The Dissertation was nominated because in its content do a critic vision of the architectural profession in our country, showing errors and virtues in the professional formation process that exists at this time in Chile. In addition the dissertation shows a new way to develop in the national labor field, understanding the architect subject as entrepreneur and community manager inside the society, understanding the real collective problems, being at the end a critical vision of the real state and economical development that actually are the main points of view associated with the contemporary urban development.

Tutor(s)
Pilar Barba
2008
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