A Land or A Ruin

Villa San Luis: Block nº 14 in the Remaining Plot 18

On April 28, 2021, The Min­istry of Cul­ture of Chile and the Pres­i­dente Riesco Con­struc­tion and Real Estate Com­pa­ny signed an agree­ment to turn the remains of the last block n°14 of the Vil­la San Luis social hous­ing project into a Memo­r­i­al-Muse­um. This was the last event relat­ed to this project that was devel­oped on a piece of land that has been con­stant­ly in dispute. 

Vil­la San Luis was part of an emblem­at­ic urban social inte­gra­tion project designed in the late 1960s in San­ti­a­go, Chile, on a 153-hectare site in a neigh­bor­hood that—at the time—was absorb­ing the urban growth of San­ti­a­go de Chile. Today in ruins and half-demol­ished, the last ves­tiges of this social hous­ing com­plex are locat­ed in what has become one of the most expen­sive real-estate areas of San­ti­a­go, cur­rent­ly char­ac­ter­ized by its large office sky­scrap­ers, lux­u­ry malls and apart­ments. These frag­ile ruins have focused debates around a dis­put­ed land where vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty has played a role both as a mate­r­i­al and rhetor­i­cal argu­ment in favor of the ruin’s pro­tec­tion (search­ing for recog­ni­tion of the his­tor­i­cal events that took place with­in them) while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly it has also defined the coun­ter­ar­gu­ments that sup­ports their demo­li­tion and appro­pri­a­tion by the real estate market. 

The terms of the agree­ment which was approved by the Nation­al Mon­u­ments Coun­cil (CNM), was the result of a nego­ti­a­tion between Real Estate devel­op­ers (today´s own­ers of the land) and the Vil­la San Luis Foun­da­tion (rep­re­sent­ing the fam­i­lies that used to live there). The agree­ment includes an open call archi­tec­ture com­pe­ti­tion financed by the pri­vate devel­op­ers involv­ing mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary teams and the same com­mu­ni­ty of for­mer inhab­i­tants. The details of its devel­op­ment remain unclear, but the guide­lines for the real­iza­tion of this Memo­r­i­al-Muse­um will be defined by the CNM dur­ing 2021–22.

Before this recent agree­ment, in 2017, the last four remain­ing hous­ing blocks, locat­ed in plot 18 of Vil­la San Luis, began to be demol­ished by the pri­vate devel­op­ers (before obtain­ing the build­ing per­mits to do so). This gen­er­at­ed deep con­tro­ver­sy. A group of cit­i­zens, includ­ing pre­vi­ous inhab­i­tants, archi­tects and cul­tur­al agents, protest­ed the demo­li­tion and request­ed their pro­tec­tion by argu­ing that the remain­ing ruins—in their extreme­ly vul­ner­a­ble condition—were an impor­tant moment in Chilean his­to­ry. The con­tem­po­rary ruins rep­re­sent­ed a tes­ti­mo­ni­al to an exam­ple of social inte­gra­tion, and accord­ing to the for­mer inhab­i­tants also a place of human rights vio­la­tions due to the vio­lent evic­tions they suf­fered dur­ing a dic­ta­to­r­i­al government. 

As a result of these events, on June 28^th 2017, Vil­la San Luis was declared a His­tor­i­cal Mon­u­ment by the Nation­al Mon­u­ments Coun­cil for being ​“an emblem­at­ic project of inte­gra­tion and redis­tri­b­u­tion of urban space with cri­te­ria of social equi­ty”, rec­og­niz­ing ​“the way in which the set­tlers were expelled and moved to dif­fer­ent parts of the cap­i­tal, even though they were the legit­i­mate own­ers of the prop­er­ty.”^[1] How­ev­er, a year lat­er, due to pres­sure from the real-estate indus­try, this dis­tinc­tion and pro­tec­tion as a His­tor­i­cal Mon­u­ment faced crit­i­cal mod­i­fi­ca­tions. By 2019, the CNM approved the demo­li­tion of the remain­ing hous­ing block 14, con­sid­er­ing, among oth­er fac­tors, a struc­tur­al engi­neer­ing report endorsed by the Min­istry of Pub­lic Works, that stat­ed the urgency of its demo­li­tion due to its struc­tural­ly unsta­ble and vul­ner­a­ble con­di­tion: ​"this struc­ture pos­es a high risk to the integri­ty of the peo­ple who pass through the place (…) it is not pos­si­ble to recov­er or res­cue of any of the low­er floors, because of this, the demo­li­tion [of] the entire build­ing is immi­nent to release all the mech­a­nisms in unsta­ble equi­lib­ri­um".^[2] This report and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of demo­li­tion would now allow the real-estate devel­op­ers to take full advan­tage of the spec­u­la­tive poten­tial of this site. How­ev­er, because of the con­tro­ver­sies gen­er­at­ed by the-real estate company's man­age­ment of this process, the com­pa­ny com­mit­ted to devel­op and ful­ly finance the new Memo­r­i­al-Muse­um on the foot­print of the remain­ing block.

The request for demo­li­tion and the pro­pos­al to con­struct a new memo­r­i­al build­ing intro­duced a series of dis­cus­sions in the pub­lic debate that have focused main­ly on the mate­r­i­al remains of the build­ings and their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty as archi­tec­tur­al objects. The struc­tur­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of the block has been used to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly sup­port two oppo­site sides of the argu­ment regard­ing how the ruins should be addressed. On one hand, the real-estate com­pa­ny argued in favor of the demo­li­tion of their remains due to the dan­ger­ous and pre­car­i­ous con­di­tion of its struc­ture.^[3] On the oth­er hand, the coun­ter­ar­gu­ments pro­posed by the for­mer res­i­dents defend­ed the high­ly vul­ner­a­ble con­di­tion as a reflec­tion of the his­to­ry of these build­ings, thus argu­ing the need for their con­ser­va­tion.^[4]

This debate high­lights how the main dis­cours­es around mon­u­ments and their preser­va­tion are close­ly relat­ed to cer­tain prac­tices and nar­ra­tives of destruc­tion.^[5] Under this notion, how does the idea of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty oper­ate as seen from oppo­site sides of preser­va­tion argu­ments in the case of Vil­la San Luis? The answer seems to lie in the con­tra­dic­to­ry val­ues seen in both the ruins of the hous­ing com­plex and in the land with­in which they are located. 

Vil­la San Luis is not only an archi­tec­tur­al object, but above all a mate­r­i­al tes­ti­mo­ny to a series of polit­i­cal, social and urban changes that have focused on the rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion of the urban land­scape and a means to jus­ti­fy cer­tain dis­cours­es and oper­a­tions that rely on its mate­ri­al­i­ty. The notion of vul­ner­a­ble ruin and how this con­cept has been used, in the case of Vil­la San Luis, has enabled broad­er pub­lic con­sent on the man­age­ment of the land.

An Urban Utopia in a Disputed Land 

Vil­la San Luis urban hous­ing project was ini­tial­ly con­ceived by the Frei Mon­tal­va gov­ern­ment (1964−1970). How­ev­er, the project was lat­er devel­oped and built dur­ing the ​"Unidad Pop­u­lar" left-wing gov­ern­ment of Sal­vador Allende (1970−1973), as part of a broad­er urban strat­e­gy and polit­i­cal project that sought to gen­er­ate greater social inte­gra­tion and at the same time to address the prob­lem of infor­mal hous­ing in mar­gin­al areas of the city, which was preva­lent a cru­cial issue at the time.^[6]

Some local authors con­sid­er Vil­la San Luis the most emblem­at­ic Chilean mate­ri­al­iza­tion of an urban utopia;^[7] it out­lines a spe­cif­ic cat­e­go­ry of urban projects that have spread from the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry as a deter­ri­to­ri­al­ized, abstract and coher­ent ​"pro­gram of action"^[8] which aimed to rad­i­cal­ly trans­form the exist­ing social-his­tor­i­cal order.^[9] Accord­ing to Fran­coise Choay, this cat­e­go­ry of projects has their ori­gin in the lit­er­ary genre of utopias—inaugurated by Thomas More in 1515—which offered a crit­i­cal approach to ​“mod­el a future real­i­ty in space” and, at the same time, they became an ​“a pri­ori device for the con­cep­tion of built space”^[10]. Togeth­er with the archi­tec­tur­al trea­tis­es, they con­sti­tute the basis for the estab­lish­ment of urban­ism as an autonomous dis­ci­pline between the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.^[11] Urban utopias, in this sense, rep­re­sent new abstract mod­els of urban orga­ni­za­tions that use the tech­ni­cal and visu­al lan­guage of archi­tec­tur­al knowl­edge togeth­er with the pol­i­tics of social trans­for­ma­tion of utopi­an lit­er­a­ture. By incor­po­rat­ing design prin­ci­ples and spa­tial con­fig­u­ra­tions that imply strong social changes, urban utopias opened the pos­si­bil­i­ty to under­stand archi­tec­ture and urban design as a pow­er­ful polit­i­cal tool. This is pre­cise­ly what hap­pened in Latin Amer­i­ca dur­ing the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, where polit­i­cal utopias pre­ced­ed and lat­er defined urban utopias^[12] man­i­fest­ing in ambi­tious social inte­gra­tion hous­ing projects.

The mate­ri­al­iza­tion of the utopi­an mod­el of Vil­la San Luis was pos­si­ble thanks to a series of archi­tec­tural­ized polit­i­cal actions oper­at­ing on the land and in direct rela­tion to those who would inhab­it it. First, the site’s loca­tion with­in the city was a deter­min­ing fac­tor: at the begin­ning of the 1970s Santiago’s Las Con­des bor­ough con­tained a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of infor­mal set­tle­ments. In this sce­nario, the San Luis project was intend­ed to offer hous­ing for the infor­mal set­tlers resid­ing in the same area and, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, it aimed to guar­an­tee their right to live in the very place where for years they had estab­lished effec­tive labor, social, and eco­nom­ic ties.^[13]

A sec­ond cru­cial point that the project estab­lish­es in rela­tion to land is land own­er­ship: 1,038 fam­i­lies gained access to prop­er­ty titles in Vil­la San Luis through mech­a­nisms of sav­ings and the sub­se­quent pay­ment of loans. These fam­i­lies moved into the flats in Vil­la San Luis between Jan­u­ary and June 1972. In lat­er inter­views the set­tlers remem­bered that the Pres­i­dent of the Repub­lic him­self attend­ed the han­dover cer­e­mo­ny where the doors of each flat had a card inscribed with the sur­name of the fam­i­ly to which it had been assigned.^[14] This act was a pow­er­ful­ly sym­bol­ic rhetor­i­cal ges­ture in which the state appeared as the prin­ci­pal agent in charge of equal­ly dis­trib­ut­ing land titles. But while rein­forc­ing the mate­r­i­al link with the site, this episode para­dox­i­cal­ly pro­mot­ed the idea of own­er­ship as a means to get out of the con­di­tion of eco­nom­ic and social precariousness. 

A third impor­tant point is that the inhab­i­tants were involved from the begin­ning in the devel­op­ment of the project. Infor­mal dwellers, orga­nized in com­mit­tees, par­tic­i­pat­ed in the design and con­struc­tion of the hous­ing units thanks to a hous­ing pre-allo­ca­tion mech­a­nism: each fam­i­ly received an apart­ment that was specif­i­cal­ly defined for them.^[15]

With the coup d'état of Sep­tem­ber 11, 1973—and the instal­la­tion of the mil­i­tary gov­ern­ment of Gen­er­al Augus­to Pinochet—the polit­i­cal utopia of the social­ist gov­ern­ment was abrupt­ly inter­rupt­ed and then buried. The dic­ta­tor­ship vio­lent­ly silenced any voice of polit­i­cal dis­sent to intro­duce a rad­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion of the eco­nom­ic sys­tem and social val­ues. A series of plans, poli­cies and pro­grams, based on Mil­ton Friedman's neolib­er­al the­o­ry were imple­ment­ed; includ­ing the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of basic resources such as water, extrac­tive mate­ri­als but above all the land.^[16] In this way the dic­ta­to­r­i­al gov­ern­ment turned Chile into a neolib­er­al dystopic lab­o­ra­to­ry for the most rad­i­cal eco­nom­ic exper­i­ments in the world. This process not only trans­formed the eco­nom­ic sys­tem, but in turn the ter­ri­to­ry itself and, con­se­quent­ly, its social structures. 

Nao­mi Klein argues that the neolib­er­al free mar­ket poli­cies advo­cat­ed by Fried­man have devel­oped due to what she called the ​"shock ther­a­py" strat­e­gy. This idea was relat­ed to the exper­i­ments con­duct­ed by psy­chi­a­trist Ewen Cameron with the CIA, who was ana­lyz­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of decon­struct­ing or deep cleans­ing the minds of his patients in order to rebuild them from scratch. Cat­a­stro­phes and crises, and even total­i­tar­i­an envi­ron­ments, are used to estab­lish con­tro­ver­sial and ques­tion­able poli­cies while cit­i­zens are emo­tion­al­ly and phys­i­cal­ly unable to under­stand the sit­u­a­tion and devel­op an ade­quate response or effec­tive resis­tance. Klein demon­strates that the trau­mat­ic expe­ri­ence of the mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship installed in Chile was a spe­cif­ic strat­e­gy to imple­ment the neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic sys­tem in the coun­try.^[17] David Har­vey also describes San­ti­a­go as one of the most extreme glob­al exam­ples of the dis­man­tling of all mar­ket reg­u­la­to­ry struc­tures. From 1973 onwards, the way was paved for the more cre­ative (but also pro­lif­ic) expres­sion of the free mar­ket that would devel­op in the fol­low­ing decades.^[18]

The trans­for­ma­tions pro­duced by the imple­men­ta­tion of the neo-lib­er­al eco­nom­ic mod­el in Chile were also put into prac­tice through a total manip­u­la­tion of urban land. In 1973, the mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship draft­ed a doc­u­ment in Chile called El ladrillo (The Brick), which laid out the basis of the Chilean mil­i­tary government's eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy.^[19] Through Decrees with the force of law, a series of urban poli­cies rad­i­cal­ly trans­formed the phys­i­cal shape of San­ti­a­go de Chile along with its social structures.

The cen­tral claim of the new urban devel­op­ment was to free the urban lim­its of the city of San­ti­a­go, which made urban land poten­tial­ly lim­it­less^[20]. Reg­u­la­tions that used to lim­it urban bound­aries were now opened to an uncon­trolled process of urban expan­sion that treat­ed land as an infi­nite resource.^[21] As a con­se­quence, land own­er­ship was grad­u­al­ly set­tled as a social aspi­ra­tion; this accel­er­at­ed the trans­fer of land titles from state agen­cies to pri­vate indi­vid­u­als. Thus, the city's inhab­i­tants were chan­neled into eco­nom­ic sub­jects.^[22] The increase in the price of land in cen­tral areas and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of exploit­ing it for eco­nom­ic pur­pos­es even­tu­al­ly dis­placed the inhab­i­tants of these areas to the periph­ery in new urban areas defined by the expan­sion of urban land.

Between 1976 and 1985, through the pro­grams of Operación Con­frater­nidad and the Erad­i­ca­tion and Set­tle­ment pro­gram, more than 30,000 fam­i­lies were forced to move from cen­tral areas to periph­er­al sites, bru­tal­ly dis­rupt­ing the social rela­tion between the land and its inhab­i­tants.^[23] As a result, the cen­tral areas of San­ti­a­go under­went a mas­sive process of ​"cre­ative destruc­tion"^[24] to open up strate­gic spaces to absorb new pri­vate invest­ment pos­si­bil­i­ties based on max­i­mum prof­itabil­i­ty with spec­u­la­tive spa­tial orga­ni­za­tion. The erad­i­ca­tion of the inhab­i­tants of Vil­la San Luis and the pro­gres­sive demo­li­tion of their hous­es was emblem­at­ic of this process. 

At mid­night on Decem­ber 28, 1976, a group of 112 fam­i­lies of Vil­la San Luis were by mil­i­tary com­mand vio­lent­ly evict­ed and trans­port­ed to var­i­ous periph­er­al loca­tions of San­ti­a­go: some of them were tak­en to a waste site in Pudahuel, oth­ers were left in a field in San­ta Rosa, on a road in San José de Maipo, in a garbage dump in Lo Cur­ro and the rest were moved to Ren­ca^[25]. The hous­ing blocks and the land began to be occu­pied by the mil­i­tary and their fam­i­lies. The evic­tion of the inhab­i­tants con­tin­ued from 1975 to mid-1980 (for var­i­ous rea­sons 95 fam­i­lies were allowed to stay in Vil­la San Luis).^[26] In 1988, the dic­ta­tor­ship of Augus­to Pinochet came to an end by a pop­u­lar ref­er­en­dum. Despite the tran­si­tion to democ­ra­cy, the influ­ence of mil­i­tary pow­er on the government's polit­i­cal choic­es was (is) still very strong. In 1991 the Min­istry of Nation­al Assets trans­ferred the prop­er­ty of Vil­la San Luis to the Nation­al Armed Forces, legal­iz­ing its mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion. The occu­pa­tion last­ed until 1996, at which time the land val­ue increased and was sold to a pri­vate real estate devel­op­er. ^[27]

A tab­u­la rasa^[28] oper­a­tion fol­lowed this episode: the whole city was con­sid­ered an exper­i­men­tal field, an erasable sur­face where the traces of pre­vi­ous ide­o­log­i­cal exper­i­ments could be com­plete­ly delet­ed and re-inscribed. The mil­i­tary gov­ern­ment imple­ment­ed a series of actions to mate­ri­al­ly and sym­bol­i­cal­ly erase any trace of the social­ist pow­er struc­ture, mak­ing room for future forms of ide­o­log­i­cal ​'inscrip­tion'. A large num­ber of exist­ing build­ings were com­plete­ly demol­ished, clear­ing the land and leav­ing it open for future spec­u­la­tion. Urban land became an extreme­ly prof­itable com­mod­i­ty.^[29]

In this con­text, the demo­li­tion of Vil­la San Luis began, open­ing the site to pri­vate invest­ment. The whole area was grad­u­al­ly trans­formed into a busi­ness dis­trict and became part of one of the most expen­sive neigh­bor­hoods in the city. Today, only a small area of the site has been left untouched: the last remains of this site (plot 18‑A), where the ruins of hous­ing block 14 are locat­ed. In this last avail­able area, a new office tow­ers project is designed to be built. The ​"Pres­i­dente Riesco" real-estate com­pa­ny pro­posed a new project on the Vil­la San Luis site enti­tled ​"Con­jun­to Armóni­co Oasis de Riesco Ex — Pres­i­dente Riesco''. The project involved an invest­ment of 110 mil­lion USD for the con­struc­tion of 61 com­mer­cial premis­es and 108 offices, with a total area of 201,664.82 square meters.^[30] The pro­gram­mat­ic choice in the con­text of an abun­dance of vacant office space in the area is evi­dence that the project is not intend­ed to sat­is­fy local demands, pre­serve the land as a com­mon good or the his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship with human rights vio­la­tion episodes, but is con­sid­ered only a prof­itable invest­ment ven­ture.^[31]

In 2017, the demo­li­tion of the remain­ing blocks led to protests that revived the pub­lic debate on the pro­tec­tion of Vil­la San Luis. The groups oppos­ing their destruc­tion argued that the build­ings' his­tor­i­cal val­ue not only relies on the mate­r­i­al tes­ti­monies of an exem­plary social inte­gra­tion project, but also rep­re­sents a dra­mat­ic episode of human rights vio­la­tions. The San Luis Foun­da­tion, togeth­er with archi­tect Miguel Lawn­er, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of CORMU (the pub­lic insti­tu­tion in charge of the con­struc­tion of Vil­la San Luis in the 1970s) was able to nego­ti­ate the dec­la­ra­tion of Vil­la San Luis as a His­toric Mon­u­ment.^[32] One of the most sig­nif­i­cant argu­ments in favor of this dec­la­ra­tion empha­sized that ​"this project, which con­tem­plat­ed in its first stage about 1,000 hous­es, was emblem­at­ic from the polit­i­cal and social point of view, for break­ing with the socioe­co­nom­ic seg­re­ga­tion of the city, inte­grat­ing the pop­u­la­tion of diverse socioe­co­nom­ic lev­els in the same urban space."^[33]

Emilio de La Cer­da, the cur­rent Under­sec­re­tary of Cul­tur­al Her­itage of the Gov­ern­ment of Chile (before being appoint­ed to his cur­rent posi­tion) argued in 2017 that the dec­la­ra­tion of Vil­la San Luis as a Nation­al Mon­u­ment omit­ted any spe­cif­ic ref­er­ence to the build­ing, ruins and phys­i­cal objects on the site. Accord­ing to De la Cer­da, this omis­sion was not a mis­take, but rather the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a par­tic­u­lar desire to high­light the Vil­la San Luis site as the bat­tle­ground of two diver­gent con­cep­tions of the city's his­to­ry and its devel­op­ment^[34]: ​"What is con­test­ed at Vil­la San Luis is not a set of ruined build­ings but land. It is a con­flict con­nect­ed to a val­ue sys­tem that oper­ates on that spe­cif­ic urban plot stressed by the exchange val­ue, the his­tor­i­cal val­ue and the social val­ue assigned to it by dif­fer­ent groups and mem­bers of soci­ety."^[35] The exis­tence of two oppos­ing views on land—in the same place—is the key point in the debate on the her­itage val­ue of Vil­la San Luis. Accord­ing to De la Cer­da, the dis­cus­sion on the val­ue of the land exceeds the debate on the her­itage val­ue of the archi­tec­tur­al object: the lack of ref­er­ence to any archi­tec­tur­al object in the decree of her­itage pro­tec­tion would oper­ate at the lev­el of land val­ue, avoid­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of it being com­mer­cial­ly trad­ed.^[36]

Despite the above, on June 26, 2019, the Nation­al Mon­u­ments Coun­cil approved the demo­li­tion of the last sur­viv­ing block of Vil­la San Luis. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, the very absence of direct ref­er­ences to the pro­tec­tion of its buildings—in the His­toric Mon­u­ments decree—was what allowed the real estate com­pa­ny to argue in favor of demol­ish­ing them. The deci­sion was based on a report by the engi­neer­ing office VMB which was hired by the real estate com­pa­ny Pres­i­dente Riesco and endorsed by the Engi­neer­ing depart­ment of the Min­istry of Pub­lic Works declar­ing the state of extreme vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of the remains of the build­ing.^[37] Through the pro­pos­al for the con­struc­tion of the new memo­r­i­al muse­um, the real estate com­pa­ny man­aged to reduce the lim­its of pro­tec­tion — that in the decree were asso­ci­at­ed with the perime­ter of the land — and con­cen­trate them in the muse­um space. The orig­i­nal perime­ter of pro­tec­tion of 4,329 square meters was reduced to a plot of approx­i­mate­ly 800 square meters. The pro­pos­al to build a new mon­u­ment that appears, in the first instance, as a form of com­pen­sa­tion from the real estate com­pa­ny actu­al­ly increas­es the area of land avail­able for new con­struc­tion and reduces the lim­its of the land pro­tect­ed as a Nation­al Monument. 

From this point on, a media debate was set in motion based on the image of the vul­ner­a­ble ruins of Vil­la San Luis and the dis­pute over its pro­tec­tion or demo­li­tion. This debate cen­tered in the build­ings (and not on the land) is ampli­fied by the con­struc­tion of the new Memo­r­i­al-Muse­um that must con­dense into one object all the mate­r­i­al and imma­te­r­i­al val­ues linked to the Vil­la San Luis project and gen­er­ate an extend­ed agree­ment between the oppos­ing par­ties. How­ev­er, this media debate con­ceals what has always been behind this plot and its his­tor­i­cal val­ue: the dis­pute over the land val­ue and its poten­tial for spec­u­la­tive real-estate development.

The ​‘Vulnerable’ Ruins of Villa San Luis.

The ongo­ing dis­cus­sions regard­ing Vil­la San Luis´ preser­va­tion or demo­li­tion have main­ly focused on the val­ue of its remain­ing build­ings and not on the land pro­tec­tion mech­a­nism that gave rise to a social inte­gra­tion project and could be even­tu­al­ly used to imple­ment this mod­el once again; despite the fact that what was defined through a decree as a His­tor­i­cal Mon­u­ment, was the area where the ruins are insert­ed with­out any men­tion to the val­ue of the ruins them­selves. How­ev­er, aging build­ings, as ruins, acquire a sense of pow­er in soci­ety that enhances nar­ra­tives and dis­cours­es around them, a giv­en qual­i­ty that the plot by itself could not obtain. Ruins are per­ceived as a melan­cholic object that through their visu­al aging qual­i­ties reveal the pass­ing of time and pro­duce a visu­al con­nec­tion with the sub­ject. This sense of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion that comes as the result of the rela­tion­ship a view­er could estab­lish with the building´s pres­ence is defined as a mod­ern cult to mon­u­ments^[38].

To under­stand the pow­er of the ruins of Vil­la San Luis oper­at­ing by enhanc­ing an eco­nom­ic sys­tem that trans­formed them into obso­lete build­ings, it is nec­es­sary to under­stand the effect and the pow­er that ruins have on peo­ple. At the begin­ning of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, Alois Rei­gl in his essay ​“The Mod­ern Cult of Mon­u­ments: Its Char­ac­ter and Its Ori­gin'' trans­formed the tra­di­tion­al notion of the mon­u­ment by defin­ing a new ele­ment that char­ac­ter­ized them. This new notion does not nec­es­sar­i­ly have to do with the com­mem­o­ra­tion of his­tor­i­cal events, but rather with the aes­thet­ic iden­ti­fi­ca­tion that a sub­ject could find with­in a building´s pres­ence that could evoke cer­tain feel­ings; and how this sub­jec­tive sig­ni­fi­ca­tion is main­ly giv­en by a building´s age val­ue.^[39] This is the pow­er obtained by what he defined as an unin­ten­tion­al mon­u­ment. While the inten­tion­al monument´s pur­pose is to com­mem­o­rate a spe­cif­ic event, the unin­ten­tion­al mon­u­ment, on the oth­er hand, has not been erect­ed for com­mem­o­ra­tive pur­pos­es. It cor­re­sponds to a build­ing that, due to its decay­ing and ruined state, acquires a defined aes­thet­ic value. 

In this sense, we can under­stand the ruins of Vil­la San Luis as roman­tic objects that pro­duce nos­tal­gia about an idea of the past that is no longer in the present, but also act as a reminder of that past. As ruins, with­out func­tion in the present and in a state of decay, they are capa­ble of absorb­ing the mean­ing that the sub­jects give them. If the blocks of Vil­la San Luis were still func­tion­ing today as a hous­ing com­plex, the aes­thet­ic qual­i­ties grant­ed by their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty would not appear and con­se­quent­ly they would not be the sub­ject of debate to be rec­og­nized as mon­u­ments. This aes­thet­ic rela­tion between man and ruins, trans­forms them into objects of cult, where nar­ra­tives are con­struct­ed defin­ing a new aes­thet­ic val­ue that has to do with a nos­tal­gic idea of get­ting clos­er to the past.^[40]

Fol­low­ing Alois Rigel argu­ments, Thordis Arrhe­nius stress­es that in today's con­ser­va­tion prac­tices, when an old build­ing becomes a mon­u­ment, its fragili­ty and con­se­quent­ly the need for its pro­tec­tion, becomes its dis­tinct mark. In this process, the use-val­ue tends to con­flict with the monument’s com­mem­o­ra­tive-val­ue. Use val­ue requires a build­ing to main­tain its func­tions, while age val­ue is giv­en by a cer­tain tem­po­ral dis­tance and there­fore the obso­les­cence of that build­ing.^[41] This obso­les­cence, and there­fore vul­ner­a­ble state, is what is val­ued in con­ser­va­tion nar­ra­tives, and con­structs the notion of a cult of ruins. 

The ruins of Vil­la San Luis, in a mate­r­i­al state of decay and aban­don­ment with its col­lapsed struc­ture, are evi­dence that this con­di­tion is what mobi­lized actions in both direc­tions: its phys­i­cal appear­ance embod­ies the idea of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty that led groups to seek its pro­tec­tion by their recog­ni­tion as mon­u­ments but also jus­ti­fied coun­ter­ar­gu­ments and dis­cours­es in favor of its destruc­tion. The idea of vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty aris­es from these con­flu­ent con­flicts. In this sense, the notion of nos­tal­gia of ruins is invert­ed, thus becom­ing a receiv­ing object that sus­tains the con­flic­tive nar­ra­tive, in which archi­tec­ture and its arti­fice is used to jus­ti­fy par­tic­u­lar discourses.

It was the very act of the attempt to demol­ish them in 2017, with­out a per­mit, that ignit­ed the debate about their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and what this vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty itself rep­re­sents, in their ten­sion between preser­va­tion and destruc­tion. The blocks appear then as anachro­nis­tic fig­ures, rep­re­sent­ing a past and with­out a func­tion in the present, becom­ing fig­ures of cult due to a con­stant threat of dis­ap­pear­ing that enhances its mate­r­i­al unique­ness brought by its decay­ing and frag­ile exis­tence. Their unique­ness val­ue then lies not on their mon­u­men­tal­i­ty and the aes­thet­ic qual­i­ties, but on the con­trary on qual­i­ties such as fragili­ty and the pos­si­bil­i­ty to be dis­in­te­grat­ed and destroyed. Fur­ther­more, its per­pet­u­at­ed exis­tence relies on the dis­cours­es that insti­tu­tions, inter­na­tion­al char­ters and orga­ni­za­tions, pro­fes­sion­als and media places around its con­tin­u­a­tion and its future.^[42]

Even though con­ser­va­tion and destruc­tion are opposed forces, they are pro­found­ly inter­re­lat­ed to under­stand the pow­er of objects and their mean­ing in soci­ety.^[43] Fragili­ty and the idea that cer­tain build­ings could dis­ap­pear, be destroyed and for­got­ten attribute them with a val­ue that enhances their unique­ness in the nar­ra­tives of con­ser­va­tion; it becomes its dis­tinc­tive mark, and their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty mobi­lizes their need for pro­tec­tion. Nar­ra­tives of dan­ger and fragili­ty have always sur­round­ed a monument´s mate­ri­al­i­ty, being able to moti­vate dif­fer­ent actions—legal, phys­i­cal or spatial—around its preser­va­tion. The dis­cours­es around the risks a mon­u­ment could be sub­ject­ed to, enhances their impor­tance and their mean­ing to soci­ety, in the con­stant play between destruc­tion and sav­ing to mobi­lize actions and cul­tur­al sig­ni­fi­ca­tions.^[44]

How­ev­er, once the real estate com­pa­ny suc­ceed­ed in argu­ing that their vul­ner­a­ble struc­ture made their main­te­nance unsus­tain­able over time, the argu­ments regard­ing the pro­tec­tion of their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and the con­ser­va­tion of Vil­la San Luis as mon­u­ments end­ed and were replaced by the idea of their trans­for­ma­tion into a new Memo­r­i­al Muse­um to be built in the area: from an unin­ten­tion­al to an inten­tion­al one. Such trans­for­ma­tion was pos­si­ble thanks to an agree­ment between the real-estate devel­op­ers and the com­mu­ni­ties look­ing for the building’s pro­tec­tion as a mate­r­i­al wit­ness of deter­mined his­tor­i­cal events. While it was agreed that the future muse­um will be defined by the results of an archi­tec­tur­al com­pe­ti­tion, there is no cer­tain­ty on how the project will look: if it will pre­serve cer­tain aspects of the remain­ing building’s struc­ture or it will sim­ply use the exist­ing foot­print as bound­aries for a new build­ing. How­ev­er, this new inten­tion­al mon­u­ment, like the ruins (as unin­ten­tion­al mon­u­ment) empha­sizes a nos­tal­gic idea of a past and fails to address ideas of social inte­gra­tion that could have been imple­ment­ed to con­struct a more equi­table urban future.

Mario Car­po, in ​“The Post­mod­ern Cult of Mon­u­ments”^[45], argues that the words mon­u­ment and memo­r­i­al are often used as inter­change­able syn­onyms with­out tak­ing account of the seman­tic shift this reflects. He explains that mon­u­ments today do not stand any­more to be con­ceived as role mod­els for a future nor do they cel­e­brate his­tor­i­cal achieve­ments. Today monuments—that are designed as such or exist­ing build­ings trans­formed into monuments—are main­ly cre­at­ed to remem­ber a past, record­ing trau­mat­ic events or remem­ber­ing vic­tims of cer­tain crimes: they are imme­di­ate­ly con­ceived as memo­ri­als. Mon­u­ments are memo­ri­al­ized because they are not able any­more to point towards an ide­al of the future because of the impos­si­bil­i­ty to con­struct a uni­tary ide­al of one, or the exis­tence of too many his­to­ries. ^[46] Today's ten­den­cy of cult of the past not only con­ceives mon­u­ments as places of remem­brance, but often these same places and their mean­ings can be used as per­sua­sive tools of cul­tur­al pro­duc­tion. Doc­u­ments of the past are trans­formed into mon­u­ments^[47], where they gain author­i­ty by con­struct­ing nar­ra­tives. In this rec­ol­lec­tion and selec­tion of what is of val­ue to be per­pet­u­at­ed and what is not, mean­ings can be shift­ed, his­to­ries can be recon­fig­ured, and cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance can be trans­formed.^[48]

The memo­r­i­al muse­um of Vil­la San Luis, in what­ev­er form it mate­ri­al­izes, will end up soft­en­ing what was real­ly in dis­pute, which would be the pro­tec­tion of land for social inte­gra­tion in an area with high eco­nom­ic sur­plus val­ue. At least today's dete­ri­o­rat­ing mate­ri­al­i­ty of the ruins of Vil­la San Luis act­ed as evi­dence that, before the cor­po­rate build­ings, there was a pop­u­lar res­i­den­tial space and urban inte­gra­tion project on that very block^[49]. Trans­formed into a muse­um, that resis­tance will dis­ap­pear and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of con­ceiv­ing a dif­fer­ent future in that plot will com­plete­ly van­ish. Although the ruins were approached in the debates from their aes­thet­ic and nos­tal­gic role, at least their pres­ence still pro­tect­ed a piece of land that could have opened the debate into anoth­er direc­tion. The Memo­r­i­al Muse­um instead closed that pos­si­bil­i­ty defin­i­tive­ly by dimin­ish­ing the pro­tect­ed area land. The land will not be con­test­ed and pro­tect­ed any­more but neu­tral­ized will par­tic­i­pate in the log­ic of a city mobi­lized by eco­nom­ic growth. As Robert Bevan says: ​"only what is val­ued by the dom­i­nant cul­ture or cul­tures in a giv­en soci­ety is pre­served and cared for; the rest may be destroyed, either care­less­ly or on pur­pose, or sim­ply aban­doned to its fate".^[50]

A Vulnerable Future

Much has been writ­ten and dis­cussed about the case of Vil­la San Luis. These dis­cus­sions have focused main­ly on the vio­lent his­tor­i­cal events that took place in the recent past that define the cur­rent con­flicts of preser­va­tion or destruc­tion cen­tered on these ruins as archi­tec­tur­al objects.The remains of Vil­la San Luis install the idea of how the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of the ruins can act as a means to trans­form their mate­r­i­al con­di­tions (their vul­ner­a­ble struc­ture) and phys­i­cal appear­ance (of decay) into roman­tic and nos­tal­gic objects — appeal­ing to a past and remem­ber­ing it — yet avoid­ing to address the ideas of inte­gra­tion that could have been imple­ment­ed to build a dif­fer­ent future. By approach­ing this debate main­ly from an aes­thet­ic con­cern ‑that the archi­tec­tur­al object pos­sess­es- this dis­cus­sion has omit­ted a deep­er reflec­tion on the project´s social con­tri­bu­tion that con­sist­ed of a series of mech­a­nisms which aimed to pro­mote social diver­si­ty by act­ing on land use and value. 

In an area of strong eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment and in a land of high cap­i­tal gain, these blocks stand as a form of resis­tance to a dis­trict that has erased oth­er traces of this his­to­ry. The ruins of Vil­la San Luis appear today as uncom­fort­able objects that bear wit­ness to an unset­tling past. Despite the above, the dis­cours­es on their preser­va­tion have trans­formed them into nos­tal­gic objects that end up act­ing in favor of the eco­nom­ic log­ic of this dis­put­ed land, instead of con­test­ing it or at least con­tain­ing its effects. In addi­tion, both the ruins and the promise of a new mon­u­ment have been used as a means to divert atten­tion from the sig­nif­i­cant aspects of the project main­ly con­nect­ed to the social val­ues of the land:such as its loca­tion and the con­struc­tion of a social­ly diverse neighborhood. 

This process is the reflec­tion of a broad­er cul­tur­al ten­den­cy to ascribe that attrib­ut­es sym­bol­ic mean­ings to build­ings but can­not estab­lish the same kind of sen­ti­men­tal val­ue in a plot of land. The site by itself is not capa­ble of pro­duc­ing the aes­thet­ic iden­ti­fi­ca­tion that Riegl defined, since it lacks an aes­thet­ic mate­r­i­al con­di­tion that allows the con­struc­tion of nar­ra­tives around it. On the oth­er hand, the ruins pos­sess an archi­tec­tur­al and a mate­r­i­al val­ue, and its arti­fice sup­ports the visu­al chore­o­gra­phies and dis­cours­es are impreg­nat­ed to its vul­ner­a­ble struc­ture and its lack of func­tion (a cult of ruins). Due to the need to install ideas of val­ue in cer­tain mate­r­i­al objects and their aes­thet­ic con­di­tions — which act as recep­tors of these — the ruins of the build­ings in the plot of Vil­la San Luis took over the pub­lic debate. Their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty became then the focus of dif­fer­ent dis­cours­es regard­ing how their con­ti­nu­ity in the future and how this per­ma­nence should be addressed. 

This is fur­ther accen­tu­at­ed by the idea of the con­struc­tion of the new Memo­r­i­al-Muse­um, which appears para­dox­i­cal­ly as an instru­ment that con­tributes to increas­ing the com­mer­cial val­ue of the land, help­ing to sus­tain the very val­ue sys­tem that the orig­i­nal project was intend­ed to con­trast. In the agree­ment for the con­struc­tion of this Memo­r­i­al Muse­um, the land area will be sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduced in rela­tion to the site now occu­pied by the last ves­tiges of Vil­la San Luis. This reduc­tion means that the land can no longer be used in any oth­er way and both the resilience of the ruins and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of giv­ing the site a social inte­gra­tion pro­gram is total­ly lost. 

What seems to be in a vul­ner­a­ble con­di­tion is the very idea of the future to build a dif­fer­ent urban con­fig­u­ra­tion — that could be informed by a past mem­o­ry recog­ni­tion — that the ruins installs today. Can her­itage pro­tec­tion be a means to pro­mote sub­stan­tial changes on the use and val­ue of a plot?? And how could the pro­tec­tion of a past ide­al be a trans­for­ma­tive force to pro­tect the land from eco­nom­ic spec­u­la­tion and pro­mote social diversity? 

The case of San Luis reveals par­tic­u­lar ten­sions that open the con­ver­sa­tion about the role that mon­u­ments and her­itage could play in today's cities. It also opens ques­tions on how to pre­serve and expand nar­ra­tives that could act in a way where the past can influ­ence future trans­for­ma­tions. A role where preser­va­tion could act as an effec­tive tool that could lim­it real estate spec­u­la­tion and its seg­re­gat­ing effects on con­tem­po­rary cities.