Zona de Operación. La hibridez táctica de la exposición demostrativa Santiago Amengual en Pudahuel, Chile

The Housing Demonstration Exhibition was one of the last competitions organized by the Housing Corporation (CORVI) before its dissolution in 1976 and one of the first projects managed by its successor, the Housing and Urbanization Service (SERVIU). Marked by the need of the civil-military dictatorship to respond to the housing demand, it was used by officials to explore a model whereby construction companies would take on a set of processes involved in that industry. This was implemented in a small eight-block sector of the Santiago Amengual Neighborhood through a competition that tendered the construction of nine CORVI typologies and the development of one hundred and fifty-six types of semi-detached and terraced housing of different sizes, layouts, and construction techniques. Using information from documents compiled in two research projects associated with the issue and compared against ethnographic observations made in 2022 and 2023 at the same site, it was possible to identify the different project ideas explored for the Santiago Amengual Neighborhood complex, determine variations in their coherence, and identify the Demonstration Exhibition competition as an operation zone, open to the evaluation and speculation of the behavior and performance of the models, techniques, and materialities used in it. The information analyzed also allows proposing that this operation zone facilitated the installation of a new hierarchical relationship between architecture and construction practices, particularly those associated with technical knowledge and capital, and that, in this sense, its extreme heterogeneity showed the tactical willingness to promote the conventions of competition and production practices appropriate to this change and the installation of a social housing market without state participation.