The Architecture as a transforming agent

The reconciliation between tourism and communities has transformed Lake Lanalhue into a natural, economic and political resource. We are aware of being part of  our own time and place, in the Arauco province  where tense ancestral and  historical demands are taking place,  a complex period in many aspects, and instead of avoiding the implications that this entails, we decided to face this period by contributing from what we know best, and this is to act from within the territory with the architecture that makes us the most sense, that is the architecture whose action transforms and summons the encounter of worlds that at times seem so distant, but that share a specific place of the planet, a common place in the Cosmos.

Yepún is one of the last works developed by Susana Herrera & Factoría in Lake Lanalhue. And like others, it is part of the continuity of a series of architectural and tourist projects that have been developed in the province of Arauco for more than a decade. And as such, it is an articulating architectural piece that becomes a landmark along with others, with a very specific tourist programme, become an Astronomical Observatory Tourist Ethnic.

Yepun Observatory was partially co-financed by a Corfo, a governmental innovation contest won by its director Marcelo Cifuentes, who partered with Pedro Durán, owner of Quelén to decided to install here the southernmost observatory in Chile. Architecturally, it is a recycled object. Its structure is mainly in wood, and was entirely constructed by local master artisans. For us, is a project that transcends the architectural object itself and contextualizes it with several interventions around it and designed by Susana Herrera & her team Factoria.

Locating this project in Quelén meant the opportunity to establish relationships between science and the cultural context, between astronomy and the Mapuche Cosmovision, between the certainties of man, and what is rather immeasurable. It was a question of redesigning a physical and virtual space, capable of integrating knowledge, experiences beyond the possibilities of hard science, to place all this in a simple, almost domestic scale intervention. It was to re-think a space of educational exchange in a rather warm and pleasant space that would be able to embrace an experiential program in a rather local architecture, where the wood and the craftsmanship were the hallmark that differentiated it from other observatories, those of metallic domes very common for this type of observatories. Here the local identity was already printed in the constructions of Quelén, and this new piece remodeled, should be part of that context and this way of doing.