Los Seminarios Montevideo:	| english version
	espacios para la reflexión y la propuesta colectiva a través del proyecto
	Arq. Salvador Schelotto
	Los Seminarios Montevideo en una mirada retrospectiva	| english version
	Arq. Salvador Schelotto
	Inusual confluencia de aportaciones	| english version
	Arq. Mariano Arana
	Una reflexión desde el Comité Académico	| english version
	Arq. Hugo Gilmet
	Los seminarios Montevideo vistos por los invitados extranjeros	| english version

The Montevideo Seminars commented by the foreign guests

Being an open exercise, an improvisation of unpredictable results, a path leading you through roads and destinations that become clear as you transit them, is one of the huge professional attractions of the Montevideo Seminar, if not its major challenge. An intense and agile experience shared by all: director, faculty, assistants and participants. Interaction inside and outside the work-shop, interaction with the city and with others… How can this be conveyed?

Achieving an urban study of some relevance requires an essential condition, i.e. achieving cultural consensus among the different players called to participate in the project (state agencies, municipalities, private entrepreneurs, construction companies, researchers and stakeholders, better known as the local community. In that direction, the negotiated project, including some forms of work and study execution – such as inviting experts, the organization of contests, project and work-shop seminaries – seem more appropriate than developing such projects in the closed purely technical offices, or the pragmatic definition of the actions taken in the spur of the moment.

The Montevideo Seminar initiative is held within this frame-work. (…) Through its workshops, the Seminar develops a project theme reflection considering critical spots and areas of the metropolitan territory (…) This topic reflection is of great value for the immediate future of Montevideo, a city with rich landscape qualities that need to be developed in projects so they may come true for collective use, not only to improve its own infrastructure, but also to improve its image and the quality of urban environment. There are still some important subjects left (…) which may become the basis of future Seminars, both trying to meet needs and to make Montevideo arise as the capital of theme urbanism in the international arena.

As I said when you invited me, I think it is fantastic for these Seminars to exist. I wish there were events like that in Spain , since they are quite rare.

Seminars in Spain are conceived as lectures or debates; but the change required to go from debates and lecturers to sitting down and sketching is dramatic.

From many perspectives, I think that the Seminar is well defined, in this rich and complex way. However, I believe that the element that makes it different from the kind of seminars we are accustomed to in Catalonia or in Spain lies in including a work-shop, of being able to sit down and grab a pencil, so people may discuss with the pencil – as Le Corbusier used to say – and not so much with the ideas.

Taken from the interview by Arch. Hugo Gilmet.

The Seminar reveals an important theoretical discussion which must take place in our countries and be established at our universities, in view of the distance existing between the academic world of architecture and social reality. To a great extent, this distance results from the way architecture is taught as a discipline in Latin America , having fine arts as their model. Based on such a model, it is very easy to export experiences of the international imaginary, but it is very difficult to export contents, in many occasions non-existent. As a result, it has been almost impossible to build up an architectural conception pertinent to Latin America , and there is a huge difference between the social public work and the work conducted by the well-to-do private sector. My view is that the Seminar is very interesting, because it proposes this liaison between the University and the Government, but I think that in the light of its results, the local administration must have not been able to do much, since I feel that we, architects, did not go beyond the usual academic proposals which are impossible to construct and too far from reality.

This way, architecture will continue to be a product for the well-to-do societies, in which architects are luxury one can afford because the problems of subsistence have been solved. Thus, our contribution to social knowledge as a discipline is scarce, not to say brief.

ARCH. MARCELO VILA / BUENOS AIRES , ARGENTINA / 2004

This is perhaps, the most decisive intellectual operation we owed ourselves in South America to understand the deep sense of our cultural construction.

We are too used to having foreign models as our benchmark, reviewing our certainties from somebody else's perspective, defining our being in comparison to somebody else's.

I am not referring here to the attitude of resistance which clearly defined the Latin American position thirty years ago, but to understanding our cultural construction through our own tools in the perspective of globalization.

Using specifically urban and architectonic terms we should neither review nor construct our certainties in the light of discussions which take place in other areas of the planet where the productive surplus, gross per capita product and average standard are really far from our figures, with 50% of the population below the level of poverty and another 50% of this layer at indigence level, as is the case of Argentina today.

“Less is more” is an option to keep a little of the surplus. We should build our architecture with what we have, understand our reality as a possibility, means giving our technical and human resources a transcendental dimension, almost poetic.

ARCH. ENRIQUE GARCIA ESPIL / BUENOS AIRES , ARGENTINA / 2004

In Montevideo, nothing less than the intelligence of students – which always implies an innovative look on any subject – was mobilized in 15 days. This was done through work-shops conducted by foreign professors who bring an ever-fresh look and who search alternative and different ways. In fifteen days they managed to have a new, different look of the whole Montevideo from many diverse scales. This is something I feel, important to highlight. I am struck by the fact that once a year people can meet to debate all the ideas on which the city is structured.