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Now, there are few things to explain about the novel because it has been described as excellent.
I'll tell you a little about how the novel was created and why I chose the dodecaphony system
Gurre-Lieder from Germany, is as Cecilia just said, Schoenberg’s dodecaphony work.
I found this structure in the midst of my writing and needed it to make this building’s multitude of tales more coherent.
However, I will leave the real answer about why I chose this musical structure for my novel to the end so it will become more clear to you.
The novel as Cecilia said, is based on a building in Santiago, Chile. The novel did not say where exactly it is located but I can tell you that it is located in the Brazil square.
It's a real building that I lived in a few years ago. Cecilia said the façade is made of glass
and this gives us a feeling of different realities that are appreciated from the square
Why did this reality attract my attention? Why did I decide to write a novel with all these elements?
Think about the way Chileans live and how we have been living throughout history
The first typical Chilean house is a house which includes an internal garden and the rooms are configured around it.
Then this structure has been transformed to what we call the “conventillo”
and the conventillo followed the same dynamic of a central garden with rooms overlooking it.
The floor was made of soil and was eliminated because people tended to throw their garbage in this garden and it piled up
After this houses changed to be site specific which some of you may know.
This closed lane gathering the houses around it until we arrived to the 20th century characterized by the social houses that were made with quality, not like today. There are many examples like “Villa Huemul” and “Villa San Eugenio”,
houses with a continued facade where you could see one or maximum two windows and the door.
However the interior of the structure expanded (3). We can still find these typical houses in Recoleta, San Miguel, Santiago Centro, and Providencia.
The strange thing is that from the outside these houses seem small but they are large and some even have an internal garden.
With these architectonic triangles, I`d like to tell you that from the early Chilean history houses tended to be looked at from the inside.
The sitè, the “conventillo” and the typical Chilean house were very intriguing to me
So, found this building is very particular, for our architecture.
In fact, most people who lived there were young single or foreigners.
There were some couples but they did not last long there because they had no intimacy with the building.
I was inspired to write about this and if I hadn’t written someone else would have.
I must emphasize that I don’t depict my life through this novel, nor my neighbors lives.
I mixed reality with some fantasy. I wrote about how architecture influences peoples lives
As Cecilia said, there are two buildings that overlook each other. The people in their buildings overlook the internal garden so they can see their neighbors every day
They can see how they wake up, when they go to the bathroom, etc. Somehow it’s very strange
People are also exposed to the exterior street, something very peculiar.
I wanted to talk about this, about how the Chileans live within the inside,
yet I can’t say this marks us culturally. It has always been said that the Chilean people are descendents of the Basques
And they live in mountainous areas.
On the contrary we find the Italian people are very outgoing.
Chileans dream to have a house with a garden even if it is a small one, just to have lots of barbecues with family and friends.
We don’t use public spaces like for example, the Argentineans who have descended from the Italians.
I think that Italians use a lot public spaces, and can vouch to this because with my wife we live there.
The squares are empty as there are no trees nor benches and is typically a space for public use.
The bars particularly (we live in Bologna) are the smallest bars yet are the most crowded and you might ask why?
Italians like to exposes themselves to the street as there is a social life which it’s created outside bars and restaurants.
In the glass building (Santiago), most of the people were foreigners because our Chilean culture, it’s so strange to be exposed through the houses.
When I was living in this building that goes by the name of Brazil Loft Community, something nice was created
I have always been living in apartments and people don’t say hello to neighbors.
I think most of you who are here tonight have at one point lived in an apartment and know that greeting with a “good morning” or “good evening” are a standard exchange of words.
Instead, at the Brazil Loft Community, there was a great atmosphere
and this is true because after a few years, I still see the faces of some people who used to live there. Some came to our wedding in Italy
as the friendship continues on even whilst we are abroad.
To be honest, I can’t always assure you that this particular friendship is caused entirely by the architecture
but I believe it assisted.
Doors here were made for being opened from the outside and it’s incredible
that someone who was passing outside your apartment could enter without needing a key!
Those years clearly have been prominent in my life and have always had the desire to write about it.
First I started to write the novel and then the structure came.
I will quote words by Josè Donoso’s, “there are authors that before they start writing have already preconceived its structure and what happens?”.
The structure or argument turns into something very forced,
...very unnatural
so there is another method after writing the novel you find a structure that better suits the argument.
This was the case also when I didn’t know how to change from one apartment to another.
Thanks to a character, the Spanish architect, who has to design Huidobro’s museum,
I started to study Huidobro’s work and I found this dodecaphonic system.
I found in a spanish magazine of 1921. If I remember correctly a score of Schoenberg
and the magazine indicated this score as music from the avant-garde. That music started to spread in Spain and then arrived to Latin America.
The atonality in the music which means to break with everything that has been done before or,
as some orchestra directors say, this music has expanded the horizon.
He composed one series without repeating any of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale
This means that none of them have a superior hierarchy.
Then, he repeats the series using a very rigid, very hard, very mathematical system
in the retrograde series as Cecilia said. This system makes the music very difficult to understand, indeed you start to understand it before listening to it for a while.
My novel on the other hand is not difficult to understand. The only thing I took from the dodecaphonic music was its structure.
What did I gain with this? How to create! In this novel, all ninety-six chapters and some have no union or interaction between them,
So you can open to any page without any problem comprehending what that specific chapter is talking about.
Each chapter is autosustentable, and after reading all the novel you can understand the general idea,
To quote Josè Donoso, he said “caprice”. This is the word I could not remember before, but if I would have preconceived the structure before writing, the novel would have been very caprice to surprise readers.
Instead, it is a structure that helped me to organize myself and I can explain it in an architectural form:
When an architect designs a building or a project, he or she can design something from imagination even if it is very difficult to build.
They also can design a voladizo of many meters but after this design goes in the hands of engineer
It is not exactly like this but I explain it so you may understand me better.
In reality the engineer is the one who finally decides if his project will work or not. He is the one that orders the project.
In this case, the engineer would be the dodecaphonic system. The project would be this horde of stories.
The stories do not speak only about the different apartments of the building, yet stories are divided into twelve chapters, or twelve tones, that are different corners of a building
the access, the terrace, common areas, appartament X, etc.
In every chapter show it that happens in this moment, somebody cleaning for example...
There is no intention to study accurately the lives of the characters but here the main character is the building
This is because the hierarchy among notes using this musical structure is lost. Whilst translating this concept into literature in my book, the hierarchy among characters is lost.
There are no secondary nor main characters, the main character is the building and life occurs there.
The book starts with the phase “One hundred years after the avant-garde". You may ask why did I choose this phrase?
An interesting idea that I stumbled upon while I was studying was the glass facade that came from the avant-garde period.
In 1914, Sheebar wrote a theory
about how life would be if the walls of the building were made of glass
He was a poet and a writer not an architect. According to his theory, life should change
because society should be transparent and be able to totally expose itself.
Futhermore he explains why people should not live concealed and constrained by their houses.
This theory later was reviewed by the German, Bruno Taut. He along with various architects and german designers shed true to this theory.
And they they founded the "Gläserne Kette" (glass chain)
I want you to know that in this time, in the early ‘1900s there were so many changes in the world
We are talking about the avant-gardes & pioneers that were initiated in 1917 with Picasso and the futurism in 1909.
Then came the First World War and then the Second.
I don’t mean to say that the artistic avant-guardes influenced the events that occurred in time
but they were able to reveal that the world was changing so much.
If we stop and think about the belle époque , then go further into the 21st century
It is fair to ask what happened here?! What happened in this century
Everything changed, there were devastating wars,
there were huge technological improvements and advancements.
To understand where are we now in the 21st century,
it is not necessary to go back to the 20th century, at least I don’t think so. I am more interested in going back to the origin
These avant-gardes for people who don’t know where the meaning came from,
had actually come from war time and were the leading part of an advancing military formation
In this time, so many famous artists came together. In the National case, we have Vicente Huidobro.
He traveled to Madrid and then to Paris. There he met the most important artist of that time like Picasso, Braque and others.
He then brought the avant-garde to Madrid, which was received by Cansinos Assens and by the whole new movement that was generating
In Spain Huidobro is named as the Ultraist movement
that brought the avant-gardes to Spain.
At that time many things happened. At the same time the crystal chain was born
as well as Shoeremberg had changed music using his dodecaphonic system at the same period
That is why I thought it was appropriate to discuss this argument this evening. In my novel the argument is not explicitly treated,
you may note it through the characters and through what they read and think.
It is important to start to realize in which moment we had initiated to get dehumanized
and in addition what time technology, airplanes, train, car subtitle by Giannina Baccelliere / correction by Giuliano Soto.
had more of an importance than people.
In this sense I think it’s important to come back to the past, to that point of origin,
where things started to change in order to understand how society with its inhabitants had advanced in the 21st century.
Thanks.
Subtitle by Giannina Baccelliere / Correction by Giuliano Soto