The Memory of Inhabiting Modern Architecture Villa Portales, 1955–2010

Villa Portales is an icon of modern architecture and urban planning of the 1950s and 1960s in Santiago de Chile. It embodies the political and institutional project of the time, which sought to respond to the need to establish a balance—although tenuous—in a fragile and strained economic and political system. This fact is crucial to understanding its sociospatialobjective, the administrative model it employed, and especially the crisis it has endured. The testimony of current Villa Portales dwellers points to a deterioration of its residents quality of life beginning in the 1980s with the changes in the role of the state introduced by the military dictatorship, the privatization of public services, and the termination of the Caja de Previsión de Empleados Particulares (Private Employees Pension Fund). Despite all this, the community was able to make this space a place of resistance and new meaning based on the sense of belonging arising from its architecture and its history.