A sampler of Chilean architecture

An installation view of Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola’s project, ‘Monolith Controversies,’ at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2014. In the early ‘70s, the Soviet Union donated a pre-fab panel factory to Chile. Alonso and Palmarola located one of the first panels ever made and put it on display. It was signed by Chilean president Salvador Allende.

For their award-winning Biennale installation, Alonso and Palmarola recreated — object for object — a home from the pre-fab apartment units they studied. The installation was a way of showing the ways in which people live in Modern, industrial surroundings.

Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena at the Pritzker Prize ceremony in Miami Beach, with (left to right) a very high-profile panel consisting of Jean Nouvel, Glenn Murcutt, Lord Peter Palumbo and Shigeru Ban.

Aravena’s Centro de Innovación Anacleto Angelini (Anacleto Angelini Innovation Center) at the Catholic University in Santiago, completed in 2014. It’s dense concrete exterior helps maintain climate control in the building’s interior.

The interior atrium of Aravena’s Angelini center is lined with oak and steel. Its forceful presence avoids the kindergarten color-palette tropes of innovation hubs in the U.S.

Cristián Undurraga is known for his meditative spaces — such as the Santiago museum for San Alberto Hurtado, the Chilean saint. A wall of Beton brut concrete admits light through a window and glass blocks.

At Undurraga’s Museum of Visual Arts (MAVI) in Santiago, a group of floating staircases hover one above the other.

The Chilean capital’s skyline is riddled with cranes. For architect, the country is a great place to build.