Confluencia Viewpoint is a piece of public equipment, whose purpose is to highlight the importance of the Confluencia Bridge Historical Monument, located in the Ñuble Region, in southern Chile.
Built in 1930, it is considered the longest wooden viaduct in Latin America, although currently is it only for pedestrian use.
The project has arisen from the bridge’s temporary closure in 2020, the result of a fire, and the concern of the community to promote its conservation.
The proposal consists of a tower - viewpoint located beside the bridge, alongside the Ñuble River, whose purpose is to be the first stage in the consolidation of an austere Site Museum by the Bridge raising it 4 meters above the ground and, in this way, contemplating this infrastructure as a gigantic open-air museum piece.
Formally, the Viewpoint is a wooden monolith with a square longitudinal section, whose sober and compact character contrasts with the rhythm and tension of the bridge’s wooden structure, forming a slender wooden object next to the road, similar to the productive infrastructures found in the Chilean countryside.
Making this object just another piece of the place, through an old, solid, and diffuse scale structure, to thus value the compositional and material rigor of its neighboring construction, without falling into obvious mimesis.
The viewpoint comprises three elements; a staircase that allows you to observe the bridge and the surrounding landscape as an anteroom to the route; an enclosed cabin on its lower part, where the history and memory of the community are synthesized with the monument, and, finally, wooden latticework that covers the structure, whose front is a semi-transparent screen that fades into the landscape, while in perspective it appears as an opaque wooden plane whose paint when dry seems to be on a natural background of a changing bluish tone, just like the color of the Ñuble River or the Andes mountains that can be seen in the distance.
Team:
Architect: Azócar Catrón
Architects in charge: Ricardo Azócar, Carolina Catrón
Photography: Pablo Puentes, Nicolás Becerra, Azócar Catrón
