Abstract

A series of commercial buildings that retorted the singular shape of a 'caracol' (literally 'snail' in allusion to its spiral shape) began to colonize Chile’s capital city, Santiago. That happened just in the early years of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in the mid-seventies. Those buildings defined a new architectural typology that was multiplied through the large cities of the country and that today it constitutes perhaps, unintentionally, the most radical experiment of the Chilean commercial architecture structuring a unique collection in the world. Forty years after the emergence of the first commercial Caracol building in Santiago, paradoxically, the Caracoles have taken the street life that they denied at the beginning, not only in the literal sense to lead to new levels and urban experiences through a continuous uphill spiral circulation but also they have been raised as symbolic structures where the time seems to have stopped in their interior allowing pedestrians to recreate, as a vestige, an idea of the city that is latent in the collective unconscious. The commercial Caracoles are finally spatial devices of cultural urban significance, which as peculiar architectural typology detonate critical issues of the Chilean society’s past and present condition.