Observation, Act and Form

Observation, Act and Form is an exhibition at the AA Gallery of drawings, sketches and paintings by Chilean architect and academic Alberto Cruz (1917-2013).

Alberto Cruz was an architect and architectural theorist who devoted most of his professional life to education. In 1952 he played a seminal role in reinvigorating the School of Architecture of Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, and years later in the creation of the Ciudad Abierta-Amereida (the Open City) at Ritoque. In 1975 he was awarded Chile’s National Architecture Award. Shown now for the first time outside Chile, Cruz’s drawings and notebooks offer the clearest manifestation of his radical ideals about education and his colourful aesthetic, which he also expressed in his architectural work.
For Cruz, scattering his ideas about so that they might proliferate was something of a vocation. His architectural gift was a special way of understanding life through acts that were – are – always continuous and never static. He created his drawings with a material, temporal continuity so that they might participate in new contexts. His ideas were meant to be disseminated. And his constructions, unfinished.

Cruz’s legacy is a ground-breaking tenet for studying, teaching and approaching architecture, and his ideas and practices have found new grounds in numerous architecture faculties around the globe.

It is for these reasons that his works have found their way to London, to the AA Gallery, where the Open City and its ideas have arrived through the publication of Cruz’s works and his Chilean architecture students. But they have also materialised in the AA School at Hooke Park, an open forest community dedicated to architectural exploration.