# Professor Patricio del Real will present Poetics of Architecture as Theology of Earthly Realities: The Secular Pedagogy of the Valparaiso School #### calendar\_today Date and Time **October 14, 2017** 10:00AM - 10:00AM EDT #### pin\_drop Location **Heyman Center, Columbia University, New York** Professor Patricio del Real will present Poetics of Architecture as Theology of Earthly Realities: The Secular Pedagogy of the Valparaiso School as part of the panel workshop and conference: “Pious Technologies and Secular Designs” at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. In the early 1950s, architect Alberto Cruz and poet Godofredo Iommi moved to Chile’s main industrial port city to pursue “an architecture in the service of poetry.” There, Cruz, Iommi and the team of architects and artists they assembled, developed an extraordinary pedagogy and approach to architecture based on avant-garde artistic and architectural practices that, to this day, continue to mesmerize and confound architecture culture and the nascent scholarship on what has been called the “Valparaiso School.” With singular pedagogical experiments and works such as the Open City, established in 1970 as a living community and testing ground to collectively pursue Friedrich Hölderlin’s invitation to “live poetically” and Arthur Rimbaud’s call to be “absolutely modern,” the Valparaiso School has proven to be a seductive and challenging subject of study. This paper offers new avenues for seeing this project critically by grounding the school’s work on a Christian-Catholic social order that is undergirded by the ‘rediscovery’ of the layperson as vanguard of the Christianization of the world and built through the sublimation and subsumption of spiritual practices and techniques to re-baptize the world through secular earthly actions. Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#) Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://haa.fas.harvard.edu/node/1083231/event-feed.ics) Copy link link