Re-reading La Merced: local translations within the Damero as an opportunity for public space and urban identity.

The thesis here presented proposes a historical, urban and architectural study of Santiago de Chile since its foundation as a colonial city in 1541, with a special focus on its religious buildings. This, with views towards a restoration project capable of revaluing them, from their condition of quality spaces for the development or urban life. Since Chile and its current institutions and socio-cultural characteristics are partially the result of colonization, the thesis starts from the idea of Santiago as a colonial city. This urban scale’s research it based on Bibliographic and Iconographic sources, centred on the ideological bases of this process: the continental reality within which Chile and Santiago develop is one where cities are diffusing devices of the European political, cultural and religious canon. In this context, religious buildings had a fundamental role, representing landmarks within the urban fabric, and configuring as public spaces par excellence. Questioning the crisis of meaning that they face today is the objective of this research, and so the second scale emerges: an architectural one framed in the inner dynamics of the city, receiving both European and American influence. Historical cartography and studies on Santiago and its colonial religious network nurture this second stage of research. When building in America, finding themselves in front of a new reality, religious orders were forced to combine the knowledge and costumes they were carrying -such as the architectural typology for conventual religious life - with the new role religion played in the colonization campaign, resulting in a model of relation with the public spheres of the city. In this case, a bibliographic study of European religious architecture’s early developments, and Spanish churches and convents of the centuries previous to the beginning of America’s colonization, are carried in the first place in order to better comprehend the conventual typology, followed by the research on other American convents that may have influenced the ones built in Santiago, particularly from Perú and Mexico. Seven religious buildings built in colonial Santiago and still integrating the city are the centre of the final part of the thesis, with the purpose to identify a Case Study for the project, and the main common characteristics of local religious architecture. Cartography is the first source, making it able to compare the appearance each case study makes in different representations of the city, to then be integrated with timelines, built from the consultation of diverse bibliographic sources. Understanding that all those different aspects are connected and present until today is key for the idea of heritage this thesis is proposing, while in the intersection between architecture, city, society and culture lay the project’s bases. The reconstruction of the closeness to what is happening in the nearby urban environment -a relation that is nowadays fragmented- is the way in which it attempts to re-consolidate, re-propose and re-store the relation between the city and its religious architecture, together with its cultural baggage and the story it can continue to tell to further enrich citizen’s urban identity.