Punta Arenas is placed where America starts and ends. Located in the Cape Horn, it has been during centuries the one harbor where Orient and Occident were linked.  In 2014, The Libraries, Archives and Museums Direction of Chile (dibam) organized an international competition for the rehabilitation of Historic Monuments Former Prison and Gendarmerie in Punta Arenas, including an extension that completes a cultural program of Regional Library and Archives.

 

The adventurous seas in Cape Horn contain certain Romanticism: never-ending plains, complex oceans, the continent dismembered in several islands and suddenly, in an eternal horizon, the Towers of Paine, the sight of southern Chile, turned into the concept for the intervention. The historic envelope of the existing buildings remains, and the interior experiences a spatial rehabilitation. Three new sharped volumetric blocks (image of the autochthonous topography) are integrated in the interstitial space, uprooting from the original cornices.

 

The new volumes independence contrasts with the configuration of a new free ground floor, where all spaces are connected. The new extension rests over the street and public space, by means of a light steel structure and a transparent glazed basement.

 

The design and volumetry of the new blocks consolidates the essence of landmark in the urban context. The volumes rises over the city height in order to look it and contemplate the horizon. Sights are controlled and can be discovered walking the buildings. Its envelope consists in a continuous skin made of perforated aluminum, which pattern varies according with the required transparency. It captures the daylight during day, and reveals its spatiality during night by a led illumination system, acting as a great lighthouse which attracts people to the town.