Cafeteria after lunch. Four episodes of informal education in Chile and Argentina

Since the early decades of the twentieth century, campus design has represented the epicenter of urban and architectural development in South America. University was considered a driving force of the modernist agenda, materialized in magnificent and iconic examples in South American capitals. This paper aims to present much less explored examples from the late 1950s that were conceived in Chile and Argentina:By introducing concepts like ‘condicionalidad arquitectonica’ (Brandes,1963) or ‘proyecto inmaterial’, they opened alternatives for a new educational project claiming its relational potential through multiple and diverging architectural responses: complex megastructures, semitransparent and permeable frames, inside-carved volumes that incorporate communal life in their large urban interior. Although each project reflects locally driven changes, this paper intends to review the direct involvement of some Italian architects/academics that operated behind the scenes of those campus projects.