The Lives of St. Francis

Referring to the heritage of the Franciscan order in Santiago and its surroundings, a network of architectural, urban and heritage themes come together in this volume. The consideration of the changing physiognomies and urban interfaces of the Franciscan convents in Latin America constitutes an unprecedented contribution, which enriches and places the understanding of the local case in a larger historical and geographical context. This section, written by specialists and observed from their respective cases, reveals the urban situations of Lima, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Bogotá, Quito, La Paz, Asunción, Montevideo and Santiago. In the Chilean case, the evolution of the last five decades is examined with particular attention, a period in which intense debates around restoration and enhancement coincide with important urban changes. Their respective projects and arguments are presented together for the first time, including a significant collection of unpublished documents. An atlas of plans and surveys produced by a workshop of the Master's in Architecture of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile provides a wealth of plans, axonometric projections and views referring to the historic monument and its changing environment towards 2019. The volume closes with the various intervention projects carried out in that same workshop regarding the monument and its surroundings. The lives of Saint Francis presented in this book form a collage of partially transparent pieces that, when superimposed, achieve high levels of friction. It is the energy accumulated in this friction, in the mismatches and contradictions, that activates new interpretative frameworks necessary to reveal the complexity of the heritage presented here. Umberto Bonomo

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