Diario 7  | Juan Borchers

Diario 7 consists of the creation of a facsimile diary of the Chilean architect Juan Borchers, based on the selection of some copies and passages from the 69 existing notebooks that belong to the collection of the Archive of Originals of the Sergio Larraín García Moreno Information Center, so that they form a single “utopian” notebook.

Borchers’ diaries allow us to follow the trail of his proto-ecological reflections on “architecture as a living animal”, in which every detail, from the membrane of a leaf to a map of the “geo-architectural” movements of the continents, leads him to develop a self-pedagogical reflection that affirms the organicist maxim that “everything is in everything”. In Borchers’ notebooks, the world appears as a place populated by architectural lessons that are revealed through the use of drawing, both as a methodology of observation and as a way of thinking architecturally. The intimacy of his journals reveals how the landscape has shaped him and how this experience becomes a system of itinerant learning about subjects as diverse as the horizon, coastlines, vegetables, the body, the morphology of clouds, the profiles of stones, football, and the simplification of forms in the distance, among many others.