Young Architects Program International

Founded in 2008 in Santiago, Chile, by the architects Jeannette Plaut and Marcelo Sarovic, CONSTRUCTO is a cultural organization devoted to Chilean and Latin American architecture, design, and art. It has partnered with MoMA on the Young Architects Program since 2010, and this year’s winning project is Your Reflection, by Guillermo Hevia García + Nicolás Urzúa.

A landscape of mounds is covered in grass, spongy vegetation, and colorful wild flowers, and is traversed by a small creek. Into this topography are inserted three mirrored steel planes that create a series of inside and outside spaces and blur the limits of the installation. By way of its mirrored surfaces, the intervention is made to disappear so that the reflected surroundings of the site become the real project. The mirror-like structures are formed using an abundance of concavities and convexities, which allow steel plates to be self-supporting.

Your Reflection creates an uncertain experience, a situation of estrangement that cannot be controlled, as the reflections and deformations made possible by the mirrored steel planes are infinite. The installation creates an encounter that belongs to a dreamlike world of illusions, more surreal than real, and full of surprises.