@andresvargas_foto
I trained as an architect and earned a Master’s degree in Architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. I later received a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University. There, landscape became for me a point of encounter between architecture, environmental studies, ecology, and the history of science and the arts.
My dissertation, Attack on Greenery: Critical Perceptions of the Artificial American Landscape, 1955-1969, examined the trajectories of Ian McHarg, John Brinckerhoff Jackson, and Rachel Carson, who, in the midst of the Cold War, questioned the promises and contradictions of the artificial American landscape.
Upon returning to Santiago, that interdisciplinary perspective became the core of my work. Since then, I have contributed to the development of landscape studies in Chile and to the consolidation of this field in Latin America.
My research addresses the cultural construction of nature through the analysis of landscapes shaped since the nineteenth century. I understand them not as simple backdrops, nor as something given in advance, but as the result of the interweaving of botanical practices, political decisions, economic forces, design proposals, sociocultural processes, and once-imagined urban futures.
Writing, translation, and editing have become other ways of developing and circulating these ideas. I am the author of Romy Hecht · ARQ Docs (Ediciones ARQ, 2024) and El alma del verdor de Santiago (Orjikh Editores, 2025), a book that reconstructs the history of Santiago’s civic landscapes and of those who helped shape them. I also translated John B. Jackson’s La necesidad de ruinas y otros ensayos, with Danilo Martic, and compiled and edited Paisajes para el pueblo, the first selection of Frederick Law Olmsted’s essays published in Spanish.
I have developed this trajectory in close connection with academia. I am Full Professor at the School of Architecture of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and currently Dean of College UC. Over the years, I have taught at universities in Argentina, Peru, and the United States, including Harvard University, and I have been a Senior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
In parallel, I have promoted outreach and public-facing initiatives aimed at strengthening Latin American networks of collaboration and anchoring a culture of landscape in Chile. I co-founded LOFscapes, Corporación Cultura de Paisaje en Chile, and Improbable. I also write regularly on landscape and culture as a columnist for VD, El Mercurio's magazine.
In some way, this entire trajectory returns to that initial question. Perhaps because I came to landscape history from architecture, I still approach it with the caution —and the irrepressible hope— of someone cultivating an illicit love. From there, I seek to foster a living debate on the making of the landscapes we share and, with it, to awaken the desire to look again and learn from our surroundings.
