The poet Neruda’s environment: The Isla Negra house

Abstract

On several occasions, the poet Pablo Neruda referred to Isla Negra as his favorite house and, for many years, he worked to transform it into his primary home. The building of this house, an incremental process over time that saw Neruda’s direct participation in its planning, constitutes a perfect case study for understanding the poet’s intention in the construction of his particular environment: the Nerudian space. Much has been written on Neruda’s houses, but the novelty of the approach presented here lies in the configurational perspective that privileges both the totality (instead of the parts) and the historical process behind its construction (instead of the final product). This article presents a morphological study of the Isla Negra house, using the Space Syntax methodology and analyzing the parts and stages of growth of the house in relation to one another and among themselves until Neruda’s last intervention in 1973.