In January 1928, the Chilean government initiated an educational reform based on the theories of the escuela activa (active school).[1] During that reform, the Academy of Fine Arts was included in the remit of the Ministry of Public Education as part of the changes introduced by Professor Carlos Isamitt.[2] He applied a methodology that was equivalent to the Vorkurs or Vorlehre of the Bauhaus state art school at Weimar and the Bauhaus Dessau called primer año de prueba (first-year trial course).[3]

The reform was halted in October of that year, as was the new direction of the school of art in January 1929, but by then it had established the precedent of change in the institutional paradigm regarding the relationship between art, science, new technologies, urbanism, education, and industrialization in the processes of social change taking place in the Chilean state.

The escuela activa relied on the work of the Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), who focused on the generation of knowledge that acknowledges the students’ own cultural variables. That strengthens their autonomy in the process of interpreting reality in terms of their community and environment. This concept was continued by Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852) and became crucial for the constructivist avant-garde who questioned the mechanical reproduction of knowledge. Various Bauhaus professors such as Johannes Itten and Hannes Meyer applied the same concept as the escuela activa in relation to the design of interaction and its perception.

The 1928 Chilean Vorkurs: Synthesis between vernacularity and functionality