The author addresses the problem of the installation of cultural modernity in the urban space from four cases inserted in the Chilean history of the 20th century. He works on spaces, buildings and objects, cultural representations of these selected moments that, with the resources of cultural history, aims to trace a historical journey in which each text operates independently at the same time. The first is located in the city of Chillán prior to the 1939 earthquake. The second takes the city of Santiago in the 1930s as its object of study. The third text deals with the visit to Chile of a former minister of the Spanish Republic in 1938. And the fourth deals with the current urban traces left by the economic development model in the public space of Santiago. "The text elaborates a new approach to the knowledge of the design of our material culture, it puts its base in moments of history in which social phenomena appear as witnesses, as engines of a change of form and background in daily living in Chile and that have been delineated through observation and research in very diverse and non-traditional sources. The book is a pleasant and profound entry towards understanding the material world and its consequences in social thought, which is motivated because the author is interested in "stressing disciplinary relationships" as a restless observer of historical Chile, as a lover of ephemeral traces and subtleties of a past with ambitions of social revolution " (HKB Translation) --Verso Cover.