Beyond Modernist Masters

Beyond Modernist Masters
Author: Felipe Hernández
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2009-11-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3034604955

Latin America has been an important place for architecture for many decades. Masters like Barragán, Dieste, Lina Bo Bardi, and Niemeyer pointed the way for architectural design all over the world, and they continue to do so today. Their approach to colors, materials, and walls had a deep and lasting influence on architectural modernism. Since then, however – and especially in the last fifteen years – architecture on the continent has continued to evolve, and a lively and extremely creative architecture scene has developed. The work of Latin American architects and city planners is often guided by social issues, for example, the approach to informal settlements on the outskirts of big cities, the scarcity of housing and public space, the availability of affordable transportation, and the important role of cultural infrastructure – such as schools, libraries, and sports facilities – as a catalyst for neighborhoods. Within this context, the book considers numerous projects that have prompted discussion and provided fresh impetus all across Latin America. Outstanding projects like the Santo Domingo Library in Medellin, Colombia, by Giancarlo Mazzanti; Alberto Kalach’s Liceo Franco-Mexicano in Mexico; and the works of Alejandro Aravena in Chile show that recent Latin American architecture is more than capable of holding its own beside the works of the founders. Felipe Hernández is an architect and professor of Architectural Design, History and Theory at The University of Liverpool. He attended an MA in Architecture and Critical Theory, graduating with distinction in 1998, and received his PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2003. He has taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), The Universities of Nottingham, Sheffield, East London and Nottingham Trent in the United Kingdom as well as at Brown University and Roger Williams University in USA. Felipe has published numerous essays and articles examining the situation of contemporary Latin American cities and revealing the multiplicity of architectural practices that operate simultaneously in the constant re-shaping of the continent’s cities.

Modern Architecture in Latin America

Modern Architecture in Latin America
Author: Luis E. Carranza
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2015-01-05
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0292768184

Designed as a survey and focused on key examples and movements arranged chronologically from 1903 to 2003, this is the first comprehensive history of modern architecture in Latin America in any language. Runner-up, University Co-op Robert W. Hamilton Book Award, 2015 Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia is an introductory text on the issues, polemics, and works that represent the complex processes of political, economic, and cultural modernization in the twentieth century. The number and types of projects varied greatly from country to country, but, as a whole, the region produced a significant body of architecture that has never before been presented in a single volume in any language. Modern Architecture in Latin America is the first comprehensive history of this important production. Designed as a survey and focused on key examples/paradigms arranged chronologically from 1903 to 2003, this volume covers a myriad of countries; historical, social, and political conditions; and projects/developments that range from small houses to urban plans to architectural movements. The book is structured so that it can be read in a variety of ways—as a historically developed narrative of modern architecture in Latin America, as a country-specific chronology, or as a treatment of traditions centered on issues of art, technology, or utopia. This structure allows readers to see the development of multiple and parallel branches/historical strands of architecture and, at times, their interconnections across countries. The authors provide a critical evaluation of the movements presented in relationship to their overall goals and architectural transformations.

Rethinking the Informal City

Rethinking the Informal City
Author: Felipe Hernández
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2012
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0857456075

Latin American cities have always been characterized by a strong tension between what is vaguely described as their formal and informal dimensions. However, the terms formal and informal refer not only to the physical aspect of cities but also to their entire socio-political fabric. Informal cities and settlements exceed the structures of order, control and homogeneity that one expects to find in a formal city; therefore the contributors to this volume - from such disciplines as architecture, urban planning, anthropology, urban design, cultural and urban studies and sociology - focus on alternative methods of analysis in order to study the phenomenon of urban informality. This book provides a thorough review of the work that is currently being carried out by scholars, practitioners and governmental institutions, in and outside Latin America, on the question of informal cities.

Divergences Architecture in Latin America and Discourses of the End of the Century

Divergences Architecture in Latin America and Discourses of the End of the Century
Author: Ingrid Quintana Guerrero
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-06-29
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9786587205304

Thinking about the ethos of contemporary Latin American architecture leads to identifying broad and flexible study categories. The position that contemporarily recognizes osmosis, hybridization - García Canclini's concept, whose erroneous assimilation in architecture has been criticized by Felipe Hernández -, and trans-modernity - according to Argentine Enrique Dussel - disengages in many moralizing (and polar-izing!) academic works from the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. It poses a fictitious situa-tion. In the words of Silvia Rivera-Cusicanqui, what happens in our territory is not a miscegenation but a coexistence of heterogeneous phenomena (around the colonizer and the colonized) that do not aspire to fuse nor produce new terms. However, considering that precolonial America was not homogeneous a priori, this coexistence (or overlap) of several Latin Americas might be the original condition of our subcontinent. Amid the undeniable coexistence of multiple Latin American realities, and without detracting from the just claims of the indigenous' vindication in the intellectual and physical construction of our territory, negotiation is funda-mental. This word, mainly in war conflict scenarios, implies tolerance and mutual surrender to achieve conciliation and avoid the oppressive tendency of those who Tuck and Wayne Yang call "empowered postcolonial subjects." In my opinion, this conciliatory attempt is present in most intellectual constructions of Latin American architecture, during the threshold of the immediate previous century. Many contem-porary academics are not open today to this negotiation, under the pretext of repeating the colonizing cycle. However, it seems to me still necessary in the light of Santiago Castro-Gómez's thesis for whom "only by radicalizing universality, that is, universalizing its 'point of exclusion', can the decol-onizing movement achieve its objectives." Castro-Gómez's proposal implies a recognition of the vulnerability of the other, whether white, black, or indigenous, and of that which minimally reverberates from its ethos (despite Rivera's affir-mation) in our current architectural thinking and making. It is in this context of coexistence and negotiation, not only between native cultures and North Atlantic Treaty Organization - NATO-centric doctrines but between diverse Latin American imaginaries that collide in sometimes violent and sometimes fortunate ways- that the architectural discourses enunciated in this book unfold. Given the scarcity of works that transversally address the discursive panorama of contemporary Latin American architecture, particularly in the twilight of the twentieth century, my purpose as co-author and editor is to elaborate a retrospective and unsuspecting exercise from which, through divergent Latin American voices, common discursive lines emerge.

Art to Come

Art to Come
Author: Terry Smith
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2019-09-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1478003472

In Art to Come Terry Smith—who is widely recognized as one of the world's leading historians and theorists of contemporary art—traces the emergence of contemporary art and further develops his concept of contemporaneity. Smith shows that embracing contemporaneity as both a historical concept and a condition of the globalized world allows us to grasp how contemporary art exists in a fluid space of increasing interdependencies, multiple contemporaneous modernities, and persistent inequalities. Throughout these essays, Smith offers systematic proposals for writing contemporary art's histories while assessing how curators, critics, philosophers, artists, and art historians are currently doing so. Among other topics, Smith examines the intersection of architecture with other visual arts, Chinese art since the Cultural Revolution, how philosophers are theorizing concepts associated with the contemporary, Australian Indigenous art, and the current state of art history. Art to Come will be essential reading for artists, art students, curators, gallery workers, historians, critics, and theorists.

Spatial Concepts for Decolonizing the Americas

Spatial Concepts for Decolonizing the Americas
Author: Fernando Luiz Lara
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2021-10-19
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1527576531

This collection of essays presents an innovative and provocative set of concepts to understand the spaces of the Americas through local lenses. The disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter; however, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge in these fields originates in another continent and is external to the lived experience in such regions. The book introduces seven new concepts that have not been sufficiently addressed, and would make a significant contribution to the field: namely, gridded spaces; spaces of agriculture; space as image; watered spaces; spaces as labor; racialized spaces; and gendered spaces. This book, thus, introduces a broader conceptual framework to foster the analysis of the spatial histories of the Americas.

History of Modern Latin America

History of Modern Latin America
Author: Teresa A. Meade
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2016-01-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1118772482

Now available in a fully-revised and updated second edition, A History of Modern Latin America offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the rich cultural and political history of this vibrant region from the onset of independence to the present day. Includes coverage of the recent opening of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba as well as a new chapter exploring economic growth and environmental sustainability Balances accounts of the lives of prominent figures with those of ordinary people from a diverse array of social, racial, and ethnic backgrounds Features first-hand accounts, documents, and excerpts from fiction interspersed throughout the narrative to provide tangible examples of historical ideas Examines gender and its influence on political and economic change and the important role of popular culture, including music, art, sports, and movies, in the formation of Latin American cultural identity Includes all-new study questions and topics for discussion at the end of each chapter, plus comprehensive updates to the suggested readings

Conceptualism in Latin American Art

Conceptualism in Latin American Art
Author: Luis Camnitzer
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2007-07-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780292716292

Conceptualism played a different role in Latin American art during the 1960s and 1970s than in Europe and the United States, where conceptualist artists predominantly sought to challenge the primacy of the art object and art institutions, as well as the commercialization of art. Latin American artists turned to conceptualism as a vehicle for radically questioning the very nature of art itself, as well as art's role in responding to societal needs and crises in conjunction with politics, poetry, and pedagogy. Because of this distinctive agenda, Latin American conceptualism must be viewed and understood in its own right, not as a derivative of Euroamerican models. In this book, one of Latin America's foremost conceptualist artists, Luis Camnitzer, offers a firsthand account of conceptualism in Latin American art. Placing the evolution of conceptualism within the history Latin America, he explores conceptualism as a strategy, rather than a style, in Latin American culture. He shows how the roots of conceptualism reach back to the early nineteenth century in the work of Símon Rodríguez, Símon Bolívar's tutor. Camnitzer then follows conceptualism to the point where art crossed into politics, as with the Argentinian group Tucumán arde in 1968, and where politics crossed into art, as with the Tupamaro movement in Uruguay during the 1960s and early 1970s. Camnitzer concludes by investigating how, after 1970, conceptualist manifestations returned to the fold of more conventional art and describes some of the consequences that followed when art evolved from being a political tool to become what is known as "political art."

Cruelty and Utopia

Cruelty and Utopia
Author: Jean-François Lejeune
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2005-02-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1568984898

This landmark collection of illustrated essays explores the vastly underappreciated history of America's other cities -- the great metropolises found south of our borders in Central and South America. Buenos Aires, So Paulo, Mexico City, Caracas, Havana, Santiago, Rio, Tijuana, and Quito are just some of the subjects of this diverse collection. How have desires to create modern societies shaped these cities, leading to both architectural masterworks (by the likes of Luis Barragn, Juan O'Gorman, Lcio Costa, Roberto Burle Marx, Carlos Ral Villanueva, and Lina Bo Bardi) and the most shocking favelas? How have they grappled with concepts of national identity, their colonial history, and the continued demands of a globalized economy? Lavishly illustrated, Cruelty and Utopia features the work of such leading scholars as Carlos Fuentes, Edward Burian, Lauro Cavalcanti, Fernando Oayrzn, Roberto Segre, and Eduardo Subirats, along with artwork ranging from colonial paintings to stills from Chantal Akerman's film From the Other Side. Also included is a revised translation of Spanish King Philip II's influential planning treatise of 1573, the "Laws of the Indies," which did so much to define the form of the Latin American city.