Latin American Architecture

This book is not about a folk or typical Latin American architecture. Latin America is not some faraway, isolated region, rather a huge and universal laboratory. It shows a different Latin America through its recent architecture, which flourishes in our time of global communications. It does have roots in the past; but does not appeal to nostalgia. Architecture thought for the present and designed for the near future. Total Latin American Architecture intends to communicate a targeted objective, to circumscribe a segment, a series of observations and actions in architecture.

In doing so, the artists reveal the two major schools of development: minimalist and tectonic tradition."--BOOK JACKET.

This volume documents the golden period of Latin American architecture that was inaugurated in September 1929, when Le Corbusier was invited to lecture in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. These countries were eager to apply -- and transform -- a European-born modernism, and within a few decades, they captured international attention with an array of extraordinary buildings, exemplified by the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro and the Brazilian pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The contributors to this insightful collection of essays (which grew out of a 2002 conference organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the New School University) offer contemporary reflections that underline the importance of reexamining this almost forgotten work in light of the contemporary crisis in global architectural production. Each essay examines a particular aspect of the cultural transformation that took place in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico. Among the topics explored are the influence of Le Corbusier on the region, the early work of Oscar Niemeyer, the roots of Mexican modernism and its radical transformation in the work of Luis Barragaacute;n, and the creative collaboration between Venezuelan architect Carlos Raul Villanueva and sculptor Alexander Calder.

What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from. Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.

Modern architecture in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking nations of Latin America.

A selected, fully open, and deep assemblage, that carries the explicit intent of outlining, conceptual and practical verifications, on critical views and specific projects, concerning the actual architecture in the Latin American territory. The book intends to communicate a targeted objective, to circumscribe a segment, a series of observations and actions in architecture. However, it is a selected, fully open, and deep fragment, outlining conceptual and practical verifications on critical views and concrete projects, concerning the actual, extensive world of architecture in the Latin American territory, and in the first years of the new century. It is a sequence of topical segments organized as an unsystematic series and through a number of different projects in each case: the single family house; searches on bigger scales; poetical structures; topics under consideration; a look over laboratories; terrain, landscape and topography; covering folk factors; and the volumetric reasoning and physical features. A selected and deep assemblage of the current architecture in the Latin American territory.