Introduction: Historic Preservation in the Americas

What were the conditions for the emergence of historic preservation in the Americas? Scholars have only recently begun to turn their attention to this question. The range of new scholarship is broader than any one publication can do justice to, but certain themes reverberate sufficiently loudly to warrant our attention. One central theme is the multiple points of contact between the development of historic preservation and modern architecture, and that concept serves as the anchor for the pages that follow. This issue of Future Anterior moves geographically from Argentina, through Brazil and Mexico, and finally north to the United States, and covers the roughly fifty years from 1910, the year of Argentina's first centennial, to 1963, the completion date of Mexico's Plaza of the Three Cultures, site of the infamous 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student protesters.

Our thematic focus and temporal frames are a point of departure for diverse and asynchronous histories of preservation in each of these countries, which stand as reminders of the shortcomings of universal master narratives and also of the limits of imposing political units (in particular the nation-state) as "natural" boundaries for framing historiographical work. The intellectual development of the discipline of historic preservation precedes and indeed is not reducible to its national institutionalization. Transnational intellectual and technical exchanges were widespread, especially in countries like Argentina and the United States, where, as Alfredo Conti reminds us, waves of mass immigration, starting in the late nineteenth century, rapidly reconfigured the social, ethnic, and professional makeup of their populations. The direction of immigration from Europe to the Americas may partly explain why, when scholarship ventures beyond nationalist silos, it has tended to become caught in a somewhat superficial bilateral comparativism that measures preservation in American countries only against European nations. Against this background, the focus of new scholarship on preservation's contacts with modern architecture, despite its obvious limitations, holds the promise of more comprehensive methodological frameworks capable of taking into account both intra - and intercontinental resonances as well as transatlantic dialogues. This methodological advance comes at the cost of the familiar propensity of taking historical actors of modernism at their word, a tendency that has exposed troubling contradictions while leaving them unexplained, contradictions such as the dissociation between nationalist rhetoric for national consumption and internationalist discourse for international audiences. By revealing such contradictions, current research into the contacts between historic preservation and modern architecture is slowly revealing a constellation of historical flashpoints that call for new interpretations of these two cultural practices, as well as a reexamination of the disciplinary and political presuppositions of previous studies, which have too easily assumed modern preservation and architecture to be disciplinarily distinct, to be respectively national (or local) and cosmopolitan, and to occupy opposing sides of the political spectrum. In the peculiar case of the United States, exposure to the synchronous development of historic preservation in the Americas may allow us to come to terms with how much the postwar battles over urban renewal, which pitted modernist planners against preservation activists, may have colored our view of early twentieth - century preservation as an early offshoot of planning, and blinded us to other histories and disciplinary contacts.

This issue of Future Anterior draws from research initiatives and public events that I organized at Columbia University over the past three years. The articles by Alfredo Conti, Enrique X. de Anda Alanís, and Louise Noelle were first presented as talks in the 2009 Fitch Colloquium, entitled "Twin Phenomena: Preservation and Modern Architecture in Latin America," and sponsored by Columbia University's Historic Preservation Program in collaboration with the Institute for Latin American Studies. Other participants included Gustavo Araoz, Hannia Gómez, Hugo Segawa, Fabio Grementieri, and Stella Maris Casal. Video recording of the full event is available online.¹ I want to also acknowledge the colleagues and PhD students from Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and NYU who participated in the Latin - American Architecture Research Group, which I organized between 2007 and 2008. The work of the group provided the impetus for this publication, and I am particularly thankful to Timothy Hyde, Luis Castañeda, Daniel Barber...