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Latin American Research Review 38.2 (2003) 234-250



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Architecture, Design, and Planning:
Recent Scholarship on Modernity and Public Spaces in Latin America

Joseph L. Scarpaci
Virginia Tech


América Latina fin de milenio: raíces y perspectivas de su arquitectura. By Roberto Segre. (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1999. Pp. 329. $8.00 paper.)
Blue Lakes and Silver Cities: The Colonial Arts and Architecture of West Mexico. By Richard D. Perry. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Espadaña Press, 1997. Pp. 279. $25.00 paper.)
Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930-1960. By Valerie Fraser. (New York and London: Verso, 2000. Pp. 280. $65.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.)
From Aztec to High Tech: Architecture and Landscape Across the Mexico-United States Border. By Lawrence A. Herzog. (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. 241. $55.00 cloth, $17.95 paper.)
Latin American Architecture: Six Voices. Edited by Malcomb Quantrill. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, Center for the Advancement for the Studies in Architecture [CASA], 2000. Pp. 219. $60.00 cloth.)
On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. By Setha M. Low. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Pp. 274. $18.95 paper.)
Revolution of Forms: Cuba's Forgotten Art Schools. By John A. Loomis. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. Pp. 432. $27.50 paper.)
Perfiles Latinoamericanos. By FLACSO (Facultad LatinoAmericana de Ciencias Sociales). (Mexico City: FLACSO Sede Mexico, 10, no. 19. Special issue titled "La nueva segregación urbana," 2001. Pp. 234. $20.00 paper.)
The Havana Guide: Modern Architecture, 1925-1965. By Eduardo L. Rodríguez. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. Pp. 263. $24.95 paper.) [End Page 234]
Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America. Edited by Vivian Schelling. (New York and London: Verso, 2000. Pp. 312. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.)

The fin de siècle and "bridge to the new millennium" metaphors swept through the humanities, arts, and social sciences in the late 1990s and generated a spate of research that reassessed prevailing epistemologies. Nowhere was this taking stock of paradigms more blatant than in assessments of modernity, and its theoretical cousin, postmodernism. Studies of the built environment provide an excellent venue to trace the confluences of these ideas because architecture, design, and planning reflect the interplay of history, politics, and the social construction of public spaces. These processes manifested themselves clearly in Latin America, the most urban realm of the so-called Third World.

This review essay samples a small selection of the many works that document the interface of architecture, design, planning, and cultural studies in Latin America. Divided into four major sections, I begin with a review of some of the dominant themes espoused by these ten books. The second section assails a selected interpretation of the colonial past. Next, I turn to how most of these works conceptualize modernity and what changes students and scholars alike might contemplate in the early twenty-first century about how modernity manifested itself in the built environment and selected aspects of Latin American culture and literature. I conclude with some tentative remarks about the trajectory of design, architecture, and modernity for Latin America's built environments.

Dominant Themes

The modern movement in Latin American architecture portended and delivered great projects by the middle of the last century. It promised new mass housing, high-rise buildings on stilts (pilotis), and motorway flyovers (mostly along the ideas espoused by the French-Swiss architect, modernist, and visionary extraordinaire Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better know as Le Corbusier). Modernity in the building trades meant substituting the dense brick of the nineteenth century with the open box and geometrical configuration of the twentieth. New architecture in twentieth century Latin America called for rational forms to embody the spirit of this new image; decoration and ornamentation would become a relic of the "backward" past. Indeed, the term "architecture" would supplant "building" and some new populist leaders across the political spectrum were eager to adopt the tenets...

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