Building the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930-1960 (review)

In this beautifully designed, lavishly illustrated, and compellingly written volume, art historian Valerie Fraser provides the best synthetic account of the heroic age of modern Latin American architecture available in English until now. Mining out-of-print monographs and the fruits of recent research, Fraser brings to the fore the surprising accomplishments and dystopian aftermath of three decades when architecture seemed key to social transformation. Like the architecture it chronicles, this book was produced in a rush of enthusiasm and remains rough around the edges, but it contains moments of wonderful poetry and great insight.

Divided into three long national chapters, the body of the book covers the course of modernism in Mexican, Venezuelan, and Brazilian architecture from Le Corbusier's 1929 visit to South America to the 1960 completion of Brasília. Each chapter follows the complex and shifting trajectory within each nation of Le Corbusier's unruly local "disciples," including Juan O'Gorman, Carlos Villanueva, Lucio Costa, and Oscar Niemeyer. Focused, above all, on monumental projects such as government ministries, public housing schemes, university campuses, and, of course, the new Brazilian capital itself, the book addresses iconic moments of Latin American modernity. While noting and even sympathizing with the breathless confidence of the period, Fraser also recognizes that these projects and her own account offer only partial views of the far broader and more complex phenomenon of Latin American modernism, whose full story remains to be told. Considering the limited scope and mythical tone of much of the existing literature, this sense of humility is wholly praiseworthy.

One virtue of this book is having brought together under one cover the strikingly parallel national trajectories that are usually treated in separate monographs. The manner in which Fraser pursues these connections and contrasts is suggestive, but not comprehensive. She offers interesting comments about the incorporation of sculpture into the Caracas Metro, for instance, but nothing about the metros of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, or Mexico City, even though modernist architects were involved in all. Discussions of housing policy, urban planning, university cities, and the importance of state patronage are very insightful, but do not offer systematic comparisons. The weight assigned to a given theme depends not only on different national contexts but also, one suspects, on the secondary sources Fraser draws on, whose underlying assumptions do not seem to have been fully critiqued. Yet even the gaps in her narrative are invitations for future scholarship to break out of nationalist confines.

This book is straight architectural history written by a skillful art historian, with little more than a nod to social or cultural history or theory. At times, this leads to a narrative driven more by the life histories of leading architects and the marvelous force of projects Fraser came across than by a full sense of the broader context of architectural production or national history. She dedicates five pages to a minor Brazilian new city project by U.S.-based architects, for example, but makes no mention of the two vastly more important Brazilian new cities, the state capital at Goiânia and the steel mill complex at Volta Redonda (pp. 206-11). Her treatment of the gardens of Roberto Burle Marx is compelling, but leads her to the dubious assertion that "unlike so many of his contemporaries ... who saw the relationship between Man and Nature in Euro-Christian terms, as a battle between opposing forces ... Burle Marx welcomed nature as a friend" bringing him "much closer to Native American beliefs" and "genuine" modernism (p. 174). Such schematic analysis is at odds with much recent scholarship on environmental, indigenous, cultural, and architectural history. Fortunately, it is also at odds with the more nuanced arguments at the heart of this book. Fraser...