Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere (review)

In four richly illustrated and fascinating chapters, Robert Alexander González covers a century of architectural history in the United States. His inquiry tells the story of the development of a visual language capable of conveying the American idea of Pan-Americanism. One of the gifts this book makes to the reader is the inclusion of a plethora of maps, photographs, posters, postcards, stamps, lithographs, and etchings. The visual contents of the book are thus as inviting as the critical analysis. We are able to literally see the development of an iconographic syntax and grammar of a visual language. This century-long architectural development of a monumental language of Pan-Americanism has not been studied as part of either the visual arts in the United States or its architectural history—and herein lies the most important contribution made by this book. Perhaps the most salient aspect of the book’s originality is its own understanding of the intricate connection between the development of an architectural language of Pan-Americanism and the ideological underpinnings of the construction of a Western Hemisphere peacefully shared and inhabited by citizens of this harmonious realm in which the paternal figure of the United States plays the key role. This book explores the development of this monumental language by offering extensively documented critical histories of the most important early Pan-American fairs, the building of the Pan-American Union building in Washington, D.C., the construction of the Light House Monument to Columbus in the Dominican Republic in 1992, and Miami’s “Iterama’s Underwater Gateway to the Americas.”

Although my credentials as a reader of a history of architecture in the United States are limited, as an intellectual historian and literary critic of Latin American culture I can appreciate the careful archival research and illuminating set of questions that drive and sustain the overall design and objectives of this book. For a cultural historian, the last chapter, in which González considers the construction of the “Inter-American Subject” to be one of the chief effects of the architecture and language of Pan-Americanism, offers one of the most intriguing arguments. He links this construction to the constitution of the identity of “Hispanics” or “Latinos” in the United States. González’s analysis of the last two hemispheric fairs, in Miami and San Antonio respectively, shows that “with their clever names, Interama and HemisFair ’68, illustrate the extent to which a well– known concept in the United States entered into a new era of hemispheric consciousness in the 1960s” (194). González further suggests that

the Pan-American concept evolved into two distinct interpretations in Miami and San Antonio, reflecting a complex cultural urbanity that was transforming each city as the fairs were being planned. This occurred as Latinos in each city negotiated their cultural identities and associations with respect to their homeland nations. It occurred with various degrees of intensity, determined by infrastructural connections, governmental policies and generational developments.

(194)

How the concept of a Pan-American geopolitical subject identity went from Bolívar’s conception (a liberating, anticolonial force that would keep Latin America safe from North American dominance) to becoming a tool for negotiating inter-American subject identities in the United States is one of the several important stories that this rich book offers its reader.

The book’s narrative opens with a reference to the publication in 1888 of A Banana Plantation by William Elroy Curtis. This richly illustrated travel book introduced images in the American imagination of a tropical landscape that in time came to synecdochically stand for Latin America as a whole. The banana plantation that the white man visits and examines is a space of transformation where the newly emerging national republics are stereoscoped and stereotyped as “plantations, farms and mines to be exploited by the United States” (1). In the Curtis...