Modern Architecture in Latin America, 1925-1985

Although Latin America plays only a minor role in most histories of architectural modernism, this complex and vast region was in fact the cauldron of enormous creativity and experimentation in formal, structural, social and political aspects of architecture and city building. This seminar develops two of the key premises and aims of the 2015 exhibition I co-curated at the Museum of Modern Art, "Latin American in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980". The first was to demonstrate that the various centers of architectural culture in Latin America from Mexico to Argentina and Chile were sources of invention and not simply places for importing the influences of Le Corbusier or of North American corporate modernism. The second was to examine the interactions between the doctrines and ideologies of developmentalism and architecture between the mid-1950s and the advent of neo-liberalism in the early 1980s.