Latin American Modern Architectures


Book Description

Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories has thirteen new essays from a range of distinguished architectural historians to help you understand the region’s rich and varied architecture. It will also introduce you to major projects that have not been written about in English. A foreword by historian Kenneth Frampton sets the stage for essays on well-known architects, such as Lucio Costa and Félix Candela, which will show you unfamiliar aspects of their work, and for essays on the work of little-known figures, such as Uruguayan architect Carlos Gómez Gavazzo and Peruvian architect and politician Fernando Belaúnde Terry. Covering urban and territorial histories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with detailed building analyses, this book is your best source for historical and critical essays on a sampling of Latin America's diverse architecture, providing much-needed information on key case studies. Contributors include Noemí Adagio, Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Luis Castañeda, Viviana d’Auria, George F. Flaherty, María González Pendás, Cristina López Uribe, Hugo Mondragón López, Jorge Nudelman Blejwas, Hugo Palmarola Sagredo, Gaia Piccarolo, Claudia Shmidt, Daniel Talesnik, and Paulo Tavares.




The Making of Mexican Modernist Architecture


Book Description

This book presents the making of Mexican Modernist architecture through five power structures – academic, social status, economic/political, gender, and postcolonial – and by interviews and analysis of 13 key Mexican architects. These include Luis Barragán, José Villagrán García, Juan O’Gorman, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, Agustín Hernández, Abraham Zabludovsky, Carlos Mijares, Ricardo Legorreta, Juan José Díaz Infante, Enrique Norten, Alberto Kalach, Javier Sordo Madaleno and Clara de Buen. Although the five power structures framed what was built, the testimony of these Mexican architects helps us to recognize and discover subtleties and nuances. Their views thereby shed light on what contributed to making Mexican Modernist architecture so distinctive globally. Even if these architects were not always aware of the power structures, their projects nonetheless supported discrimination, marginalization and subjugation. In that sense the book also reveals the extent to which these power structures are still present today. The Making of Mexican Modernist Architecture’s uniqueness lies in uncovering the remarkable buildings that arose amid the five power structures while at the same time questioning their validity. It also voices the urgent need today for a new kind of architecture outside these boundaries. The book is essential reading for anyone studying Mexican and Latin American architecture.




Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime


Book Description

How engineers and agricultural scientists became key actors inFranco's regime and Spain's forced modernization.




Towards a Dialogical History of Modern Architecture


Book Description

The book challenges three perspectives on the modern architectural canon: explanations that disregard impacts and effects beyond the North Atlantic (monologic), superficial modifications that simply add "Other" figures to the canon, and views that reject the canon itself. Instead, it recognizes the canon's significance in comprehending architecture, while seeking to uncover its presumed Western-centric integrity through a shift from a monological to a dialogical approach. This approach integrates concepts of identity and Otherness as dialectically articulated and mutually interrelated. In essence, the book's main thesis contends that the canon's historiographic construction overlooked the existence of “Otherness”, specifically neglecting the world beyond the North Atlantic nucleus of the West. By examining a global context to comprehend the canon formation, the book proposes a more accurate understanding of the history of modern architecture. Recognizing that this task cannot emanate from a single hegemonic center, it presents the prospect of a coral-type architectural history. This narrative should and could encompass voices from diverse cultures to explore the particular circumstances of the world intertwined with each piece or figure transiently integrated into that canon. As a result, the ideal readers of this book position themselves within multiple settings, keen on engaging in a critical global conversation about modern architectural discourse. It will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, architectural history, and cultural studies.




Britannica Enciclopedia Moderna


Book Description

The Britannica Enciclopedia Moderna covers all fields of knowledge, including arts, geography, philosophy, science, sports, and much more. Users will enjoy a quick reference of 24,000 entries and 2.5 million words. More then 4,800 images, graphs, and tables further enlighten students and clarify subject matter. The simple A-Z organization and clear descriptions will appeal to both Spanish speakers and students of Spanish.




Modern Architecture of Quito


Book Description

Situated at the crossroads of the foreign and the vernacular, Quito-the capital of Ecuador, with its world-famous yet understudied built environment-stands as a testament to architectural in-betweenness. This book interweaves history and theory to explore how near and far influences have shaped its unique character. Case studies present diverse and unexpected episodes in the architectural history of this city, spanning the intricacies of its topography, the design of modernist houses and the appropriation of the motel typology. Together, they show how fluxes of different origins have created an architecture marked by diversity and interrelation. To theoretically frame these investigations, this anthology readdresses the notions of the global and the local, examining their tension and unavoidable coexistence, while introducing the in-between as a phenomenon with many variations and embodiments, increasingly referenced in architectural thinking. This book not only furthers the evolution of these concepts but also demonstrates their value as tools for analyzing the architectures of Latin America and the Global South more broadly. With contributions from both international experts and a new generation of Ecuadorian scholars, Modern Architecture of Quito is an indispensable resource for students and researchers investigating the development of architectural modernism in Latin America.




The Havana Guide


Book Description

Designed for anyone with an interest in touring major architectural works, the Guidebooks contain historical and descriptive information on key buildings, and practical information including maps, directions, addresses, and references for further reading.




The Journey of Utopia


Book Description

In 1927, a group of advisors of King Alfonso XIII of Spain set off a journey to the United States. Their aim was to study the American University as a model for the design of the new University City in Madrid. Using the reconstruction of this cultural event as a guiding thread metaphor, the purpose of the Research Project is to study the roots and historical transformations that the University Space has experimented since its origins, under the impulse of Utopia, making special emphasis in its relation to the City. It will focus on the evolution of essential architectural models, beginning from its medieval germ in Europe: the exodus of the 'seed' of its embodied soul (the quadrangle) to the New World, the birth and diversification of the new model (campus) and, finally, in the early twentieth century, the 'return trip' to Europe of the modern idea, and the prolific heritage that it has generated in the contemporary University since then, from the point of view of the cultural connection between the Unites States and Europe.




Mathias Goeritz


Book Description

The first major work in English on Mathias Goeritz (1915-1990), this book illuminates the artist's pivotal role within the landscape of twentieth-century modernism. Goeritz became recognized as an abstract sculptor after arriving in Mexico from Germany by way of Spain in 1949. His call to integrate abstract forms into civic and religious architecture, outlined in his "Emotional Architecture" manifesto, had a transformative impact on midcentury Mexican art and design. While best known for the experimental museum El Eco and his collaborations with the architect Luis Barrag n, including the brightly colored towers of Satellite City, Goeritz also shaped the Bauhaus-inspired curriculum at Guadalajara's School of Architecture and the iconic Cultural Program of Mexico City's 1968 Olympic Games. Josten addresses the Cold War implications of these and other initiatives that pitted Goeritz, an advocate of internationalist abstraction, against Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, ardent defenders of the realist style that prevailed in official Mexican art during the postrevolutionary period. Exploring Goeritz's dialogues with leading figures among the Parisian and New York avant-gardes, such as Yves Klein and Philip Johnson, Josten shows how Goeritz's approach to modernism, which was highly attuned to politics and place, formed part of a global enterprise.