The Swiss architect Theodor Cron disembarked in the Peruvian port of Callao on what was almost certainly a grim, gray August day in 1948, the sky over Lima’s Pacific coast bleached a dimensionless white by the perpetual fog of the city’s austral winter. Then, as now, Peru teetered at the edge of crisis and transformation. In October of that year, General Manuel Odría would overthrow the democratically elected, left-leaning president José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, initiating his 8-year dictatorship. The year before, the soon-to-be influential Agrupación Espacio—roughly “Space Group,” a consortium of intellectuals led by architects—published a manifesto insisting on a new approach to the arts, and particularly building, that would bring about “the genesis of a new man and the elaboration of his message.” Modernism had arrived in Peru.
Iglesia Luterana, Lima, 1953. Photo courtesy the Bindler and Cron Family Archives
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