Sixty years after its exhibition Latin American Architecture Since 1945, the Museum of Modern Art is picking up the story where it left off. But the sequel, Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980, is on a different order of ambition. Where the first show covered a mere decade, this one spans a quarter of a century during the most architecturally fertile period in the region's history. As a backdrop, two factors propel the architectural agenda. The first is unprecedented urbanization, with cities such as São Paulo and Mexico City doubling in population every decade. The second is a furious process of modernization. The fact that the force behind much of the architecture in this show is the state—whether elected governments or military dictatorships—explains why the curtain comes down in 1980, with the arrival of market-driven neoliberalism. One might call this Latin American Architecture from Henry Russell Hitchcock to Ronald Reagan.
What no visitor to the show can fail to notice is the scale of vision demonstrated by nations that, in Octavio Paz's words, were “condemned to be modern.” Taking in the 13-foot-long drawing of Rio's Flamengo Park by Affonso Reidy and Roberto Burle Marx, it finally dawned on me what a bold and extravagant plan that was. But it is through another type of master plan that the curators drive their point home: the university campus. Crucial to the act of nation-building was the education of a new professional cadre, and these campuses were conceived as ideal cities on a sweeping scale. Carlos Raúl Villanueva's Universidad Central de Venezuela, in Caracas, is a tropical idyll of landscaped parkland, with covered walkways, monumental architecture, and decorative murals. Like its counterpart, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), in Mexico City, it is a Unesco heritage site.
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