Except for a handful of anthologies and books focusing on specific architects or events, Latin America has received little attention in English-language histories of architecture. The Museum of Modern Art, though, mounted three exhibitions (and published accompanying books) on the region in the 20th century—Brazil Builds in 1943, Latin American Architecture Since 1945 in 1955, and The Architecture of Luis Barragán in 1976—and is now showing Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955'1980 through July 19th.
Luis E. Carranza and Fernando Luiz Lara try to fill the publishing gap with their new book, Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia, the first book in English to deal with the entire 20th century. This is a monumental task, for which the authors have relied chiefly on the existing historiography to identify key buildings and architects. So, in spite of the authors' avowed “commitment to write . . . from a Latin American perspective,” this dependence leads them to reproduce that historiography's Eurocentric bias, which is currently undergoing critical review by architectural historians in Latin America and elsewhere. That bias shows up in the book's index, where entries for Le Corbusier exceed those for Oscar Niemeyer, the most celebrated architect of Latin America. The book gives the impression that Le Corbusier and other European and American figures were the determining influence on Latin America's most significant designers and buildings, without acknowledging that the reverse also occurred. For example, Le Corbusier's 1956 design for the Maison de la Culture in Firminy, France, reflects the formal ideas of Affonso Reidy's 1953 design of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro.
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