Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955 - 1980

(Hardback)

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In 1955 The Museum of Modern Art staged Latin American Architecture since 1945, a landmark survey of modern architecture in Latin America. Published in conjunction with a new exhibition that revisits the region on the 60th anniversary of that important show, Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 offers a complex overview of the positions, debates, and architectural creativity from Mexico and Cuba to the Southern Cone between 1955 and the early 1980s. The publication features a wealth of original materials that have never before been brought together to illustrate a period of self-questioning, exploration and complex political shifts that saw the emergence of the notion of Latin America as a landscape of development. Richly illustrated with architectural drawings, vintage photographs, sketches and newly commissioned photographs, the catalogue presents the work of architects who met the challenges of modernization with innovative formal, urbanistic and programmatic solutions. Today, when Latin America is again providing exciting and challenging architecture and urban responses, Latin America in Construction brings this vital post-war period to light.

Reviews

Generously and comprehensively illustrated with historical and contemporary images of the most important work produced in Latin America... an important resource. Essential.--L.E. Carranza "Choice"
In the book just as in the show, the entire visual scope of architectural production is on display--design sketches, graphs, presentation renderings and construction documents, magazines, notebooks and photographs... all get their share.... An architecture that was often more courageous and grander, structurally daring, iconographically innovative, and more responsive to climate and cultural context than what happened in Europe and the US at the same time. The catalogue, with its particularly insightful essays and high production value, is a lasting testament to a remarkably dense exhibition.--Dietrich Neumann "Society of Architectural Historians"
It serves, then, not only as a much-delayed sequel to the 1955 show, but as an autopsy for a dead epoch.--Tony Wood "Bookforum"

Author Bio

Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and served as the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA from 2007 to 2013. He has been praised for "activist's sense of urgency and an academic's insistence on rigor." He is the author of European Architecture 1750-1890 (Oxford University Press, 200) in addition to the MoMA catalogues for Henri Labrouste, Home Delivery and Mies in Berlin. In his ongoing role as a part-time curator at MoMA, he is preparing an exhibition on Brazillian architect Lina BoBardi.

Carlos Eduardo Comas is Professor at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Jorge Francisco Liernur is Professor and former dean of the architecture school at The Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Patricio del Real is a Curatorial Assistant at The Museum of Modern Art, New York