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Radical Functionalism: A Social Architecture for Mexico provides a complex and nuanced understanding of the functionalist architecture developed in Mexico during the 1930s. It carefully re-reads the central texts and projects of its main advocates to show how their theories responded to the socially and culturally charged Mexican context. These, such as architects Juan Legarreta, Juan O’Gorman, the Union of Socialist Architects, and Manuel Amábilis, were part of broader explorations to develop a modern, national architecture intended to address the needs of the Mexican working classes. Through their refunctioning of functionalism, these radical thinkers showed how architecture could stand...
Designed as a survey and focused on key examples and movements arranged chronologically from 1903 to 2003, this is the first comprehensive history of modern architecture in Latin America in any language. Runner-up, University Co-op Robert W. Hamilton Book Award, 2015 Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia is an introductory text on the issues, polemics, and works that represent the complex processes of political, economic, and cultural modernization in the twentieth century. The number and types of projects varied greatly from country to country, but, as a whole, the region produced a significant body of architecture that has never before been presented in a single...
(Radical) Functionalism in Latin America is an introduction to the production and theorization of functionalist architecture in Latin America from the 1920s through the 1940s. Primarily an abstract, utilitarian, and social architecture, functionalism developed and manifested itself most powerfully in the urban centers of Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay. The book traces how it emerged within and against various economic, artistic, cultural, and political realities and out of the need to radically transform architecture--not only to meet the building requirements of a growing working class but also to critique longstanding aesthetic practices. (Radical) Functionalism in Latin America ad...
Mexico City became one of the centers of architectural modernism in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Invigorated by insights drawn from the first published histories of Mexican colonial architecture, which suggested that Mexico possessed a distinctive architecture and culture, beginning in the 1920s a new generation of architects created profoundly visual modern buildings intended to convey Mexico's unique cultural character. By midcentury these architects and their students had rewritten the country's architectural history and transformed the capital into a metropolis where new buildings that evoked pre-conquest, colonial, and International Style architecture coexist...
The period following the Mexican Revolution was characterized by unprecedented artistic experimentation. Seeking to express the revolution's heterogeneous social and political aims, which were in a continuous state of redefinition, architects, artists, writers, and intellectuals created distinctive, sometimes idiosyncratic theories and works. Luis E. Carranza examines the interdependence of modern architecture in Mexico and the pressing sociopolitical and ideological issues of this period, as well as the interchanges between post-revolutionary architects and the literary, philosophical, and artistic avant-gardes. Organizing his book around chronological case studies that show how architectur...
As Latin American elites strove to modernize their cities at the turn of the twentieth century, they eagerly adopted the eugenic theory that improvements to the physical environment would lead to improvements in the human race. Based on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” this strain of eugenics empowered a utopian project that made race, gender, class, and the built environment the critical instruments of modernity and progress. Through a transnational and interdisciplinary lens, Eugenics in the Garden reveals how eugenics, fueled by a fear of social degeneration in France, spread from the realms of medical science to architecture and urban...
Bringing together an expert group of established and emerging scholars, this book analyses the pervasive myth of the 'new man' in various fascist movements and far-right regimes between 1919 and 1945. Through a series of ground-breaking case studies focusing on countries in Europe, but with additional chapters on Argentina, Brazil and Japan, The "New Man" in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-45 argues that what many national forms of far-right politics understood at the time as a so-called 'anthropological revolution' is essential to understanding this ideology's bio-political, often revolutionary dynamics. It explores how these movements promoted the creation of a new, ideal human, ...
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, t...
This book presents an expansive overview of the development of architectural and environmental research, with authoritative essays spanning Dean Hawkes’ impressive 50-year academic career. The book considers the relationship between the technologies of the environment and wider historical and theoretical factors, with chapters on topics ranging from the origins of modern ‘building science’ in Renaissance England to technology and imagination in architecture. It includes numerous architectural examples from renowned architects such as Christopher Wren, Peter Zumthor, Alvar Aalto, Robert Venturi and Carlo Scarpa. Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in architecture and beyond, this illustrated volume collates important and wide-ranging essays tracing the definition, scope and methodologies of architectural and environmental studies, with a foreword by Susannah Hagan.
Architecture and design have been used to exert control over bodies, across lines of class, gender and race. They regulate access to certain spaces and facilities, impose physical or psychological barriers, and make particular activities possible for specific groups. Built in 1951, the War Memorial Gymnasium at the University of British Columbia is a prize-winning example of modernist architecture. Although conceived to honour the dead of World War II, it was far from being a neutral memorial and gymnasium for everyday athletes. This collection shows what the design, construction and shifting functions and spatial configurations of the building reveal about the values and aspirations of the university in the post-war years. It shows how the building reflected the social and power relations among university administrators, architects and planners, faculty, staff and students, and demonstrates how the culture and structure of the gymnasium responded to changing attitudes to competition, discipline, profession, gender, race and health. As the editors explain, built form has politics, and culture - sporting culture - is just politics by another name.