MoMA to Open 'LATIN AMERICA IN CONSTRUCTION' Exhibition, 3/29

On the 60th anniversary of its last major survey of modern architecture in Latin America, The Museum of Modern Art returns its focus to the region with Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980, a complex overview of the positions, debates, and architectural creativity from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, from Mexico to Cuba to the Southern Cone, between 1955 and 1980. On view March 29 through July 19, 2015, Latin America in Construction is organized by Barry Bergdoll, Curator, and Patricio del Real, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA; Jorge Francisco Liernur, Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Carlos Eduardo Comas, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil; with the assistance of an advisory committee from across Latin America.

In 1955 MoMA staged Latin American Architecture since 1945, a landmark exhibition highlighting a decade of architectural achievements across Latin America. Latin America in Construction focuses on the subsequent quarter-century, a period of self-questioning, exploration, and complex political shifts in all the countries included: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. During these years Latin American countries created startling works that have never been fully granted their place in accounts of the history of modern architecture.

Latin America in Construction brings together, for the first time, more than 500 original works that have largely never been exhibited, even in their home countries. These include architectural drawings and models, vintage photographs, and films from the period collected from architecture and film archives, universities, and architecture offices throughout the region. Highlighting the extent to which the exhibition contributes to new interpretations of Latin American architecture of the period, several research teams-in addition to the invited curators-have worked over the last five years to develop analytical models and compilations of rarely seen film footage. These historical materials will be displayed alongside newly commissioned models intended to highlight the spatial invention of some of the period's masterworks of architecture, and to underscore the exploration of new forms of public space. Large-scale models of key structures have been commissioned for this exhibition from Constructo, a cultural organization working with the workshops of the Catholic University of Chile, along with models of buildings and their landscapes fabricated by the University of Miami, and both the exhibition and the catalogue feature a group of new photographs by the Brazilian photographer Leonardo Finotti.

Latin America in Construction begins with some of the most telling architectural projects of the years leading up to 1955 in drawings, models, and photographs, as well as an evocation in period films of the rapidly changing rhythm and physiognomy of urban life in major cities such as Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Sa?o Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Mexico City, and Havana. These attest to the region's breathtaking pace of change, modernization, and shift toward the metropolis. The exhibition is bookended by these historical films in the first gallery and, in the final gallery, a dynamic display of present-day snapshots of sites in the exhibition, submitted by Instagram users.

Urban Laboratories

Beginning in the late 1940s, planning for new campuses for the national universities of Mexico and Venezuela announced radical new thinking in which a modernist campus became not only a laboratory for new educational ideals, but also a fragment of an ideal future city that would explore themes related to local traditions and climate. The term "Cuidad Universitaria" was born, changing the relationship between university and city. Projects in Latin America in Construction range from the universities at Concepcio?n, in Chile, and Tuca?men, in Argentina, to Rio de Janeiro, Brasi?lia, and the National University in Bogota?.

From the campus laboratory to the fully realized new city, a section of the exhibition is devoted to one seminal example of modern urban planning in Latin America: Brasi?lia. From 1956 to 1960, Oscar Niemeyer led the newly created Companhia de Urbanizac?a?o da Nova Capital (NOVACAP) to move the Brazilian capital from Rio de Janeiro to the savanna of the central plateau. In a national competition to plan a city for a half-million inhabitants, the jury selected Lucio Costa's plan, which is exhibited in Latin America in Construction alongside very different visions from Brazilian architects Villanova Artigas and Rino Levi.

Costa's design was structured around two main axes: one of civic representation, focused on the Plaza of the Three Powers, which would come to feature Niemeyer's Congress building; the other a bowed axis centered on a complex transportation spine connecting the horizontal spread of the superquadras (urban residential superblocks). The bus terminal was placed at the intersection of the two axes, to be surrounded by the commercial, recreational, and cultural sectors, realizing a long-held modernist dream of a city centered on infrastructure and movement.

Cities in Transition

While the spectacular development of Brasi?lia was heralded, transformations of older cities were just as dramatic. The exhibition looks at examples such as Rio de Janeiro, where new relations between monumental public buildings, landscape design, and natural settings were forged in a spectacular redesign recasting the image of the city and its fabled landscape; the creation of a new civic center at Santa Rosa de la Pampa in Argentina, where architecture helped restructure the administration and the experience of the country's vast interior; and the recasting of portions of the Chilean coastline at Valparai?so to accommodate an expanded Naval Academy.

Also surveyed are buildings in the late 1950s and early 1960s that created a new permeability between interior and exterior space, eroding traditional boundaries of the public realm. Many of these buildings also have complex incorporation of diverse functions within a great urban block, notably Lucio Costa's Jockey Club in Rio de Janeiro and the Teatro San Marti?n in Buenos Aires, which grew to pierce through a block in the city's grid and incorporate a range of cultural functions. Clorindo Testa's great Bank of London in Buenos Aires, one of the masterpieces of the period, created an entirely new type of urban building block with its theatrical linking of interior spaces to the public realm of the street and sidewalk. Compelling new ideas for cultural buildings as complex structures-not set apart from the city, but interwoven within it -- are also featured, from Lina Bo Bardi's art museum in Sa?o Paulo and Clorindo Testa and Francisco Bullrich's National Library in Buenos Aires, to Abraham Zabludovsky and Teodoro Gonza?lez de Leo?n's Tamayo Museum in Mexico City.

A look at innovations in architecture for schools throughout Latin America includes Juan O'Gorman's projects for radically modern elementary schools across Mexico in the early 1930s, new educational buildings and programs built in the early years of the Cuban Revolution, the great open hall of Joa?o Batista Vilanova Artigas's Architectural Faculty in Sa?o Paulo, and the intertwining of classroom spaces and a great protected playground in the Belgrano school in Co?rdoba, Argentina. Latin America in Construction also explores the inventive flourishing of new models of church architecture in many Latin American countries, notably those of Uruguay's Eladio Dieste; public investment in major stadiums, leading to some of the most impressive structural achievements of advanced engineering; and the development of the coastline of every country in this exhibition, particularly as the rapid expansion of airplane travel transformed spatial relations among and within countries and fueled the development of tourism.

Housing

After World War II, Latin America emerged as one of the most sustained and innovative regions in terms of state investment and new thinking in housing design. One wall of the exhibition comprises a timeline of important housing initiatives intermixing state sponsored (public) housing with middle-class housing built by the private market.

A major example is the United Nations -- supported Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI; Experimental Housing Project) in Lima, Peru, a neighborhood of low-cost experimental housing conceived in 1966 by the British architect and planner Peter Land. In contrast to the superblock model, PREVI proposed the development of projects that could be partially built at the outset and then extended over time by the inhabitants as they gained greater resources or changed needs. Rather than a single master plan, Land chose an array of projects, resulting in a neighborhood with units designed by emerging international talents in middle-income housing, including Christopher Alexander (USA), Kikutaki, Kurokawa, Maki (Japan), Oskar Hansen (Poland), Candilis, Josic, Woods (France), and many others. Land's original slides are included in the exhibition.

The growing prosperity of the middle class in many Latin American countries ushered in a golden period of design for the individual family house, often combined with innovative garden design. While the emphasis of the exhibition is on public architecture and collective housing, it also includes an array of some of the most innovative and accomplished of the countless examples of architects designing houses for themselves or their family members, with examples by Agusti?n Herna?ndez Navarro, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Juan O'Gorman, and Amancio Williams.

Export

While Latin American architectural history has largely been written in terms of the importation of styles and techniques developed in Europe and the United States, Latin America in Construction seeks to bring attention to the internationalization of many Latin American practices. Beginning with the New York World's Fair of 1939, exhibitions have played a major role in showcasing the innovative forms and attitudes embodied in much Latin American work. Several examples of Latin American pavilions are featured in the exhibition, including Carlos Rau?l Villanueva's Venezuelan Pavilion for the 1967 Montreal Expo and Eduardo Terrazas's Mexican Pavilion for the 1968 Triennale di Milano.

More permanent and sustained exportations of Latin American architectural expertise are also examined. As countries studied new trade relationships in the realms of economy and politics, architecture in Latin America developed a more international set of practices. Seen as part of the Third World after World War II, Latin America was also an exporter of aid in the form of expertise, buildings, and plans, from Mexico providing schools to countries throughout the world (including Yugoslavia, India, and Indonesia) to Lucio Costa's design for a new city in Nigeria.

Utopia

As in the rest of the world, in Latin America 20th-century utopian thinking often involved a radical embrace or rejection of the accelerating pace of industrialization and the national embrace of technology. For some, technologies offered the possibility of conceiving entirely new spatial relations -- even the occupation of Antarctica, as seen in a 1981 perspective for Amancio Williams's Project for La primera ciudad en la Antarida (The first city in Antarctica). For others, technology contained an intrinsic dystopian failure, to be addressed with sharp criticism -- as seen in eight collages from the series Collages Sobre la Cuidad, (1966-70) by the Venezuelan architect Jorge Rigamonti, which reflect on the dark underside of his country's obsession with the development of its oil economy. A number of archival photographs and materials from the School of Architecture at Valparai?so are also on view, illustrating the school's radical refusal of the prevailing values of a technological future in the search for an architecture of poetics.

PUBLICATIONS:

Published in conjunction with the exhibition and edited by Barry Bergdoll, Carlos Eduardo Comas, Jorge Francisco Liernur, and Patricio del Real, Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 features a wealth of original materials that have never before been brought together. These materials 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 postwar period to light. 9.5 x 12"; 320 pages; 560 color ills. Hardcover, $65. ISBN 978-0-87070-963-0. Published by The Museum of Modern Art and available at MoMA stores and online at MoMAstore.org. Distributed to the trade through ARTBOOK|D.A.P. in the United States and Canada, and through Thames & Hudson outside the United States and Canada.

An anthology of primary texts and writings by architects translated from Spanish and Portuguese is forthcoming in MoMA's Primary Documents series.

INSTAGRAM PROJECT:

In collaboration with Instagram, MoMA invites Instagram users to share their photos of buildings featured in the exhibition, using #ArquiMoMA. Select photos will be featured on a display in the exhibition galleries and on MoMA.org. The goal of the project is to show the current context of these buildings and how people see and use them today.

The project will launch with the start of the exhibition on March 29, 2015, and will continue through the conclusion of the exhibition on July 19, 2015. Photos may be posted on Instagram using #ArquiMoMA at any time leading up to or during the exhibition.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS:

Learning from/in Latin America
This program expands on the exhibition's curatorial framework and further explores key positions, debates, and architectural activity arising from Mexico to Cuba and the Southern Cone over three decades of development between 1955 and the early 1980s. Practitioners, planners, architecture and urban design historians, humanities scholars, curators, and critics will contribute to a conversation about architecture in Latin America, its social and political implications, and the persistent legacies of modernization. Learning from/in Latin America is jointly organized by The Museum of Modern Art and the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities at Princeton University.

Learning from/in Latin America, Part One
Thursday, April 2, 6:00-7:30 p.m.
The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2, The Museum of Modern Art
This roundtable conversation brings together contemporary architects from Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia to reflect on their current activity in relation to the quarter-century of architectural and urban development featured in the exhibition. Participants include Angelo Bucci, SPBR Arquitetos, Sa?o Paulo, Brazil; Tatiana Bilbao, Tatiana Bilbao SC, Mexico City, Mexico; and Felipe Mesa, Planb: Arquitectos, Medelli?n, Colombia. Barry Bergdoll, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA, introduces the roundtable program and Fabrizio Gallanti, Princeton-Mellon Initiative, Princeton University, moderates.

Tickets ($15; $10 members and corporate members; $5 students, seniors, and staff of other museums) can be purchased online at MoMA.org/visit/calendar/events/23283 or at the information desk, at the Film desk after 4:00 p.m., or at the Education and Research Building reception desk on the day of the program. Ticket reservation is required for each part of this program.

Learning from/in Latin America, Part Two
Friday, April 3, 2015, 10:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture, Princeton University
Established and emerging scholars of architecture and urbanism convene for a daylong symposium to discuss ideas central to the formulation of the exhibition: campuses as urban laboratories, the image and imaginary of the city, and the concept of the informal city. Following an introduction by Stan Allen, School of Architecture, Princeton University, and Bruno Carvalho, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, Princeton University, curators of the exhibition will moderate three sessions: The Campus as a Laboratory for the Ideal City, Urban Imaginaries, and The Form of the Informal.

Additional program information for this event, including speakers and ticket sales, can be found
at soa.princeton.edu/learning-from-in-latin-america. Ticket reservation is required for each part of this program.

MoMA CLASS:

Latin America in Construction: Art, Architecture, and the Metropolis
Tuesdays, April 14, 21 and May 5, 12, 19, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
This course explores modern architecture in Latin America during the Cold War, when the region's spectacular urbanization resulted in an unprecedented alignment between modern design, the politics of development, and the construction of regional identities. Cities such as Mexico City, Sa?o Paulo, and Caracas were among the fastest growing cities in the world. The region was a laboratory for experiments in modern housing, planning, and infrastructure, as well as for avant- garde artistic practices, all of which played out against the backdrop of swelling urban populations and volatile political changes. Latin America was contested terrain, geographically and discursively, as evidenced by those who sought to shape the idea of "Latin America" for their own ends. Led by art and architecture historian and educator Jennifer Gray (PhD, Columbia University), the course will combine in-depth investigation of the special exhibition Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 with guest speakers who explore issues related to the construction and preservation of cultural identities, the politics of state-led desarrollismo (developmentalism), modern art under dictatorship, and contemporary challenges related to the proliferation of informal cities, favelas, and ad hoc housing.

Prices: nonmembers $400, members and Corporate Member employees $360, students and educators $200. Register online at MoMA.org/classes.

PUBLIC INFORMATION:
The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019, (212) 708-9400, MoMA.org.
Hours: Saturday through Thursday, 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Friday, 10:30 a.m.-8:00 p.m.
Museum Admission: $25 adults; $18 seniors, 65 years and over with I.D.; $14 full-time students with current I.D. Free, members and children 16 and under. (Includes admittance to Museum galleries and film programs). Free admission during Uniqlo Free Friday Nights: Fridays, 4:00-8:00 p.m.
MoMA.org: No service charge for tickets ordered on MoMA.org. Tickets purchased online may be printed out and presented at the Museum without waiting in line. (Includes admittance to Museum galleries and film programs).

Pictured: Rogelio Salmona. Torres del Parque Residencial Complex, Bogotá, Colombia, 1964-1970. Photograph: Leonardo Finotti © Leonardo Finotti.