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BARRY BERGDOLL
NEW YORK, 2016
Publisher: MOMA
Edited by: Barry Bergdoll, Patricio del Real...
Building: Hardback
Dimensions: 25.4 x 3.81 x 31.75 cm
Language: English
Pages: 320
In 1955 the Museum of Modern Art staged the exhibition Latin American Architecture since 1945, a landmark exploration of modern architecture in Latin America. On the 60th anniversary of that significant show, the Museum returned to the region to offer a complex overview of the positions, debates, and architectural creativity from Mexico and Cuba to the Southern Cone between 1955 and the early 1980s.
This period of, exploration, and complex political changes also saw the emergence of the notion of Latin America as a place of development, one in which all aspects of cultural life were colored in one way or another by a new attitude to what emerged as the “Third World.” The 1955 exhibition featured the result of a single photographic campaign, but Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980 brought together a variety of original materials that had never before been shown together and which were rarely exhibited, even in their countries of origin.
The exhibition featured architectural drawings, architectural models, vintage photographs, and film clips alongside newly commissioned models and photographs. While the exhibition concentrated on the period of 1955 to 1980 in most of the countries of Latin America, it was introduced by an ample preface on the preceding three decades of architectural developments in the region, presentations of the development of several key university campuses in cities such as Mexico City and Caracas, and a look at the development of the new Brazilian capital at Brasilia. Architects met these challenges with formal, urbanistic, and programmatic innovation, much of it relevant still to the challenges faced in the 21st century, in which Latin America is again providing exciting and stimulating architecture and urban responses to the ongoing issues of modernization and development, though it’s complex and ever changing economic and political contexts.