A selected, fully open, and deep assemblage, that carries the explicit intent of outlining, conceptual and practical verifications, on critical views and specific projects, concerning the actual architecture in the Latin American territory. The book intends to communicate a targeted objective, to circumscribe a segment, a series of observations and actions in architecture. However, it is a selected, fully open, and deep fragment, outlining conceptual and practical verifications on critical views and concrete projects, concerning the actual, extensive world of architecture in the Latin American territory, and in the first years of the new century. It is a sequence of topical segments organized as an unsystematic series and through a number of different projects in each case: the single family house; searches on bigger scales; poetical structures; topics under consideration; a look over laboratories; terrain, landscape and topography; covering folk factors; and the volumetric reasoning and physical features. A selected and deep assemblage of the current architecture in the Latin American territory.

In the last decade Latin America has been the scene of one of the greatest building booms in history. The Museum of Modem Art, under its International Exhibitions Program, sent Henry-Russell Hitchcock, America's leading historian of modern architecture, to survey this remarkable achievement and to report on the most significant buildings he found there. This volume, the result of that trip, presents forty-six buildings by a score of architects in ten countries and Puerto Rico. -- from book jacket.

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 volume in any language. Modern Architecture in Latin America is the first comprehensive history of this important production. Designed as a survey and focused on key examples/paradigms arranged chronologically from 1903 to 2003, this volume covers a myriad of countries; historical, social, and political conditions; and projects/developments that range from small houses to urban plans to architectural movements. The book is structured so that it can be read in a variety of ways—as a historically developed narrative of modern architecture in Latin America, as a country-specific chronology, or as a treatment of traditions centered on issues of art, technology, or utopia. This structure allows readers to see the development of multiple and parallel branches/historical strands of architecture and, at times, their interconnections across countries. The authors provide a critical evaluation of the movements presented in relationship to their overall goals and architectural transformations.

A chronological overview of important art, sculpture, and architectural monuments of colonial Latin America within the economic and religious contexts of the era.

What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from. Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.

Shaping Terrain shows how the physical landscape and local ecology have influenced human settlement and built form in Latin America since pre-Columbian times. Most urban centers and capitals of Latin American countries are situated on or near dramatically varied terrain, and this book explores the interplay between built works and their geographies in various cities including Bogotá, Caracas, Mendoza, Mexico D. F., Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, and Valparaíso. The multi-national contributors to Shaping Terrain have a broad range of professional experience as urbanists, historians, and architects, and many are globally renowned for their design work. They examine how humans negotiate with the existing environment and how the built form expresses that relationship. The result is a wide-ranging representation of the unique legacy of Latin America’s urban heritage, which is a repository of possibilities for future cities.