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Edited Volumes by Ana María León
e-flux architecture, 2020
Architecture, with its deep implications in property and capital derived from settler colonial pr... more Architecture, with its deep implications in property and capital derived from settler colonial processes, condenses the tensions, contradictions, disavowals, and betrayals of settler colonialism. And yet, discourse on settler colonialism has been largely absent from the architectural discipline. This absence is productive in settler colonial contexts—it allows the discipline to most effectively serve the interests of capital and its emissaries. Indeed, in its hegemonic professional and pedagogic forms, architecture was and remains a product, instrument, and memorial of settler colonialism. Attempts to “decolonize the curriculum” that omit these constitutive relations are complicit with them.
Architectural Theory Review, 2017
Raw materials have long linked disparate territories through transnational circuits of exchange, ... more Raw materials have long linked disparate territories through transnational circuits of exchange, imperial regimes, and technology transfers. What remains under-examined is the relationship of these commodities to the built environment and the relationship of both to the rise of global capitalism. This special issue of ATR argues that the extraction, cultivation, processing, storage, and circulation of commodities has shaped images, buildings, and landscapes across the globe. The authors herein examine architecture’s links to a larger constellation of design practices, from photography to infrastructure to regional planning.
Detroit Resists is a coalition of activists, artists, architects, and community members working o... more Detroit Resists is a coalition of activists, artists, architects, and community members working on behalf of an inclusive, equitable, and democratic city. We came together to respond to "The Architectural Imagination," an exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion in the 2016 Venice Biennale. In response to this exhibition, Detroit Resists digitally occupied the U.S. Pavilion with its own exhibition. This is the catalogue of this digital occupation it was co-edited with Andrew Herscher.
Essays by Ana María León
The Journal of Architecture, 2023
In 1869, the Osage burial monument known as Big Mound, located in the middle of downtown St. Loui... more In 1869, the Osage burial monument known as Big Mound, located in the middle of downtown St. Louis, was destroyed. But the desecration of the site did not end there. The multiple destructions and memorialisations that this sacred site subsequently endured reveal the markers of settler colonialism, a form of occupation that replaces Indigenous populations with invasive societies. We can see this pattern take shape in the narratives constructed around the site, in the manner in which its destruction was enacted and recorded, and in the commemoration efforts made in 1929 under the sponsorship of the Colonial Dames of America. This association is dedicated to honouring the memory of settlers, the agents involved in the destruction and dispossession of Indigenous populations. The plaque installed by the group prioritises them over the Indigenous builders it is supposed to commemorate. Aggressions to the site have not stopped. In 2014, the Missouri Department of Transportation moved the marker to make way for the construction of the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge. A few efforts have been made to palliate these actions and commemorate the monument. However, these efforts have elided and erased the claims of its builders — the Osage Nation — and constructed an image of these sites as empty, abandoned ruins built by supposedly distant, disappeared groups. By disconnecting the original builders from contemporary Indigenous groups, they have followed settler colonial frameworks resulting in acts of both physical and conceptual un-making that extend to the present. Undoing these frameworks is the first step towards reconsidering the broader site, which extends beyond the monument.
Manifest: Bigger than Big, 2021
In this essay I argue the joint exhibition of 19th century bodies and bones along with Pleistocen... more In this essay I argue the joint exhibition of 19th century bodies and bones along with Pleistocene bones displaced contemporary Indigenous genocide into a remote past. The broader argument of the essay links the network of iron building parts, bones, cattle, and grain to understand Argentina as a settler colonial nation and the role of Indigenous genocide in global processes of industrialization.
Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present, 2020
e-flux, 2020
The colonial genealogy of the contemporary nation-state border frames any politics of their openi... more The colonial genealogy of the contemporary nation-state border frames any politics of their opening. Borders are opened when they are approached, conceptually and practically, as ambivalent, porous, fluid, and negotiated. At the same time, borders, whether closed or opened, are also historical artifacts of a colonial episteme. Neglecting the colonial genealogy of the border renders border work of any and all sort as a deferral of the work of decolonization.
Grazer Architektur Magazin 14 Exhibiting Matters, 2018
Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 2016
La Ciudad Frente al Río (The City in Front of the River) is an Argentinian, ten-minute long film ... more La Ciudad Frente al Río (The City in Front of the River) is an Argentinian, ten-minute long film directed by Italian Surrealist Enrico Gras in 1949. The film was part of the promotional material for Bajo Belgrano, a modern housing plan sponsored by the Buenos Aires City Hall under the auspice of populist president Juan Perón. As part of this promotion, German photographer Grete Stern designed a brochure with images from the film and text by the Study for the Plan of Buenos Aires (Estudio del Plan de Buenos Aires, hereafter EPBA). I compare the film and brochure to contemporaneous work by Stern: a series of photomontages illustrating a women’s advice column. The column mined its readers’ dreams for insights into their unconscious, and advised them on proper behavior. Following a similar method, the film found Buenos Aires’ unconscious in the chaos of city life, and revealed what I have termed as "pastoral modernity" as the cure. Masked behind a veneer of revolutionary modernity, the message of these works was that of a nostalgic return to the past—an invitation to sleep, and to dream. Complicating this message, subtle hints in both the film and the photomontages point to the artists’ awareness of the totalizing vision they were collaborating with.
Participation in Art and Architecture: Spaces of Participation and Occupation
This essay examines the narratives used to represent public space and to address or suppress the ... more This essay examines the narratives used to represent public space and to address or suppress the conflicts that take place within it. These narratives are examined in the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City, designed by Mario Pani and the site of student protest and subsequent tragedy in 1968. This case study is related to a more recent project: the Metropol Parasol in Seville by JürgenMayer H., a large structure including a market, a museum, and an expanse of public space that was the site of Acampada Sevilla in 2011. In both instances, older buildings were incorporated into new designs meant to represent the state: a modern vision for the Mexican Miracle, formal exuberance for a renewed Seville. The construction of these idealized public spaces by the state was followed by their subsequent occupation by marginalized constituencies, protesting the very same state that built the structures. My analysis describes two registers of publicness: as a realm of discourse and as the presence in a physical site. Each of the following case studies incorporates both registers in different ways. Using these case studies, I examine the tensions between public space as constituted by the state and its appropriation by a contesting public. A space is only public, I argue, when it can be contested, questioned, and claimed by active citizens.
A inicios de los setenta aparecieron dos espacios de excepción en Ritoque: una escuela de arquite... more A inicios de los setenta aparecieron dos espacios de excepción en Ritoque: una escuela de arquitectura y un centro de detención. Si bien no hubo contacto entre ellos, sus ocupantes formaron comunidades y utilizaron repertorios similares (juegos, eventos y performances) para crear espacios reales e imaginarios. Los profesores formaron un enclave utópico que los liberó de estructuras normativas pero limitó su ac-ción política. Los prisioneros del campo, en cambio, transformaron su aislamiento forzado en una activa resistencia política. Pal abr as cl ave · arquitectura, educación, performance, teatro, dictadura
Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, Ines Weizman, ed., 2013
Arrested and forced to retire from teaching at the start of the Brazilian dictatorship, architect... more Arrested and forced to retire from teaching at the start of the Brazilian dictatorship, architect .Joao Batista Vilanova Artigas wound up working for the regime that had curtailed his freedom, How and why did this central figure in Brazilian architecture turn from resistance to collaboration? A significant body of recent Brazilian scholarship has focused on particular actors and time periods related to this question.' and by looking for connections across a broader time scale, this essay intends to complement and respond to these studies from an external point of view. Here, Artigas' writing, Designing dissent Figure 5.1 Vila nova Artigas, FAU USp' front view from Ave. Luciano Gualberto (photograph c. 2011 I discourses into the pedagogy of the school in the 1960s. followed by debates on the political role of the discipline prompted by the military coup of 1964. This context, paired with the threat of incoming foreign firms and the continuity of the state's developmentalist policies, illuminates broader links in Artiqas' attitudes toward the state. I argue Artigas' appropriation of foreign pedagogies and technology echoed the developmentalist policies of the Brazilian military regime. and his fixation with the threat of United States imperialism ultimately superseded the abuses of the regime he served. Industrialisation and foreign influx After the Second World War, Brazil began a process of accelerated industrialisation, consolidated in the latter half of the 1950s with the developmentalist project of J uscelino Kubitschek (1956-611.' It is possible to roughly bookend the period between two architectural events: the 1943 'Brazil Builds' exhibition at MoMA and the construction from scratch of Brasilia, the new modern Brazilian capital. built between 1956-1960.
Aldo Rossi, la storia di un libro: L’architettura della città, dal 1966 ad oggi, 2014
Fernanda De Maio, Alberto Ferlenga, Patrizia Montini Zimolo, eds. (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2014).
Journal of Architectural Education 66:1, 2012
thresholds 39: Inertia, 2011
e-flux architecture, 2020
Architecture, with its deep implications in property and capital derived from settler colonial pr... more Architecture, with its deep implications in property and capital derived from settler colonial processes, condenses the tensions, contradictions, disavowals, and betrayals of settler colonialism. And yet, discourse on settler colonialism has been largely absent from the architectural discipline. This absence is productive in settler colonial contexts—it allows the discipline to most effectively serve the interests of capital and its emissaries. Indeed, in its hegemonic professional and pedagogic forms, architecture was and remains a product, instrument, and memorial of settler colonialism. Attempts to “decolonize the curriculum” that omit these constitutive relations are complicit with them.
Architectural Theory Review, 2017
Raw materials have long linked disparate territories through transnational circuits of exchange, ... more Raw materials have long linked disparate territories through transnational circuits of exchange, imperial regimes, and technology transfers. What remains under-examined is the relationship of these commodities to the built environment and the relationship of both to the rise of global capitalism. This special issue of ATR argues that the extraction, cultivation, processing, storage, and circulation of commodities has shaped images, buildings, and landscapes across the globe. The authors herein examine architecture’s links to a larger constellation of design practices, from photography to infrastructure to regional planning.
Detroit Resists is a coalition of activists, artists, architects, and community members working o... more Detroit Resists is a coalition of activists, artists, architects, and community members working on behalf of an inclusive, equitable, and democratic city. We came together to respond to "The Architectural Imagination," an exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion in the 2016 Venice Biennale. In response to this exhibition, Detroit Resists digitally occupied the U.S. Pavilion with its own exhibition. This is the catalogue of this digital occupation it was co-edited with Andrew Herscher.
The Journal of Architecture, 2023
In 1869, the Osage burial monument known as Big Mound, located in the middle of downtown St. Loui... more In 1869, the Osage burial monument known as Big Mound, located in the middle of downtown St. Louis, was destroyed. But the desecration of the site did not end there. The multiple destructions and memorialisations that this sacred site subsequently endured reveal the markers of settler colonialism, a form of occupation that replaces Indigenous populations with invasive societies. We can see this pattern take shape in the narratives constructed around the site, in the manner in which its destruction was enacted and recorded, and in the commemoration efforts made in 1929 under the sponsorship of the Colonial Dames of America. This association is dedicated to honouring the memory of settlers, the agents involved in the destruction and dispossession of Indigenous populations. The plaque installed by the group prioritises them over the Indigenous builders it is supposed to commemorate. Aggressions to the site have not stopped. In 2014, the Missouri Department of Transportation moved the marker to make way for the construction of the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge. A few efforts have been made to palliate these actions and commemorate the monument. However, these efforts have elided and erased the claims of its builders — the Osage Nation — and constructed an image of these sites as empty, abandoned ruins built by supposedly distant, disappeared groups. By disconnecting the original builders from contemporary Indigenous groups, they have followed settler colonial frameworks resulting in acts of both physical and conceptual un-making that extend to the present. Undoing these frameworks is the first step towards reconsidering the broader site, which extends beyond the monument.
Manifest: Bigger than Big, 2021
In this essay I argue the joint exhibition of 19th century bodies and bones along with Pleistocen... more In this essay I argue the joint exhibition of 19th century bodies and bones along with Pleistocene bones displaced contemporary Indigenous genocide into a remote past. The broader argument of the essay links the network of iron building parts, bones, cattle, and grain to understand Argentina as a settler colonial nation and the role of Indigenous genocide in global processes of industrialization.
Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present, 2020
e-flux, 2020
The colonial genealogy of the contemporary nation-state border frames any politics of their openi... more The colonial genealogy of the contemporary nation-state border frames any politics of their opening. Borders are opened when they are approached, conceptually and practically, as ambivalent, porous, fluid, and negotiated. At the same time, borders, whether closed or opened, are also historical artifacts of a colonial episteme. Neglecting the colonial genealogy of the border renders border work of any and all sort as a deferral of the work of decolonization.
Grazer Architektur Magazin 14 Exhibiting Matters, 2018
Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, 2016
La Ciudad Frente al Río (The City in Front of the River) is an Argentinian, ten-minute long film ... more La Ciudad Frente al Río (The City in Front of the River) is an Argentinian, ten-minute long film directed by Italian Surrealist Enrico Gras in 1949. The film was part of the promotional material for Bajo Belgrano, a modern housing plan sponsored by the Buenos Aires City Hall under the auspice of populist president Juan Perón. As part of this promotion, German photographer Grete Stern designed a brochure with images from the film and text by the Study for the Plan of Buenos Aires (Estudio del Plan de Buenos Aires, hereafter EPBA). I compare the film and brochure to contemporaneous work by Stern: a series of photomontages illustrating a women’s advice column. The column mined its readers’ dreams for insights into their unconscious, and advised them on proper behavior. Following a similar method, the film found Buenos Aires’ unconscious in the chaos of city life, and revealed what I have termed as "pastoral modernity" as the cure. Masked behind a veneer of revolutionary modernity, the message of these works was that of a nostalgic return to the past—an invitation to sleep, and to dream. Complicating this message, subtle hints in both the film and the photomontages point to the artists’ awareness of the totalizing vision they were collaborating with.
Participation in Art and Architecture: Spaces of Participation and Occupation
This essay examines the narratives used to represent public space and to address or suppress the ... more This essay examines the narratives used to represent public space and to address or suppress the conflicts that take place within it. These narratives are examined in the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City, designed by Mario Pani and the site of student protest and subsequent tragedy in 1968. This case study is related to a more recent project: the Metropol Parasol in Seville by JürgenMayer H., a large structure including a market, a museum, and an expanse of public space that was the site of Acampada Sevilla in 2011. In both instances, older buildings were incorporated into new designs meant to represent the state: a modern vision for the Mexican Miracle, formal exuberance for a renewed Seville. The construction of these idealized public spaces by the state was followed by their subsequent occupation by marginalized constituencies, protesting the very same state that built the structures. My analysis describes two registers of publicness: as a realm of discourse and as the presence in a physical site. Each of the following case studies incorporates both registers in different ways. Using these case studies, I examine the tensions between public space as constituted by the state and its appropriation by a contesting public. A space is only public, I argue, when it can be contested, questioned, and claimed by active citizens.
A inicios de los setenta aparecieron dos espacios de excepción en Ritoque: una escuela de arquite... more A inicios de los setenta aparecieron dos espacios de excepción en Ritoque: una escuela de arquitectura y un centro de detención. Si bien no hubo contacto entre ellos, sus ocupantes formaron comunidades y utilizaron repertorios similares (juegos, eventos y performances) para crear espacios reales e imaginarios. Los profesores formaron un enclave utópico que los liberó de estructuras normativas pero limitó su ac-ción política. Los prisioneros del campo, en cambio, transformaron su aislamiento forzado en una activa resistencia política. Pal abr as cl ave · arquitectura, educación, performance, teatro, dictadura
Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, Ines Weizman, ed., 2013
Arrested and forced to retire from teaching at the start of the Brazilian dictatorship, architect... more Arrested and forced to retire from teaching at the start of the Brazilian dictatorship, architect .Joao Batista Vilanova Artigas wound up working for the regime that had curtailed his freedom, How and why did this central figure in Brazilian architecture turn from resistance to collaboration? A significant body of recent Brazilian scholarship has focused on particular actors and time periods related to this question.' and by looking for connections across a broader time scale, this essay intends to complement and respond to these studies from an external point of view. Here, Artigas' writing, Designing dissent Figure 5.1 Vila nova Artigas, FAU USp' front view from Ave. Luciano Gualberto (photograph c. 2011 I discourses into the pedagogy of the school in the 1960s. followed by debates on the political role of the discipline prompted by the military coup of 1964. This context, paired with the threat of incoming foreign firms and the continuity of the state's developmentalist policies, illuminates broader links in Artiqas' attitudes toward the state. I argue Artigas' appropriation of foreign pedagogies and technology echoed the developmentalist policies of the Brazilian military regime. and his fixation with the threat of United States imperialism ultimately superseded the abuses of the regime he served. Industrialisation and foreign influx After the Second World War, Brazil began a process of accelerated industrialisation, consolidated in the latter half of the 1950s with the developmentalist project of J uscelino Kubitschek (1956-611.' It is possible to roughly bookend the period between two architectural events: the 1943 'Brazil Builds' exhibition at MoMA and the construction from scratch of Brasilia, the new modern Brazilian capital. built between 1956-1960.
Aldo Rossi, la storia di un libro: L’architettura della città, dal 1966 ad oggi, 2014
Fernanda De Maio, Alberto Ferlenga, Patrizia Montini Zimolo, eds. (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2014).
Journal of Architectural Education 66:1, 2012
thresholds 39: Inertia, 2011
Log 11, 2008
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Hyperallergic, 2023
We knew that Michael Heizer’s installation City would be impossible to visit when we made our way... more We knew that Michael Heizer’s installation City would be impossible to visit when we made our way through the Nevada desert in the summer of 2016 with a field trip investigating “technical lands” of the American desert for students in history and practice of art, architecture, and science. As our chartered bus departed the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, on the morning of August 22, we cued up a complicated satellite compass/phone system that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology provided to our group as a safety measure, preparing to announce the moment when we passed near to City (we had already abandoned the idea of trying to enter).
Harvard Design Magazine, 2021
Faktur, 2018
In the current context of rising authoritarianism and totalitarianism, the cultural roots of nati... more In the current context of rising authoritarianism and totalitarianism, the cultural roots of nationalism were staged in the summer of 2018 through two contemporaneous events—the FIFA World Cup and the Venice Biennial of Architecture. Both events strove to present an image of smooth globality via national representatives under the pretense of a supposedly egalitarian platform. But while FIFA is hardly a model for equality and progressive politics, the World Cup offered opportunities for a critical reading. The absence of African teams from the semifinals was contrasted with the undeniable importance of African (and Afro-Caribbean) immigrants and their descendants to the rosters of the European teams. These circumstances led to critical discussions on the nation-state, immigration, and citizenship, as well as the legacies of colonialism and other disparities caused by capital. In contrast, the absence of most African nations from the Biennial, as well as other markers of national disparity and privilege, have gone largely unmentioned in reviews of the exhibition in Venice, while the content of the Biennial itself was split in its acknowledgement of geopolitical constraints and complicities.
Art Journal Open, 2018
Digitally created and disseminated syllabi and reading groups have become important responses to ... more Digitally created and disseminated syllabi and reading groups have become important responses to the violence waged against vulnerable populations because of their race, class, or gender, but also to the privatization of knowledge sharing.
Dimensions of citizenship, May 17, 2018
The Latin term “Civitas” is traditionally defined as the social body of the citizens united by la... more The Latin term “Civitas” is traditionally defined as the social body of the citizens united by law. Yet, who gets to be a citizen, and who gets to decide on the law? If the civitas is based on inclusion, who does it exclude? This underlying tension between civitas and difference is a matter of concern to architects in the design of public spaces and services. That is, spaces that are meant to be inclusive, yet which operate within a civitas fragmented by relationships of oppression and exclusion. A possible response to these challenges can be found through the work of two very different thinkers. If philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wrote one of Western thought’s best-known meditations on bondage and its consequences on identity, sociologist, historian, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois has masterfully disentangled and exposed the role of slavery in the identity of the United States. Reading Hegel with Du Bois can provide crucial insight in thinking about the civic challenges of the architect, and how this challenge informs the design of public space.
The Avery Review 2, Oct 2014
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, Dec 2011
A review of the pdf as scholarly format.