Simultaneous Territories: Unveiling the Geographies of Latin American Cities (original) (raw)
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In what ways have patterns of urbanization and the types of urban political regimes in Latin American cities anticipated or followed trends in the United States and Europe, and to what extent have they followed their own distinctive path? What kinds of adaptations or translations are needed in the application of approaches from the North to Latin America?'
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Invisible Cities, a catalog of imaginary cities that presents an archetype of the city from which all possible cities may be deduced. This model of the city can help us to reflect both on a particular city and on all cities at once, for as Cal-vino reminds us in his renowned work, cities are ...
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Modernist architecture in Latin America was originally intended to propel the region into the ‘developed First World’. Meanwhile, modernist architecture in Anglo-America has often served to consolidate the political-economic power of the ‘First World’, especially in the age of globalisation. This essay examines the First/Third World divide through two historical ‘moments’ of modernism, beginning in Brazil and ending in California. Brazilian modernism reached its apex with the construction of Brasília (1955–1960), designed principally by two undisputed masters of Brazilian modernism, Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. The politico-economic ambitions of Brazil's modernist architecture, however, appear to have ended in failure. Rather than curing underdevelopment, modernism (and modernisation) may have exacerbated it. Yet for all modernism's failures, we should not assume that history has somehow left Brazil behind, as if Brazilian architecture were caught in some historical time-lag. In this essay I will test this notion by considering Richard Meier's Getty Center complex in Los Angeles. In projecting an ‘imperial’ power of globalisation onto Los Angeles, the Getty Center strives to create new meaning for its urban milieu. Yet in doing so it may be repeating problems manifest in Brasília.
Barrio Affinities: Transnational Inspiration and the Geopolitics of Latina/o Design
American Quarterly, 2014
cholarship on the cultural production of Latina/os has underexamined the role of designers, even as urban design, architecture, and graphic design are increasingly marketed to appeal to Latina/o tastes in housing, commercial packaging, branding, advertising, and other consumer goods. Academic disinterest may stem partly from a fine arts perspective that usually portrays design, especially the commercial kinds, such as graphic design, as a less cerebral, transcendent, and rarified visual field, linking design's roots in applied arts to an instrumental, capitalist approach to creative practice where the client or message rules, not the creator's conceptual brilliance. 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Why and how these designers express identity while most designers continue to operate under a modernist premise that design should follow a pseudoscientific method to solve visual problems that communicate at a universal level-trumpeting the very universality that has subsumed Latina/o and other minority cultural difference-is the question underlying this article. Part of the answer has to do with the role of place in Latina/o identity formation and cultural expression and the desire to represent the barrio and render it culturally valuable. This is what Raul Homero-Villa terms "barriological" practices: the cultural and social affirmations of the barrio that Latina/o scholars and activists have promoted since the Latino nationalist | 530 American Quarterly movements of the 1960s and 1970s to counter dominant perceptions of the barrio as blighted and devoid of praiseworthy culture. 2 These barriological practices took barrio life and culture as a source of inspiration to provide its very residents with new spaces of enjoyment and pride, such as Mexican murals and Puerto Rican casitas. 3 This article argues that in the field of design, desires for representing Latino-majority places are emerging and transforming the spatial and cultural contours of long-standing barrio cultural politics. Discussions of place and identity should be familiar to a design history in which the nation or region prominently figures. Graphic design history books are organized by categories such as French art nouveau, Russian constructivism, De Stijl (Dutch for "the style"), and Swiss design, and current practitioners and marketers promote, among others, Scandinavian design, Italian design, and Brooklyn design. Latina/o, Latin American, Asian, African, or African American designs, however, are rarely provided with the legitimacy of a placebased style in graphic design literature. In Philip B. Meggs's classic History of Graphic Design (1983), a chapter titled "The Asian Contribution" is reduced to ancient paper and printing technologies in Asia prior to the year 1150, and African and Latin American designs are limited to revolutionary propaganda of the mid-to late twentieth century. 4 Among modern architecture styles alone, European nationalisms such as De Stijl, the Glasgow School, and the Nordic tradition, and Latin American nationalisms, such as the Spanish colonial and Mexican and Brazilian modern architecture, are among the most popular styles. 5 Several designers are calling for ethnic-specific design to fill the lack of Latina/o representation in design history and using the barrio in lieu of a nation for this design production. 6 Urban planners and architects have emerged at the forefront of this Latina/o-based design, proposing related but incommensurate practice-oriented categories such as the urban planner Michael Mendez's "Latino New Urbanism," the urban planner James Rojas's "Latino urbanism," and the designer Henry Muñoz's "mestizo regionalism." 7 Proponents of these models believe that by elevating the contributions of Latina/o culture in cities, especially the marginalized barrios that conventional urban place-making has ignored, these practice-oriented urbanisms will diversify the built environment and represent the needs of a growing Latina/o population. The models are certainly contemporary, professional manifestations of barriological practices. 8 Yet these models, especially Latino New Urbanism and its typologies of Latino urban living, are also aestheticized developments that reify cultural stereotypes and are at a distance from the actual diversity and vivacity of the barrio. 9 Thus, such designs risk merely reflecting a multiculturalism that plays into the ethnic atomization convenient for current neoliberal marketing strategies. 10