architecture and the construction of cultural identity. learning from latin america

ARCHITECTURE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CULTURAL IDENTITY

OR LEARNING FROM LATIN AMERICA

2007 Susana Torre and Geoffrey Fox

[email protected]

[email protected]

Eladio Dieste. Shopping Center. Montevideo, Uruguay

This not a paper about African architecture. Neither is it a paper

about Latin American architecture. Rather, it is a discussion about

architecture and the construction of cultural identity, using Latin

America as a case study. Why is this relevant to this conference?

Because the conference poses as its central question: Is there an

African architecture, and if so, what are its elements, space, form and

technology? If we substitute Latin American for African the very

Torre-Fox AAT paper Page 1 of 17

same issues were posed in 1985, stimulating a vigorous and still

continuing production of discourses about architecture and cultural

identity in Latin America. The debates around these issues have been

expressed in theoretical and critical papers, in actual buildings

intended to express one side or another, and a roving gathering of

scholars and designers that now takes place in a conference every two

years, each time in a different country, alternating between the

northern and southern extremes of Latin America, a region that covers

most of two continents and islands between them. We suggest that

awareness of this fervor over similar issues in another world region

may be useful to African scholars in at least three ways: first, it may

serve to clarify which design and identity issues are uniquely African,

and which are more widely shared; secondly, it may help avoid some

of the less productive lines of debate that Latin Americans engaged in

for some time before abandoning them as fruitless; and finally, it is

always stimulating to both sides to share ideas with serious colleagues

of other backgrounds and outlooks.

We have said that these questions of a regional identity in

architecture and how to express it were first posed publicly and

dramatically in Latin America in 1985. This was the date of the first

conference of Latin American scholars and designers that shaped the

discussion in the years that followed. Some of the questions raised in

those early debates later were reframed or simply lost their relevance.

First lets look at the dominant discourses within which the

central question is inscribed: Is it there an identifiable architecture

common to and specific to our region whether Latin America or

Africa? Twenty-five years ago the central idea of the dominant

architectural discourse, which is to say, the discourse that had evolved

in New York, London and Tokyo, was post-modernism. Earlier, in


1967, Robert Venturi had launched a gentle attack on modernity,

which had become a rigidly consistent corporate style in the United

States while its social programs remained unfulfilled in most of the

world. He called for a post-modern state of mind that acknowledged

ambiguity and contradiction, as is the case in the popular arts. By the

early 1980s, post-modernism had coined a repertory of architectural

tropes that were based on the formal elements of European neo-

classicism, often merely superimposed on modern corporate styles.

These became the new memes, as Richard Dawkins has called them,

the ideas or slogans or design details that spread from one brain to

another like an infectious virus. They were disseminated via

conferences, magazines and journals, and endlessly (and mindlessly)

replicated just as the earlier modernist memes had been. In 1985,

during a conference on postmodernism and architecture in Buenos

Aires, Argentina, where none of the main speakers were from Latin

America, a small group of architects from Latin American countries set

up a parallel meeting in defiance of the conferences format and rules.

This became what they called the Seminars of Latin American

Architecture, or SAL (Seminarios de Arquitectura Latinoamerica). Sal

is also the Spanish word for salt, the basic condiment they thought

had been missing in the discussion of issues that, they felt, did not

represent the reality and concerns of Latin American architects beyond

the elite circles in the major Latin American capitals. What came out of

these initial discussions was the realization that to engage

postmodernism in a region where the largest part of the population

lived in marginal conditions, without enjoying the benefits of

modernization access to drinking water, paved streets, good housing

and schools, equipped hospitals and so on, made no sense. They felt

the social promise and the bare bones esthetics of modernity were still


valid and current in Latin America and that architects should once

again embrace them, albeit in a manner that reflected realistically the

conditions of the region, its poverty, and its lack of sophisticated

technological resources. There thus arose the call for what they called

an appropriated/appropriate modernity. In Spanish and Portuguese,

appropriate and appropriated are same word, apropiado

(masculine) or apropiada, and they meant it in both senses: the

aspects of modernity taken in by Latin American architects should be

appropriate, that is, suitable to local conditions, and should also be

appropriated, that is, taken over and remade to meet local needs. At

the inception, this concept was vague enough to be embraced by

people coming from very diverse countries and who in reality had very

different notions of what was appropriate and how to appropriate

others ideas. By the 4th SAL meeting in 1989, the latent

disagreements over its meaning came out into the open. Silvia Arango,

editor of the 1991 compilation of the key papers of this conference,

asked whether there was indeed a debate about Latin American

architecture, or whether all that was left was a dialogue among deaf

people. Yet there was a debate, with the majority position, led by the

Chileans Christian Fernandez-Cox and Enrique Brown, proposing the

construction of an appropriate modernity in opposition to the

modernities in Northern hemisphere countries that were heirs to the

goals of 18th century European Enlightment. This new modernity

should not be based on folkloric or nativist essences. Instead, it

should reflect the tension between the spirit of the time and spirit of

the place. The architectural historian Marina Weisman, one of the key

participants and the author of a major theoretical work, The Historical

Structure of the Built Environment, believed that place was of

greater importance than time, because people who culturally and


mentally inhabit different historical eras (pre-modern, modern and

post-modern) may coexist in the same place and society. This is

obviously true in large parts of Latin America, where people who

continue to observe ancient, pre-European customs and beliefs live in

the same towns, and often in the same households, with others who

are much more modern or postmodern.

Luis Barragn. St. Cristobal Horse Ranch. Mexico City

Within the debate, the appropriateness of place also came to

mean the use of construction materials that were not imported, and

intermediate technologies that were already in common use in each

region. Appropriate materials and technology were present in the

buildings of several Latin American architects whose work has been

canonized in the past twenty years through awards and publications,

such as the Argentineans Claudio Caveri and Togo Diaz; the Chilean


Christian deGroote; the Colombian Rogelio Salmona; the Cuban

Ricardo Porro; the Mexicans Luis Barragan and Luis Mijares; and the

Uruguayan Eladio Dieste. They all used brick and reinforced concrete,

signaling a formal continuity with traditional architecture. This work

was considered emblematic of an architecture that was appropriate to

societies that were poor in capital without becoming an architecture

of poverty. To these we would add projects that embraced the

poverty of resources in an even more explicit way, such as the

churches designed for Pentecostal congregations in marginal

neighborhoods of Buenos Aires by Norma Romn and Mederico Faivre,

and the projects built in Ritoque, Chile, and other locations by the

students and faculty of a Chilean school of architecture in Via del Mar.

The Open City. The Pilgrims Lodge. Ritoque, Chile


The debates minority position claimed that the process of

modernization of Latin American cities during the first half of the 20th

century had already provided a legitimate starting point for modernity

in the region. This could be seen in the architectural designs of the

Argentinean Amancio Williams; the Brazilians Lucio Costa and Oscar

Niemeyer; and the Mexican Luis Barragan, respectful of regional

typologies and materials. Moreover, the origin of appropriation in the

arts had already been postulated by the Brazilians Tarsila de Amaral, a

painter, and by Oswald de Andrade, a writer and author of the

Cannibal Manifesto of 1928, whose iconic line is "Tupi or not Tupi: that

is the question." The Tupi are an indigenous Brazilian tribe that had

been accused of cannibalism; Andrades appropriation of the line from

Hamlet, he was suggesting, was a kind of cultural cannibalism, by

eating Shakespeare.

Ricardo Porro. School of Fine Arts. Cubanacn, Havana, Cuba


The relationship of a Latin American architecture to a supposed

Latin American cultural identity became an even stronger focal point

of the debate, dominating the discourse for a decade or so. Several

participants attempted to define it in opposition to the cultural identity

of the English-speaking United States, and its early Puritan esthetic.

To some, the difference was self-evident when the buildings of two

Modernist architects the Mexican Luis Barragan and the Dutch Cor

Van Eesteren -- were compared. They further claimed that the

appropriation of the Catholic baroque by the indigenous craftspeople

who had carved many of the Colonial churches magnificent interiors

had set up the basis for an esthetic mestizaje which should be a

characteristic of Latin American architecture of all times. This line of

argument was opposed of those who believed that the cultural

identities of countries with a very strong influence of indigenous

cultures, such as Mexico and Peru, or African cultures, such as Cuba,

were very different from the cultural identities of countries that

received a huge influx of European immigration (primarily from Spain

and Italy) starting in the 19th century, such as Argentina, Brazil and

Venezuela. Other participants alleged that the idea of a Latin

American identity in architecture was dangerously close to the

nationalisms that flourished in the arts at the end of the 19th Century,

when architects insisted on defining a national architecture based on

the Colonial precedents.

In spite of these critiques and doubts, the question of a cultural

identity in architecture became entrenched in the emerging discourse,

and became the basis for the defense of the cultural and architectonic

patrimony. This allowed the architectural historians to take over the

architects protagonistic role in the formulation of discourse. The

evolution of their protagonism has been bolstered over the past


decade and a half by the numerous institutional mechanisms that

prominent SAL participants put in place in their respective countries.

Rogelio Salmona. Torres del Parque. Bogot, Colombia


Among these were the Argentineans Marina Waisman and

Ramn Gutirrez (author of the first and only history of Latin American

architecture, published in 1985), the Brazilian Hugo Segawa, the

Chilean Humberto Eliash, the Colombian Silvia Arango, and the

Mexican Louise Noelle. These institutionalized supports included, in

addition to the SAL, a Latin American architecture biennial exhibition

and conference in Ecuador, numerous university-based architecture

magazines and research books with an emphasis on the historic

patrimony of Latin American cities. A few countries lacking resources,

like Bolivia, were able to secure financial support from the

Autonomous Regional Government of Andalusia in Spain for the

publication of architectural guides, using the interest of the former

Colonial power in being recognized as the mother country. Wealthier

countries like Mexico and Brazil are now way ahead of the others in

the publication and dissemination of their architectural historical

research. As a result of this work we now know far more about

architecture in Latin America than a decade ago, although the

narrative has huge holes that remain unexamined, such as the building

culture of indigenous and African populations, and the role of women

in the formulation of modernity. The latter is only recently being

recognized by the patrimonial protection extended to two key

modernist houses whose clients and designers were the Mexican

painter Frida Kahlo, and the Argentinean writer Victoria Ocampo,

whose literary and cultural journal Sur had Jorge Luis Borges as a

contributor.

The impulse towards establishing precedents for the creation of

a Latin American architecture did not prosper. The importance of

Diestes, Caveris or Salmonas work has yet to transcend the region.


Togo Diaz. Apartment Building. Crdoba, Argentina

And in Latin America, architecture professionals and students are more

familiar with buildings that are published in American, European and

Japanese architectural magazines than with those built in their region.

Looking at past architecture exhibitions at New Yorks Museum of

Modern Art it seems as if only one Latin American architect is allowed

to emerge every 30 years: it was Oscar Niemeyer in the 1940s, and

Luis Barragan in the 1970s it may now be Eladio Diestes turn. So

waiting for acknowledgement from powerful world institutions is a

hopeless proposition. Unfortunately, the most contagious design

memes remain those promoted by the architectural glossies.

Fortunately, the architectural discourse constructed at the SAL has

recently shifted from buildings to cities. This has been a very

productive change in the discourse, since Latin American urban centers

share three major conditions in spite of their great differences: 1) a

common urban pattern established during the regions Colonization


(sometimes influenced by indigenous settlement patterns); 2) an often

savage replacement of its traditional urban pattern by buildings and

urban and suburban spaces that belong to Generica, that city that is

everywhere in the world without belonging to any specific place; and

3) the existence of huge, unassimilated informal settlements in the

periphery, and sometimes the center, of major cities (with Cubas

exception). Perhaps the most famous of these are the Brazilian

favelas, nowhere to be seen in the maps of Brazilian cities, in spite of

their size and prominence. Usually, the habitants of the formal city are

reminded of the informal one through urban violence, or in the form of

ambulant vendors and itinerant markets, which the local government

is forever trying to contain and regulate. Usually, it is also assumed

that the inhabitants of the informal city have brown or black skin,

creating a de facto racial economic apartheid. The new focus of the

discourse on the urban condition holds the promise of reuniting once

again the practitioners and the historians, as the formers proposals

are debated at the SAL gatherings and the latters studies examine

typologies of public and private space and social occupation rather

than formal styles. What this change seems to be saying is that the

participation of architects and scholars in defining the quality of life in

Latin American cities is far more important than whether there is or

not a Latin American architecture. Yet the question of cultural

identity served as a useful engine to set into motion a knowledge

process that could never have emerged from outside sources.

In closing, we could ask how the project of an African

architecture will evolve in the years to come. There are a number of

questions that constitute the conceptual framework of this conference.

We could add a few more. Given that the dominant discourse today is

on sustainability, and that the cutting edge of this discourse is being


defined in terms of technology and the density of urban settlements --

what constitutes an appropriate and appropriated sustainability in

African countries? Other issues could be: what is the relationship

between traditional and modern urban patterns of settlement? To what

extent do ancestral social organization patterns and religion influence

urban patterns? What is the role of women and minority populations in

the creation of urban form? What are the relevant typologies of urban

public space? What are their uses? Should the discourse on form be

influenced by erudite precedents alone? What kind of networks can be

formed through the Internet to include the African Diaspora in the

discussion? What other regions in the world are relevant to urban

problems and solutions in African cities?


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Recommended Web Sites (in English):

ARARA (Art and Architecture of the Americas) an on-line journal of the Art History and Theory Department of the University of Essex. http://www2.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/arara/

LANIC (Latin America Network Information Center of the University of Texas at Austin), a major clearinghouse of information about Latin American countries. http://lanic.utexas.edu/index.html

About the Authors: Susana Torre and Geoffrey Fox are co-authors of a history of the built environment in

Latin America from pre-Columbian times to the present, to be published in New York by

W.W.Norton. Torre is an architect and scholar. She was director of the Department of

Architecture at Parsons School of Design in New York City and has taught at Columbia

University and Yale University in the United States, the University of Kassel in Germany and

the University of Buenos Aires, among others. Fox is a writer and sociologist specializing in

Latin America. He has taught at New York University and is the author of Hispanic Nation:

Culture, Politics, and the Construction of Identity, among other books about Cuba, Venezuela

and Argentina.


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