Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, architects, planners, landscape architects, artists, and designers understood and reacted to the specific conditions of their historical and geographical place within Latin America. In this way, they developed new yet fluid relationships with those and which each other that produced work ranging from the individual work of art, to buildings, cities, and possible utopias. How this production was made, theorized, and developed expresses alternate conceptions of and reactions to the specific forms of modernity developed there. The goal of this course is to engage in broad dialogues with historical case studies throughout Latin America during this period that show how the creation of ideas, works, space, and place was part of a critical practice with/in “alternative modernities;” self-conscious and original, yet operating under a progressive spirit. We look at the self-reflexive practices and negotiations within/through modern art, architecture, and utopias in Latin America—as operations of vernacularization, transculturation or creolization, denaturalization, and deterritorialization—as fundamental works, problems, and didactic exercises intent on producing new knowledge and directions central to its socio-cultural development and to its architectural and artistic expressions.

All Semesters

3328
Spring 2023
Latin American Modernity: Architecture, Art & Utopia
Luis E. Carranza