In this beautifully designed, lavishly illustrated, and compellingly written volume, art historian Valerie Fraser provides the best synthetic account of the heroic age of modern Latin American architecture available in English until now. Mining out-of-print monographs and the fruits of recent research, Fraser brings to the fore the surprising accomplishments and dystopian aftermath of three decades when architecture seemed key to social transformation. Like the architecture it chronicles, this book was produced in a rush of enthusiasm and remains rough around the edges, but it contains moments of wonderful poetry and great insight.
Divided into three long national chapters, the body of the book covers the course of modernism in Mexican, Venezuelan, and Brazilian architecture from Le Corbusier’s 1929 visit to South America to the 1960 completion of Brasília. Each chapter follows the complex and shifting trajectory within each nation of Le Corbusier’s unruly local “disciples,” including Juan O’Gorman, Carlos...
