Urbanization is the central socioeconomic phenomenon of contemporary Latin America. In a rational world, the ten leading Latin American architects and urbanists that Damián Bayón interviewed should be crucial to Latin America’s future. The irrelevance of their role in Latin American urban development is the single sad fact that emerges from this well-intended, but uninspired, book.
By any measure, Damián Bayón has assembled the top architectural minds and practitioners of Latin America. His interviews follow a tight structure—a survey, he calls it—asking a similar set of questions of each architect interviewed. Unfortunately, this device lapses into a constraining rigidity that restricts rather than structures the flow of the conversation. Any lively discussion emerges in spite of the questions. A few architects—Rogelio Salmona (Colombia), Fernando Salinas (Cuba), and Eladio Dieste (Uruguay)—manage to transcend these problems and contribute significant commentary on important issues. The remaining architects—Clorindo Testa (Argentina), Roberto Burle-Marx (Brazil), Emilio Duhart (Chile), Pedro Ramírez Vásquez (Mexico), Carlos Colombino (Paraguay), José García Bryce (Peru), and Carlos Raúl Villanueva (Venezuela)—appear almost bored with the banal and predictable questions, and they respond in kind.
Paolo Gasparini’s excellent accompanying photographs offer a satisfactory alternative to the text. Generously sprinkled throughout the book, they cover a wide range of historical examples, important contemporary buildings, and illustrate key urban social issues.
In the end, however, one is disturbed by the nagging irrelevance of the entire effort. These brilliant architects have little or no impact on their respective environments. Architecture and urban form are being molded by out-of-control economic forces that preempt the design process and make over the cities in their chaotic image. As Fernando Salinas observes, “architecture is, simply, the outer wrappings . . . it’s an instrucment, it’s a form that sheathes and reflects the life of the society” (p. 98).
