The concluding words of Henry-Russell Hitchcock in Latin American Architecture since 1945 state that, in comparison with post-war years of architectural achievements in Europe and North America, “Latin America excels both in quantity in quality.”[1]Citing examples in Brazil, Hitchcock predicated that modern architecture would soon become the vehicle for regionalism and particularities.[2] In the 1950s, the avid defender of the International Style and his architectural milieu faced the crisis of internationalism; that is, how an architectural language could accommodate the global policy of American capitalist expansion into its local fabric. The Cold War scenario of political and economic interest in Latin America was concomitant with the crisis of modernist historiography, which, it seems, the success of Latin American architecture came to euphemise. 

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With respect to monumentality, J. J. P. Oud’s Shell building (1938-1946) (fig.1), for example, became contradictory to the universalising discourse of modernism. The architect’s iconographical program recalled both regional elements and conceptual architecture that were emblematic of the company’s characteristics. In contrast, the exhibition Brazil Builds revered Brazilian architecture for the exact same reasons. The claim of return to historicism in the Shell building stirred negative reactions; in Latin America, architects were praised for distilling national identity through blending foreign language with local history. Oud’s building revealed difficulties modernism faced when handling monumentality. Oud, who was included in Hitchcock and Johnson’s exhibition catalogue International Style of 1932, was targeted as betraying the canon, a default in the system. Latin American architecture was never part of the canon. The short critical success that the continent enjoyed attests to its architectural achievements being but a footnote to the ‘grand narrative’ of the International Style. This footnote came to publicize the capitalist expansion that defined Latin America as the United States’ exclusive area of influence. However, as Segawa has suggested, Latin American architecture, Brazilian in particular, made the functionalist establishment uncomfortable.[3] The sudden cease of attention to the continent’s buildings reflects more than a shift of geopolitical market interest. It reflects that perhaps Latin American architecture spelled out too loudly the International Style’s own crisis and resistance to foreign influence.

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Culture was the medium through which capitalist ideology travelled the globe. The exhibition Brazil Builds (fig.2) of 1943 was sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art under the aegis of Rockfeller who had financial interests in the continent. The exhibition was prepared by Philip Goldwin with contribution by Elizabeth Mock, which in reverse, was the team that curated Built in USA in 1955-57. That is to say that a compiled history of Brazilian architecture that filled less than one hundred pages of written text was being conferred in an American intellectual milieu. Clearly were American intentions to use the exhibition as a means to strengthen ties – hierarchical ties of imperialist expansion that is – of panamericanism.

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While the exhibition was propaganda for the United States ideological expansion, it also contributed to the Brazilian’s self confidence to “diminish the disastrous inferiority complex of mixed race that harm ourselves so much.”[4] For the first time, Brazil was not framed in exotic terms. As illustrated in the Acropolis, a local architecture magazine, “Brazil Builds had among other advantages that of showing that…the work of our modern architects is neither simple exoticism nor the desire to be different, but a confident and secure art.”[5] In the international critical milieu, Latin American architecture was introduced as a competent use of Le Corbusian ideals adapted with local flavour. The rather patronizing foreign attitude, however, was understood on Brazilian soil as an equal exchange of ideas. Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, Mies van der Rohe were discussed on the same level with Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, Affonso Reidy, Mindlin and the Roberto Brothers. Aware of cultural and historical dependence on the European continent, the adoption of foreign ideals by these architects did not escape digestion into a local product.[6] At this point, Niemeyer came to be known as the foremost architect in Brazil and never lacked commissions either at home or abroad. Niemeyer, after his collaboration with Lucio Costa in the Ministry of Health and Education in Rio de Janeiro of 1936 (fig.3) and the Brazilian Pavilion in New York World’s fair of 1938-39 (fig.4) was said to have overcome the stage of orthodox functionalism inherent in the International Style and was in search for a new plasticity.[7] The free flow of form between inner and outer space, its rhythmic curves recalling the baroque of colonial times and stylised with local artistic language became a genuine Brazilian Style (fig.5). As portrayed in Brazil Builds, and later in Latin American Architecture since 1945, Latin American architecture stood as sufficiently similar and sufficiently different for the International Style to position itself against.

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The real critical interest of the United States in the country, as Fraser suggests, is intriguing. The author states that the term “International Style” coined by Hitchcock and Johnson in 1932, veiled European modernism’s political origins and played down its social implications. The logic of this “‘new’ modern architecture was that it supposedly rendered all cultural, historical or national references unavailable or unjustifiable, and thus style-less.”[8] Modern architecture was not immediately accepted in the USA, and was never completely accepted. Critics of modernism, or writers of its history such as Johnson and Hitchcock watched amazed as a group of Latin American architects appropriated European ideologically charged modernism and transformed into a product of their own. Latin American architecture was certainly not style-less. They demonstrated that they understood the rules but did not need to be confined by them, “that it was possible to be modern and regionally or nationally specific at the same time.”[9] The “disciples of Le Corbusier” – how Latin American architects came to be called above the Equator – used his ideas as a springboard to create their own.

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Different levels of meaning in Latin American architecture weave a complex web of asymmetrical relations that resist a passive rhetoric of mirror imaging.[10] Within the continent’s modernism, different locales developed their own personalities, converting European ideologies into an alternative to the hegemonic International Style (figs.6-9). Attitudes of heterodoxy flourished in Latin America out of dialectics of assimilation of foreign currents and internal processes of distilling cultural heritage (fig.10-11).[11] For instance, Brasilia marked the end of affair with international critics. The application of the universal and utopian values embedded in Le Corbusier’s Charter of Athens were shattered, for, in intending to foster an unprecedented architecture of social inclusivity, it failed in that it staged economic and social contradictions generated by advancements of capitalism. The city is the reflection of its society.[12] The mirror could not reflect a repertoire of imported forms without reflecting back the reality of the “Third World” (fig.12). Latin American architecture may well have served to advertise US’ cosmopolitanism but it definitely stood at odds with its claim for internationalism.  

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In the United States, the International Style, despite its name, became a departure for debates on regionalism. The discourse struck the nerve of American architectural culture, challenging any notion that post-war architecture was debated irrespective of traditional building types.[13] The show What is Happening to American Architecture of 1948 at the MoMA launched a discussion on the paradoxical nature of the attempt to unify homogenised American policy of neo-colonisation with issues of locality. Schwarzer suggests that the debate on regionalism in the United States may be seen as an integral part of a crisis of identity brought about by the nation’s enhanced power.[14] The country’s increased international commitments challenged the nation’s singularity and its estrangement from foreign ideologies. The ‘unusual’ Latin American modernism, with its lesson of critical engagement with foreign currents and transformation into a national product, perhaps revealed too evidently the United States’ fear of foreign influence. The failure of International Style implied the nation’s fear to undergo conscious hybridity; as such, this stylistic discourse could secure itself in its abstract purity. What was once acclimated by Hitchcock and Johnson’s apolitical descriptions of modernism is then reawakened by the ease with which Latin American architecture surpassed the International Style.

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In 1961, critic Nikolaus Pevsner stated that the buildings of Oscar Niemeyer “are the earliest buildings which are emphatically no longer of the so-called International Style, and they are buildings that have force, that have power, that have a great deal of originality, but they are emphatically anti-rational.”[15] The anti-rationality or provocative nature of which Pevsner speaks is the critical adoption of the early twentieth century modernist utopian ideals of universality transformed into a national product. The fear was that Latin America was handling modernist universality markedly well. It managed to convey a heterogeneous universality, at the same time that it revealed tensions generated by the cultural homogenisation that haunted the American expansionist policy (fig.13). Learning from Latin American architects, then, universalism should be metaphorical, not metonymic. Pevsner goes as far as to say that this architecture is post-modern. He insists that Niemeyer belongs to the group of architects who lived long enough to form a new trend of historicism, which is to say early-historicism, or in Charles Jencks’ words, semi-historicism.[16]

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In his 1977 major theoretical work, Jencks claims that the first semi-historicist, post-modern building was the Synagogue in Port Chester of 1956, signed by none other than Philip Johnson (fig.14). The once avid defender of the International Style states: “Mies is a genius! But I grew old! And bored! My direction is clear; eclectic tradition. This is not academic revivalism.”[17] Suddenly, the once praised Latin American eclecticism stands for archetypes of modernity, bad modernism or “gross doctrinism” according to the language of post-modernism.[18] Jenks laments an age whose “futurisms” have produced “Skinner’s Walden Two, Kubitcheck’s Brasilia and Hitler’s Third Reich.”[19] In his book, the caption below the figure of Niemeyer’s Presidential Palace reads: “a classical building whose oversimplifications and gross detailing betray its subsequent political usage.”[20] Perhaps it was due to the nasty U.S.- sponsored military coup that overthrew the left-inclined government of Jucelino Kubitcheck that what was once described as ‘neo-baroque’, ‘neo-sensualism’, is now compared with Nazi architecture.[21] In the critical sphere, what was once a revered architecture for its inventiveness is now a distant Other who epitomises the failures of modernism, leaving intact the ‘grand narrative’ of Western evolutionary history of architectural development.  This becomes all the more visible with the little amount of literature in English available on contemporary Latin American architecture; and, if not left as a footnote, it is included in last chapters in books on modernism under the sub-title “Modernism abroad,” with all the [O]thers the term ‘abroad’ refers to.

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It comes as no surprise, then, to realise that post-modern architecture in the United States of the 1970s and 80s was as apolitical as were Hitchcock and Johnson’s descriptions of modernism. The pure white box, stripped-bare of its European modernist ideals of the 1920’s and 30s, is now decorated with globalised American pop culture icons. The post-modern sign of ‘pastiche’ architecture veils the origins of socio-political and historical conditions that determined the emergence of commodity culture at the expense of exploitation of developing nations’ economy, politics, and culture. There is nothing more elitist and self-indulging than to claim the ‘ugly’ as avant-gardist. Latin American architecture, being exercised amidst an environment of military isolation and censorship, continued emulating its by now traditional modern architecture. Latin American architecture does not fit into the formalist discourse of post-modernism; therefore, it is edited out. The saga of Western centrality and accommodation of its Others in the peripheries continues. 

Bibliography

Henry-Russell Hitchckock, Latin American Architecture Since 1945 (NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1955)

Philip Goodwin, Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old 16520-1942 (NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1943)

Mitchell Shwarzer, “Modern Architectural Ideology in Cold War America” in The Educational of the Architect. Historiography, Urbanism and the Growth of Architectural Knowledge: Essays Presented to Stanford Anderson, ed. Martha Pollack (Cambridge, Mass-London: The MIT Press, 1997)

Zilah Quesado Dekker, Brazil Builds: the architecture of modern movement in Brazil (London-NY: Spon Press, 2001)

Valerie Fraser, Building in the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930-1960 (London-NY: Verso, 2000)

Hugo Segawa, “The Essentials of Brazilian Modernism”, The Design Book Review, no. 32/33 (Spring/Summer, 1994) pp. 64-68

Roberto Segre, “The Sinuous Path of Modernity in Latin America”, translated from Spanish by Richard Ingersoll, The Design Book Review no. 32/33 (Spring/Summer, 1994)

Roberto Segre, Eliana Cardenas and Lohania Aruca, Historia de la Arquitecture y del Urbanismo: America Latina y Cuba (Ciudad de La Habana: Editorial Pueblo y Educacion, 1986)

Nikolaus Pevsner, “Modern Architecture and the Historian or the Return of Historicism”, Royal Institute of British Architects 68, no.6 (April, 1961) p.230-240

Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (NY: Rizzoli International Publication, 1977)

Charles Jencks, Architecture 2000: Predictions and Methods (London: Studio Visa Limited, 1971)

[1] Henry-Russell Hitchckock, Latin American Architecture Since 1945 (NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1955) p. 62.

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[2]  Henry-Russell Hitchcock, “The Acclimatisation of Modern Architecture in Different Countries”,  Architect and Building News, v. 186 (May 1946) p. 149; cited in Mitchell Shwarzer, “Modern Architectural Ideology in Cold War America” in The Educational of the Architect. Historiography, Urbanism and the Growth of Architectural Knowledge: Essays Presented to Stanford Anderson, ed. Martha Pollack (Cambridge, Mass-London: The MIT Press, 1997)p. 87-109.

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[3] Hugo Segawa, “The Essentials of Brazilian Modernism”, The Design Book Review, no. 32/33 (Spring/Summer, 1994) pp. 64-68: 64.

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[4] Mario de Andrade, “Brazil Builds” Folha da Manha (23 March, 1944) in Zilah Quesado Dekker, Brazil Builds: the architecture of modern movement in Brazil (London-NY: Spon Press, 2001) p. 192

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[5] Acropolis May 1944. Cited in Dekker, p.192

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[6] The Brazilian modernist avant-garde of Antropofagia preached by poet Oswald de Andrade consisted of a metaphor for native people’s cannibalist rituals, which meant the ingestion of the fittest enemy and consequent absorption of his (knowingly) power. The Movimento Antrpofago urged the digestion European ideologies into a national product. Just as well, the so-called American Intelligentsia and its ideological propaganda through the medium of culture were easily perceived in Latin American intellectual elite: “Today, Brazilian modern architecture is progressing in such a way as to serve as propaganda for any commercial villainy…, while at the same time reinforcing the penetration of imperialism, giving it cover to enter without being noticed through the doors of cultural movements” in Dekker, p. 200  

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[7]  Roberto Segre, Eliana Cardenas and Lohania Aruca, Historia de la Arquitecture y del Urbanismo: America Latina y Cuba (Ciudad de La Habana: Editorial Pueblo y Educacion, 1986) p.208

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[8] Valerie Fraser, Building in the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930-1960 (London-NY: Verso, 2000) p. 14

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[9] Ibid

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[10] Roberto Segre, “The Sinuous Path of Modernity in Latin America”, translated from Spanish by Richard Ingersoll, The Design Book Review no. 32/33 (Spring/Summer, 1994) p. 25-27: 25.

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[11] Ibid

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[12] Roberto Segre, Eliana Cardenas and Lohania Aruca, p.208

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[13] Schwarzer, p.94

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[14] Ibid, p.95.

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[15] Nikolaus Pevsner, “Modern Architecture and the Historian or the Return of Historicism”, Royal Institute of British Architects 68, no.6 (April, 1961) p.230-240. In footnote 32, he continues: “And the Museum of Modern Art published its Brazil Builds (1943) for the world to see these new things”.

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[16] Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (NY: Rizzoli International Publication, 1977) p. 81

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[17] Ibid

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[18] Charles Jencks, Architecture 2000: Predictions and Methods (London: Studio Visa Limited, 1971) p.9

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[19] Ibid

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[20] Ibid

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[21] As discussed by Dekker, the inflation in the economy caused by the development of Brasilia is an often cited reason for the military coup. However, the socialist direction of the government and Brazil’s international position offer a more realistic explanation. Kubitschek had withdrawn Brazil from the International Military Fund (IMF) in 1959, and, in 1961, the vice president had awarded honorary citizenship to Che Guevara. Intense diplomatic pressure as well as more covert support by the CIA, gave the military confidence to act.