Plastic Modernity: Art, Sculpture, and Cinema in Latin American Architecture

Collective housing in Latin America and the Caribbean took various forms that, while responding to the socio-political, cultural, and material context, reflected fundamental views about domestic life. This course aims to focus on how housing needs were solved through experiments and investigations centered on developing new living practices for the 20th and 21st century. Sometimes, the single-family house became a working prototype and, in other cases, explorations focused on developing buildings and building systems that could be reproduced and modified according to specific family forms, needs, and circumstances. Central to our study will be the understanding of how architects, planners, landscape architects, and interior or furniture designers reconsidered the roles, norms, and strictures of the domestic environment to alter the living and social relationships that preceded them and to produce diverse types of houses and models for housing that addressed the social needs of a rapidly growing and changing world.

Throughout the semester we will look at a number of case studies ranging on diverse types of houses and housing prototypes, contextualize them, and discuss their implications; from the earliest experiments of the social avant-garde, through the influence of Le Corbusier’s proposals, to the promotion of self-built communities. We will also examine the formal and theoretical dialogues established with European and North American housing proposals and at the way that housing in Latin America developed solutions whose innovation preceded other international investigations. These include Juan Legarreta’s Balbuena Neighborhood, Hannes Meyer’s Lomas de Becerra Housing proposal, Affonso Reidy’s Pedregulho Apartments, Lucio Costa’s Guinle Apartments, Oscar Niemeyer’s housing for Brasilia’s Supercuadras, Claudio Caveri’s Comunidad Tierra, Mario Pani’s Multifamiliares, FUCVAM Cooperatives in Montevideo, PREVI, and Alejandro Aravena’s “Incremental” housing, among others.

Class size might be limited to 20 students in order to facilitate discussions and research agendas. Students who would like to participate might be asked to submit a short text (2 or 3 paragraphs) after the first-class meeting describing their background, their interest in the class and topic, and how they can contribute to the course.