Reading Precisions: Reconstructing Latin America’s Le Corbusier

The seminar focuses on Le Corbusier’s 1929 trip to South America and examines the impact that Latin America had on him and that he had on Latin America. Participants undertake a close reading of the lectures he delivered in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay–collected as Precisions, On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning (1930). The class focuses on how his presence both reinforced the stature of his architecture and of his ideas and, at the same time, opens them for (mis)interpretation and transformation in the built and theoretical work of 20th-century Latin American architects from Mexico to Brazil and Argentina.