{"id":16250,"date":"2014-07-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-10T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=1179"},"modified":"2014-07-10T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-07-10T00:00:00","slug":"latin-american-and-the-bilbao-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/07\/latin-american-and-the-bilbao-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"Latin American and the Bilbao Effect"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n<\/head>

Justin McGuirk argues in his\u00a0Radical Cities<\/a> that Latin American was the site of the \u201cgreatest experiments in urban living of the twentieth century. Latin America, let us not forget, experienced mass urbanisation long before China and Africa, which today produce almost panic-inducing statistics of urban population growth. In the 1950s and 60s the equivalent statistics were coming out of Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina.\u201d While the rest of the world was moving toward 50% urban, \u201cmany countries in Latin America have had 80 per cent urbanisation for decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

McGuirk gives us a history of urban planning and architecture from an unusual angle, from the \u201cbelow\u201d rather than from \u201cabove,\u201d from Latin America rather than from Bauhaus and Vienna. It\u2019s an illuminating perspective.<\/p>\n

Latin America, with its strongman authoritarian regimes, was also the site of massive experiments in urban planning, which continued in Latin America after they had been abandoned elsewhere: \u201cThe architecture historian Charles Jencks famously pinpointed the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in 1972 as the end of modernism. This was not quite the case in Latin America, where ambitious social housing projects continued to be built until the end of the decade, often by military dictatorships who used them to reward their support bases.\u201d<\/p>\n

Modernist architects aimed to use their technical and artistic skills to better the lives of the poor. Ultimately, Latin American leaders abandoned the effort. After a study of Lima\u2019s barriadas<\/em>, the English architect John Turner concluded in 1963 that \u201c\u2018No government \u2013 however wealthy, as the Venezuelan superblock project shows \u2013 can possibly finance more than a small proportion of the total demand for housing.\u2019\u201d \u00a0For Turner, \u201cslums were not the problem, they were the solution.\u201d Cities don\u2019t need planners and architects.<\/p>\n

The failure of grand modernist planning led not only to shifts in the nature of urbanization but to a fundamental shift in the aspirations of architecture. Architects had \u201clost their social purpose\u201d and so began to pursue an architecture of pure aesthetics, one that no longer aimed to serve the poor but in practice became aesthetes of the superrich: \u201cThe housing blocks that had accompanied industrialisation gave way to the office towers that heralded the service economy. Modernism gave way to postmodernism, and the transparent glass of rationalism became the impenetrable mirrors of a new corporate culture. The avant-garde \u2013 namely those too young or too academic to have surfed the PoMo office and hotel boom \u2013 withdrew into experimenting with architecture as an autonomous art form, informed by\u00a0deconstructivist philosophy and complex geometry. Continue zooming through time and you\u2019ll see the development of computer-aided drawing software and a resurgent global economy on converging tracks until \u2013 voil\u00e0! \u2013 the \u2018starchitect\u2019 is born.\u201d Museums became the \u201cpinnacle of architectural ambition\u201d: \u201cCall it \u2018the Bilbao effect\u2019 or what you will, the museum as a tool of urban regeneration, not to mention urban branding, becomes the focus of architectural discourse.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Justin McGuirk argues in his\u00a0Radical Cities that Latin American was the site of the \u201cgreatest experiments in urban living of the twentieth century. Latin America, let us not forget, experienced mass urbanisation long before China and Africa, which today produce almost panic-inducing statistics of urban population growth. In the 1950s and 60s the equivalent statistics […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[895,422,896],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-latin-america","category-urbanization"],"yoast_head":"\nLatin American and the Bilbao Effect<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Justin McGuirk argues in his Radical Cities that Latin American was the site of the “greatest experiments in urban living of the twentieth\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/07\/latin-american-and-the-bilbao-effect\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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