A Review of Constructing Latin America. Architecture, Politics and Race at the Museum of Modern Art

Harvard architectural historian Patricio del Real’s latest book analyzes the development of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) between the 1930s and the 1960s, emphasizing the construction of the notion of Latin America from the peculiar perspective offered by architectural and curatorial practices.

Constructing Latin America. Architecture, Politics and Race at the Museum of Modern Art by Patricio del Real (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2022, 307 pages)

Through a close examination of exhibitions that condense the aesthetic and ideological stakes of the Department’s officials, Del Real moves from the end of the interwar period to the years of World War II, the postwar period and the beginning of the Cold War. The ideological pivot that runs through the periodization is Pan-Americanism, a key weapon in the positioning of the United States on the cultural front of geopolitics in the middle of the last century. In this trajectory, modern architecture appears as an ideal weapon of imperialism. However, in contrast to other analyses of the same period that offer the image of U.S. action as a vertical imposition from North to South, Del Real shows how MoMA’s changing discourses on architecture in Latin America established back-and-forth dynamics, though always safeguarding the interests of the U.S. State Department in the region. In the author’s words: “Constructed as a counterpoint to U.S. culture but in line with the U.S. political economy, Latin American architecture was part and parcel of the project to define an ‘American’ civilization” (p. 11).

In the period under study, that “civilization” had to defend itself from the Nazi threat and from communism—although the book shows the sympathies of several MoMA figures for the Nazis (National Socialism)—, but also from the explosion of its own contradictions, such as those that the policies of racial segregation tried to order until their outburst during the 1960’s. How to build a racially harmonious society in a country without a colonial past that decanted into cultural hybridity? It seemed that Latin America held the key to solving the problem.

One of the key aspects of Del Real’s argument consists precisely in locating various passages where architecture in Latin America—especially in Brazil—appeared as the ideal image of a built environment coming from mestizo societies with a certain racial conciliation or harmony. If Mexican arts offered the example of a cultural production that articulated the pre-Columbian past and the modern present during the 1930s, Brazilian architecture, especially Costa and Niemeyer’s Escola Carioca in Rio de Janeiro, would take the predominant place in MoMA’s efforts during the 1940s. That shift was not easy: the Department of Architecture oscillated between the promotion of the Mexican and the Brazilian—both seen as strong and clearly mestizo identities—, capable of saturating the idea of Latin America at different times—and the search to purify the elements in those imaginary constructions that attempted against aesthetic quality. This latter notion understood in formalist and supposedly universal terms, according to the institutional vision of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., would last far beyond the period 1933-1955, when the museum had to curb the “seduction” exercised by the Brazilian modernism it once promoted. The notion of aesthetic quality was an ideological-political “torpedo” (p. 10) that also informs the path taken by architecture itself as a discipline within MoMA, until it was understood as an art form in its own right, with its own “masters”—divided, in turn, into “international masters” and “regional masters”— and its own “masterworks.”

 Now then, in methodological terms, the author suggests that “exhibitions are dialogic objects, the product of intellectual negotiations and discursive exercises. They are also embodiments of material practices” (p. 17). In this sense, the book is organized around the analysis of specific exhibitions: Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (1940), Brazil Builds (1943), Two Cities: Planning in North and South America (1947), From Le Corbusier to Niemeyer: 1929-1949 (1949) and Latin American Architecture since 1945 (1955). Each exhibition, moreover, appears in the midst of a dense web of curators, architects, critics, collectors, dealers and museum and state office officials. Architecture appears here as an object of dispute in the public sphere, and Del Real even shows the role that printed culture played both in the architectural debate and in the visual imagination of modern architecture among U.S. elites and middle classes, through shelter magazines that disseminated the different curatorial trends in dispute in the period. The book aims to reveal “the serial function of exhibitions,” that is, “to present an intertwined and intertwining history of curatorial practices” (p. 19).

Seen as a whole, the history of these practices leads us from debates confined to the domestic interior (during the 1930s) to the need for urban planning in the midst of the emergence of desarrollismo as a technical penetration of the United States in the region (from the second postwar period onward). If at the beginning of the historical journey presented here MoMA’s vision sought to organize the national roots of each architectural tradition in Latin American countries, at the beginning of the Cold War, architecture, anchored in the International Style, would become an ambassador of the liberal cause because, once exported—in the U.S. embassies designed and built by the State Department, for example—, it would disseminate “nothing other than the language of corporate modernism” (p. 200). Architecture as a special form for imperialism on the cultural front. In its less-crude versions, MoMA claimed that the “political immaturity” of Latin American societies, evident in their vacillation between constant authoritarianism and brief democratic periods, could be resolved through the modernization of architecture and urban planning (pp. 237-8).

At the end of the processes analyzed, already in the mid-1950s, Del Real takes us not only to the moment when Latin America has finished constituting itself as such in MoMA’s imaginary geography—largely as a result of the purification of Brazilian modernism—, but also to the operability of that idea in the face of the Latin American countries themselves: “The region’s architecture found its place at MoMA as a mechanism for self-discovery, as a means for the ‘people down there’—architects in particular-to discover their architectural Latin Americanisms and, by extension, their own identity, and identity underpinned by a white cultural and racial order” (p. 244). Although this excellent book culminates with a rather brief account of the appearances of Latin America as an image already constituted through architecture in various exhibitions from the 1980s to the present, Patricio Del Real’s stimulating work deserves to be extended to a detailed analysis of the convulsive 1960s and 1970s in the Americas and the world, from the singular angle offered by architecture as an ideological weapon of U.S. geopolitics.