Research Tracks in Urbanism: Dynamics, Planning and Design in Contemporary Urban Territories

Alessia Allegri, Angélica Benatti Alvim, Eunice Helena Abascal, Joaquin Sabaté, João Pedro Costa, Maria Cristina Schicchi

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000464184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Maybe the Global Village metaphor has never been more accurate than it is today, where societies join forces in the fight against the COVID 19 pandemic, in a global coordinated effort, possibly never tested before in the known history of Humankind. Although we are sure that in the past some other shared demands have united the different peoples of the world, this has never been so strongly necessary, mainly in what the global scientific community is concerned. This is a fight for the survival of a society. However, we should not lose sight of what we are fighting for. We fight together for people. Not just for the abstract value of Human life, but for life in society as a whole, including its moral and ethical aspects. The topics of this book are based on this claim, on what makes it possible. We do not build our lives in a vacuum, or in distant Invisible Cities, but through a higher value, which represents physical life in society: the City, built by the discipline of Urbanism.

This book is a spin-off of the International Research Seminar on Urbanism_SIIU2020. Inspired by the contents of twelve research seminars, a group of researchers from the universities of Barcelona, Lisbon and São Paulo discuss the contemporary agenda of research in Urbanism. Following the conference, a selection of 35 original double-blind peer-reviewed research papers were brought together with different perspectives about such an agenda.

Portugal

L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui special issues on Latin America, 1945-1975. A look at its contents and the context of its production

A. Avila-Gómez

HiCSA, Panthéon-Sorbonne University; Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France

DOI: 10.1201/9781003220855-3

ABSTRACT: During the first half of the 20th century, the dissemination of images of urban and architectonic projects – built or unbuilt – in Latin America, had a special reception in some European journals, whose global reach promoted the recognition of the spatial modernization achieved by some Latin American cities. Along with these images, new urban narratives – whose origins were in European and North American schools – were also transmitted. This is made evident through the professional connections and networks built by Latin American architects and urban planners who studied in Europe and in the United States, and later applied their newly acquired knowledge in their countries of origin. In this regard, this article analyzes the content from special issues of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui that were devoted to Latin American cities and/or their architecture, emphasizing the context – both professional and editorial – in which those thematic issues were created.

1 Introduction

During the second half of the 20th century, the main French architectural magazines became a medium for reflection on technical, artistic, intellectual, and theoretical production. Based on the production of visual and critical material whose contents permanently enriched the material culture of other disciplines such as urbanism, construction, or design, the importance of these periodicals even allowed them to leave aside language barriers and settle into the professional imagination and popular culture.

Among these publications, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (AA), founded in 1930 by André Bloc (1896-1966) and Marcel Eugène Cahen (1883-1930), quickly occupied a privileged space, bringing a series of material and conceptual innovations that quickly positioned it at a national level (alongside other traditional publications such as L’Architecture and La Construction Moderne), and at an international level. From its first issues, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui offered its readers a broad panorama of the architecture and urbanism produced on all continents, and it was thus that from the inter-war period, projects built in Latin American cities increasingly populated the pages of the magazine.

Three specific questions have served as a starting point for this research:

In what editorial and professional context were the special issues on Latin America prepared by L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui produced?

What kinds of contents and discourses on urbanism and the city were included in these issues?

What kind of connections fed the exchanges between Latin American and French professionals related to the preparation of these issues?

Although there are studies that have partially analysed the presence of Brazilian (Braschi, 2016) and Mexican (Noelle, 2009) architecture in some of the issues that make up this corpus, the set of publications on all the countries of the region prepared by the successive editorial teams of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui requires a more detailed look. This detailed look contributes to draw a global panorama to which some historians of architecture such as Ana Esteban Maluenda (2017; 2019) and Maria B. Camargo Capello (2011) have already provided valuable interpretations and elements of analysis. In this sense, the work carried out by Esteban Maluenda offers us the study of interesting quantitative aspects such as, for example, the calculation of the number of pages devoted to Latin American projects between 1943 and 1969 in a universe of nine European magazines that include two Spanish^I, two British, two French, and three Italian. It also shows the comparison of the distribution of the number of pages devoted to the architecture of each Latin American country in each of the nine magazines of the corpus defined by the author.

2 The International Dimension of a French Magazine

Since its creation, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui has distinguished itself from other prestigious French publications such as L’Architecte or La Construction Moderne, by its initiative to offer the reader a current panorama of recent architecture produced abroad, including modern or more moderate trends, both in purely architectural projects and in urban projects and large-scale interventions. The magazine favored exchanges and contacts with professionals from countries on all continents, thus weaving an international network that permanently fed the contents and debates presented in its pages.

To this end, trips abroad were organized – almost always on an annual basis –, which included not only meetings with colleagues from other latitudes and visits to emblematic sites, but also the opportunity to discuss with local authorities: this happened initially in 1932 in Poland and the USSR; in 1933 in Italy; and in 1935 in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria. In addition to this, there were the activities promoted by the Réunions Internationales d’Architectes (RIU) also created by the magazine in 1932, whose first general secretary was Pierre Vago, its rédacteur en chef.

Based on these initiatives, the magazine became a platform for architects from other countries to present projects and current issues in architecture and urban planning, considered to be of general interest in an increasingly interconnected world. As architecture historian Hélène Jannière (2002) pointed out: “Thanks to study trips, special issues, and a very efficient network of correspondents, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui was able to offer the reader an unprecedented world panorama of contemporary architecture.”

Since its reappearance in 1945, after the interregnum imposed by the Second World War, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui resumed the publication of special issues devoted to modern architecture and urbanism in a particular country, or in a region of the world made up of several countries. Thus, during the period between 1947 and 1979, the French magazine published a total of 28 issues devoted to one country: the first of which to Brazil and the last to China [Table 1].

Table 1. Special issues of AA dedicated to a single country, 1946 – 1979.

Countries	Special issues dedicated to each country	Total issues
_ Brazil, USA, Japan	3	9
Mexico, Spain, Italy, Israel	2	8
_USSR, Switzerland, Austria, Iran Great Britain, Denmark, Poland, Portugal, China, Tunisia, Morocco	1	11

_

Source: Own elaboration from data of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui.

In total, 18 countries were selected to be a focus during this period: eight in Europe, three in Asia, two in North Africa, two in the Middle East, two in Latin America, and one in North America. Among them, only three countries were selected on three occasions: Brazil (in 1947, 1952, 1960), the United States (in 1953, 1965, 1971), and Japan (in 1956, 1961, 1966).

A special case is that of the issues prepared according to a geographical or even geopolitical criterion: this is the case of the three issues dedicated to the Nordic countries; the two dedicated to Latin America (in 1951 and 1974); and those dedicated to North Africa, Black Africa [sic], and the Third World (in 1968) [Table 2].

Table 2. Special issues of AA dedicated to regions, 1946 – 1979.

Region	Year	Title of the issue	(No. issue)
_	1954	Pays nordiques	(54)
Nordic countries	1961	Pays nordiques	(93)
	1967	Architectures nordiques	(134)
Latinamerica	1951	Urbanisme en Am. Latine	(33)
	1974	Amérique Latine	(173)
_ Africa	1955	Afrique du Nord	(60)
	1957	Afrique Noire	(70)
Third Word	1968	Tiers Monde	(140)

_Source: Own elaboration from data of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui.

3 Latin America and its Countries as a Central Theme in Special Issues

L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui’s interest in current architectural and urban issues in Latin American countries was already evident in the second half of the 1930s, when Eduardo Vasconcelos Pederneiras in 1936, and Mario Pani Darqui in 1937, became the magazine’s correspondents in Brazil and Mexico respectively. During the magazine’s first decade, the correspondents mainly fed the Architecture à l’étranger section, but Jannière stressed that, before the war: “This worldwide network of correspondents had not had a systematic impact on the coverage of the global scene that the publication was intended to show: thus, for example, despite having correspondents in Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, and New Zealand – all of them permanently featured in the magazine’s credits – these were countries to which no specific, really important articles were devoted.”

1 On Latin American students at ESA and the IUUP in the first half of the 20th century, see especially the articles by Andrés Avila-Gómez about Latin American students at the Institut d’Urbanisme de l’Université de Paris (2019); and at the École Spéciale d’Architecture (2020).

At the end of the war, the magazine had about twenty foreign correspondents, and by 1950, 24 countries were represented, four of them Latin American: Argentina (R. Moller), Brazil (Maria Laura Osser), Mexico (Vladimir Kaspé), and Venezuela (Carlos Raúl Villanueva). Two decades later, in 1970, correspondents were quoted in 34 countries, six of them Latin American: three in Colombia (Vieco, Reyes and Botero); two in Brazil (Maria Laura Osser and R. M. Peres); and one in Ecuador (Barragán Dumet), Mexico (Vladimir Kaspé), Uruguay (Luis García Pardo), and Venezuela (Carlos Raúl Villanueva).

During the period we are dealing with here, which corresponds to the so-called Trente Glorieus...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• [Re]Urban practice, towards a European research agenda for urbanism: Nature as reference, human as critical, process as fundamental
• Urbanism research (ongoing) in Latin America: Some keywords
• Portugal
• Brazil
• Author index