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LâArchitecture dâAujourdâhui special issues on Latin America, 1945-1975. A look at its contents and the context of its production
A. Avila-GĂłmez
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 â built or unbuilt â 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 â whose origins were in European and North American schools â 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 LâArchitecture dâAujourdâhui that were devoted to Latin American cities and/or their architecture, emphasizing the context â both professional and editorial â 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, LâArchitecture dâAujourdâhui (AA), founded in 1930 by AndrĂ© Bloc (1896-1966) and Marcel EugĂšne 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 LâArchitecture and La Construction Moderne), and at an international level. From its first issues, LâArchitecture dâAujourdâhui 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 LâArchitecture dâAujourdâhui 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 LâArchitecture dâAujourdâhui 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 SpanishI, 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, LâArchitecture dâAujourdâhui has distinguished itself from other prestigious French publications such as LâArchitecte 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 â almost always on an annual basis â, 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 RĂ©unions Internationales dâArchitectes (RIU) also created by the magazine in 1932, whose first general secretary was Pierre Vago, its rĂ©dacteur 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 HĂ©lĂšne JanniĂšre (2002) pointed out: âThanks to study trips, special issues, and a very efficient network of correspondents, LâArchitecture dâAujourdâhui was able to offer the reader an unprecedented world panorama of contemporary architecture.â
Since its reappearance in 1945, after the interregnum imposed by the Second World War, LâArchitecture dâAujourdâhui 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 â 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 LâArchitecture dâAujourdâhui.
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].
3 Latin America and its Countries as a Central Theme in Special Issues
LâArchitecture dâAujourdâhuiâs 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 magazineâs correspondents in Brazil and Mexico respectively. During the magazineâs first decade, the correspondents mainly fed the Architecture Ă lâĂ©tranger section, but JanniĂšre stressed that, before the war: âThis 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 â all of them permanently featured in the magazineâs credits â these were countries to which no specific, really important articles were devoted.â
1 On Latin American students at ESA and the IUUP in the first half of the 20th century, see especially the articles by AndrĂ©s Avila-GĂłmez about Latin American students at the Institut dâUrbanisme de lâUniversitĂ© de Paris (2019); and at the Ăcole SpĂ©ciale dâArchitecture (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 KaspĂ©), and Venezuela (Carlos RaĂșl 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 (BarragĂĄn Dumet), Mexico (Vladimir KaspĂ©), Uruguay (Luis GarcĂa Pardo), and Venezuela (Carlos RaĂșl Villanueva).
During the period we are dealing with here, which corresponds to the so-called Trente Glorieus...
