ARC3324H F
Instructor: Elisa Silva
Meeting Section: L9101
Synchronous
Tuesday, 6:00PM - 9:00PM

Parallel modernities refers to the dual dynamics that transpired in cities of Latin America as industrialization, increased economic growth and rural-urban migration defined them. Between the 1950s and 1980s these dynamics pushed cities to expand, build roads, infrastructure, schools, hospitals, university campuses, institutions and even public space. Urban growth also required finding efficient ways to house the population which manifested itself in various examples of multifamily social housing as well as pre-fabricated progressive housing models. Nonetheless, these efforts were not able to meet demand and informal settlements emerged, creating a simultaneous and separate urban evolution that characterizes practically every city in Latin America.

Modern architecture saw some of its most complete developments in Latin America. Examples of buildings by Mario Pani (Mexico) Vilanova Artigas (Brazil) and Carlos Raúl Villanueva (Venezuela) are master pieces of modern architecture, widely celebrated and glorified. They reflect the aspiration of modernization and progress present in political discourses at the time. The course will discuss this modern production of architecture, as well as the “other modern” the “second modern” that grew at a much faster pace in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Caracas, and yet was thoroughly ignored, denied and even erased through official urban public policy focused on razing slums.

The course presents parallel modernities as a tendency or pattern along separate but co-dependent paths, that reveals an insistent celebration and dissemination of forms of “high art” more conventionally recognized as modern, while systematically failing to consider the massive development of the built environment and economic forces that occurred in tandem through informal mechanisms. We will look at how denial, misunderstanding and exclusion produced the territorial fragmentation of cities we witness today, levels of inequality that are among the highest in the world, as well as the political implications they have yielded.

The course´s objective is to gain a broader understanding of the economic and cultural forces that created the culturally rich, socially diverse and politically complex environments that characterize cities and societies in Latin America. Students will be asked to actively discuss reading assignments in class and produce a final paper and presentation where they argue and support their understanding of current cultural and political situations through examples of architecture, the built environment, art and or literature over the past decades.