Modern architecture and urban modernization in Latin America (1930-1950):

a review of the perspectives and methods used to approach them in local historiography

Abstract

The expression of modern architecture and urbanism in Latin America appear as the objects of local historiography in the early 1970s, when they have already been placed in the chapter of peripheral reproductions by the builders of the international canon. Since then, the construction of the history of the modern experience in the region has been approached from different perspectives. If the first stories aim to serve the critique of contemporary production, as early as the 1980s, historiographical propositions took shape to abandon the canonical story and to interpret modern architecture in Latin America through a series of circumstances that emerge from the local contexts. In the 1990s, an exacerbated regionalism elaborates a discourse raised from the dependency perspective to endorse certain professional practice aimed at expressing the American identity. Such a position has been diluted during the last two decades, giving rise to approaches that cross disciplinary knowledge by other knowledge and contemplate the imprints of previously ignored actors, replacing the single story with a multiplicity of stories and giving greater density to the interpretation.