Thursday, April 2
Luis Castañeda
The Modernist Frontier: Architecture and the Bureaucratic Medium in Latin America, 1950-1970
School of Architecture, S-118
12:00pm / Lunch will be served
In connection with ARC551 Architecture's Empire, the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities welcomes Luis Castañeda, (Art History, Syracuse) to Princeton University. Castañeda's talk stems from a book project titled, The Modernist Frontier, which takes a revisionist look at the “golden age” of modern architecture and design in Latin America (1950-1970). Through a comparative analysis of interventions spearheaded by architects closely tied to state bureaucracies in Mexico, Brazil and Peru, the book demonstrates that the active participation of these figures in politics not only propelled this panorama of heightened architectural production but was crucial in establishing their domains of expertise and expanding architecture's territorial scales of operation.
Discussant: Lucia Allais, Assistant Professor, History and Theory of Architecture
Luis M. Castañeda is an Assistant Professor of art history at Syracuse University and the author of Spectacular Mexico: Design, Propaganda and the 1968 Olympics (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Castañeda's research examines multiple aspects of the visual culture and urban history of the Americas, inscribing these spheres within broader horizons of economic, political and intellectual transformation in the region.
This program is co-presented by the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities, the Princeton University School of Architecture, and Program in Latin American Studies.
