The Other of the Other: 20th century Architecture in Latin America. A lecture by Fernando Luiz Lara

DESCRIPTION

The Lecture of the architect Fernando Lara will focus on balancing of the interest of Latin American countries in local traditions, in the character of the people and their culture and experimentation with new languages, architectural forms and materials from modernity.

When the Mexican writer, Octavio Paz, defined Mexican history as “the search of ourselves, deformed or masked by strange institutions, and for a Form which expresses us” he might as well have defined the central character of Latin America as a whole.

This is especially true for the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries where Latin America, according to some, experienced an “incomplete modernization”. What this means is that during the period of European and North American modernization, Latin America was setting up the political, economic, and material conditions and infrastructure for modernization as part of broader initiatives or aspirations.

Many of the architectural expressions that we find within the twentieth century reflect this paradoxical condition. 

ABOUT THE LECTURER

Fernando Luiz Lara is a Brazilian architect with degrees from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (BArch, 1993) and the University of Michigan (PhD, 2001). The author of several books and hundreds of articles, in academic and professional journals as well as the general media, Prof. Lara writes extensively on a variety of issues regarding the Latin American built environment. In 2015 Prof. Lara published, together with Luis Carranza, the first comprehensive survey of Modern Architecture in Latin America. A member of the Brazilian Institute of Architects, and the Brazilian DOCOMOMO, Lara has also been active in his native country as a critic, researcher and educator, and is the editor of a bilingual series called Pensamento da América Latina. Currently Fernando Lara teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.

HOW TO TAKE PART

Free admission with advance registration.

The lecture will be held in English with interpreting into Russian.

REGISTRATION