about the book

This book focuses on major state-funded architectural projects, featuring not only the high-profile prestigious buildings like the House of Representatives in Brasilia but also social architecture such as schools and low-cost housing developments. Architects like Pani, Costa, Reidy and Niemeyer, who undertook social planners, their avant-garde aesthetic and technical experimentation often being teamed with radical social agendas.

By 1960, the year in which Brasilia was inaugurated, economic growth in the region was slowing and faith in the modernist project in general was faltering. The English-speaking world, which had previously endorsed and even envied Latin American architectural production, changed its opinion and largely dismissed it from the history of twentieth-century architecture. “Building the new world” redresses the balance. It provides an accessible introduction to the most important examples of state-funded modernism in Latin America during a period os almost unimaginable optimism, when politicians and architects saw architecture as, literally, a way of building themselves out of underdevelopment and into the new world of a culturally rich and socially inclusive future.

about the author

Valerie Fraser
A reader at the University of Essex in the Department of Art and History and Theory and the Centre for Latin American Studies.

how to quote

FRASER, Valerie. Building the new world. Studies in the modern architecture of latin america 1930-1960. 1st edition, London, Verso, 2000.

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