The Latin American Initiative at the ASU/School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture represents a major institutional statement, not only academic, but socio-cultural and political. It is a singular step towards a more comprehensive anchoring for Arizona’s future architecture and design in general, considering the current cultural immersion of the region. In the past 3 years, many related activities have taken place until the point when a more articulated program became obviously inexorable, aiming to consolidate an influential, culturally reflective, organic position for architecture. Until today, the program has involved Latin American architecture seminars, lecture series, summer trips, academic exchanges, exhibitions, and from now on physical exhibition at the School and a permanent bilingual web site (http://lai.caed.asu.edu/). The website is the first comprehensive compilation of the phenomenon of Latin American architecture to emerge on the internet. They all explore in different ways the great territorial dimension and fabulous realism of Latin American culture, and more specifically the intricate and utopian urbanism, its monumental, public and domestic architecture, and the natural but also highly designed and constructed landscape.

The specific focus of the seminar class that generates this exhibition was placed on the patient discovering of the theoretically common ideals and practical ideas developed through distinctive architectural works especially of the heroic avant-garde modern period of the years ‘30s through '80s, and how that consolidates a body somehow still in force affecting the architectural practice in Latin America today. From more distant ancient precedents, to the very echoed visit of Le Corbusier to South America in 1929, the strong political and economic turbulences in the region following the ‘great depression’ in the US, the subsequent instability of the region under military oppression for decades, the consequent fight of the people for liberation, freedom, together with the strong impact of the Cuban revolution and the expansion of the fresh revolutionary ideas, and the re-conquering of democracy for most of the countries, among other events get somehow refracted but not following any linear manner. Consistent, sometimes secret, silent, dialoguing in a way is a shadow in the works: Juan O’Gorman, Luis Barragan, Felix Candela, Ricardo Porro, Rogelio Salmona, Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Reidy, Roberto Burle Marx, Lina Bo Bardi, Vilanova Artigas, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Martín Correa, Eladio Dieste, Amancio Williams, Clorindo Testa’s among other outstanding works are reviewed and featured by the students in critical papers, researched materials, drawings, photographs and newly constructed models to unfold and reveal some of these basic territorial relationships.

The previously suggested territorial conditions of Latin American cultural production in general are based on the wide range and multiplicity of socio-historical-geopolitical forces that creates a common project without a simply visible formal unity. They preserve through motion in time the variety of those forces that impulse it, within a common tacit vision, often a political or social ideal materialized in the public field by the architects commissioned by or involved in the state, as well as in the private field. Each occasion results in a new potential territorial ground to put those forces in play even there is no win or lose, but a sense of communality and brotherhood to guide a constant and restless revolution and sense of challenge, liberation, freedom and independence. But since these dynamic grounds that compose a certain territory are constantly evolving, their embedded principles of action are always mutable, that is why they need to be constantly described, re-interpreted, explored, mapped... like this exhibition does.

When exploring, a double condition appears in them in order to construct possible maps, since real and non-real worlds are always intertwined, and ‘fabulous’ conditions are still preserved in that which is deteriorated or ‘favelado’ (proper of the favelas, Brazilian slums, that which is affected from the ‘favelization’ process). The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier conjugates that the condition that unites spiritual and empirical realities in Latin America is the ‘real marvelous’. An example of these extreme components embedded at the same time in the reality, greatness and misery, fabulous and ‘favelado’, is then in the ‘favela’ case, where the unacceptably miserable social conditions and extremely informal and poor urban circumstances, contrasts with the fabulous geographic/topographic conditions, and its spontaneous particularity and inlaid work. Buildings like the ‘Pedregulho Housing Complex’ in Rio de Janeiro, exhibited here, conjugate then quite well that dual reality, what is structural of their territorial installation, with that which is particular and unexpectedly opportune, being able to anchor a complete section of social, political, cultural and geographical bonds.

But these newly emerged ties attempt to create gleams of new and greater hypothetical totalities within the disparate existing one, trying to affirm at the same time its partial configurative purpose as well as the bigger urban/territorial figure. These gleams never reveal their complete image or purpose, but are potentially utopian at completion and remain as possible constellations, or fragments of vast future constellations that foreshadow the new reality but without completely predetermining it. They manage to articulate in its apparent, but at the same time neglected autonomy, the territorial/ dimensional ties with the precisely existent particular, as an anchor that reveals from itself its own fabulous character. The emerging of the true concrete character of all these fragmentary pieces around configures then a kind of hidden, enigmatic map, a very powerful one when you discern it… even it does not crystallize or solidify because of its ever changing and shifting unmatchable shape. It becomes a very precise body of criticism to the abstract Modern never quite realized ideals in many cases, through regionally focalized conditions and socio-cultural and political idiosyncrasy, and more importantly common spirituality. This inherent but embedded modern criticism is the one that impulses, together with its own strengthened contents, the kind of ‘fabulous’ freedom with wider and stronger roots, as a provisional program for the Latin American project for architecture and urbanism.

Fabulous and favelado, greatness and misery, Nature and Man, far extremes always train and favor a better sensitivity for greater and smaller dimensions. So to deal with them and construct along them one requires also great spiritual depth to be able to encompass, and identify with that realm of humanity. The Uruguayan Engineer Eladio Dieste, also present in this exhibit, reflects in a paragraph from cosmos to bread: “I feel these things do not come about as the result of a conscious effort, but rather as the result of a deep adjustment and of an affinity –in other words, of a deep, obscure relationship with the land on which we dwell (…), with the grandeur and inordinacy of the American landscape (…) here, in America, there is something obscure, and yet that somehow still expresses this mysterious cosmic relationship between man and nature (…) I feel that a city or a region, deep down, plastically expresses what that city or that community is. Now, since at this moment I think that we are unfortunately suffering from a lack of community spirit, and the cities express this –in other words, they express the fact that there aren’t any real communities. The great failure I see now is the failure of community in a deep human sense (…) It seems to me that the mistaken aspect of the attitude with which we have generally approached everything that has to do with architecture and planning is, in fact, a somewhat narrow utilitarian criterion. What I would demand would be a change of mentality, a greater brotherhood that would give as a result a completely different meaning to our cities, rural areas, to all our society. All this, of course, would be an expression of the soul: cities, towns, rural areas are nothing more than the expression of what the society feels very deeply (…) There has to be a great art shared by the community. Whether or not architecture has to be purely ‘utilitarian’ then, I believe people need a series of imponderables of a spiritual nature as much or more than they need to eat. One of the utilitarian factors is art. Art is one of the most utilitarian things you could ask for, because people need it like they need bread”.

A deep sense of community could be possibly seen, I believe, embedded in the varied scales and ties of the map of this exhibition, including a teaching/learning community; that expanded sense is hopefully able to open the limits for exploration and discovery and set the ground for constant revolution in the territories of architecture.

* Claudio Vekstein (1965, Buenos Aires) is Professor at ASU/CAED/SALA since 2002, he studied architecture in Argentina (1989), earned his master’s in Germany (1993), has run his practice in Buenos Aires since 1996. http://design.asu.edu/faculty/veksteinclaudio.shtml