Theorizing Space of Nuestra América

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

To study the built environment of the Americas is to deal with an inherent contradiction. While our disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that spaces matter; an overwhelming majority of our knowledge comes from another continent.

As reminded by Edward Said in the classic Orientalism of 1974, European culture developed narratives about all other societies on Earth and as a result established itself as the center of human knowledge. This session departs from asking what could be the contribution of the Americas in a global theory of the built environment?

One possible answer is given by Roberto Fernández in his seminal El Laboratório Americano (1997). Fernández discusses how architectural theory, to this day, treats the Americas as the a special kind of periphery that turns into an eternal laboratory, in which experiences are systematically abandoned by new ones. America thus becomes the place of modernity par excellence, of eternal novelty, a perpetual state of infancy to use ethnocentric Hegelian concept that should be outdated but insists in framing our narrative.

To debate an spatial theory for the Americas is to look at it not only as the most genuine product of Western modernity, but also as a tool to invent modernity, to extend it and to reproduce it. If modernity was invented in the Americas we need to face the challenge of revising our spatial theories accordingly.

Sub Track

• Art, Archaeology, and Architecture

Session Organizer

• Fernando L Lara, University of Texas/Austin

Chair

• Fernando L Lara, University of Texas/Austin

Discussant

• Reina Loredo Cansino, Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas

Individual Presentations

• The Nature of Space in the Americas: realizing a non-Eurocentric and non-anthropocentric theory or theories for architecture and urbanism - Clare Cardinal-Pett, Iowa State University

• Space against Function: Critical Strategies for Rethinking Modern Architecture in post-War Mexico - Luis E Carranza, Roger Williams University

• Other spaces: Viveiros de Castro; Kush and Escobar in conversation with Descartes, Heidegger and Habermas - Fernando L Lara, University of Texas/Austin

• Between “critical regionalism” and “appropriate modernity” – the construction of a self and conceptual identity for Latin American modern architecture - Marianna B Al Assal