Dialogues

Abstract

The control and changes of urban spaces can reveal the intricate intersections between power and architecture. In this way, political regimes have often manipulated physical environment to promote political power and convey the identity that supports and legitimizes their rule. While power and architecture have been relevant in the past decades for scholarship produced in Europe and the United States, they have not received the same attention from scholars working on Latin American subjects. With the following essays, Dialogues would like to mitigate the present void and put forward new ways to look at and discuss the built environment. The section starts with a short introduction by Idurre Alonso and Maristella Casciato addressing the main ideas around the theme. Each of the subsequent four essays examines case studies in which the symbolic use of architecture and urbanism was used by different political actors in order to accommodate their specific ideas. Camilla Querin focuses on the marginalization of Afro and Indigenous Brazilian communities via the control of historical urban spaces in Rio de Janeiro. Catalina Fara analyzes the construction of a modern image of Buenos Aires generated by photographer Horacio Coppola and promoted by the municipality through the photo book Buenos Aires 1936. Visión Fotográfica. Cristóbal Jácome-Moreno examines the Eighth Pan-American Congress of Architecture (1952) in Mexico and its links to the government in the promotion of a unifying architectural past and present for the country. In the final essay, Lisa Blackmore addresses the urban reforms associated with hydro-engineering by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, linking them to his interest in projecting an image of modernity.