Review: Eugenics in the Garden: Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity, by Fabiola López-Durán

Abstract

Fabiola Lopez-Duran Eugenics in the Garden: Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018, 312 pp., 132 b/w illus. $90 (cloth), ISBN 9781477314951; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 9781477314968 Scholarship on twentieth-century architecture beyond Europe and North America has been adjectivizing modernization for the past several decades. Authors write about incomplete modernization, conservative modernization, and unequal modernization to speak of processes that enriched a few at the expense of the many. In 1995, anthropologist Arturo Escobar's Encountering Development convincingly explained how modernity implies coloniality.1 Inequality and exclusion are not side effects of modernization but inherent conditions of its processes. Architectural historians, however, have not been at the forefront of this way of thinking. Much to the contrary, when compared to sociologists, anthropologists, and even art historians, we arrived late to the understanding that gender, race, and ethnicity are fundamental facets of how we narrate (or do not narrate) our histories of modernization. Eugenics in the Garden, by Fabiola Lopez-Duran, marks a significant step toward rectifying this situation. The book traces Le Corbusier's connection with eugenic concepts developed around the end of the nineteenth century, showing how racist ideas played a role in the transatlantic materialization of Corbusian spatial proposals in Brazil and Argentina. The author gets right to the point: modern architecture as we know it is much closer to white supremacist ideas than we would like to admit. The book starts and ends in Paris, taking us on a wild ride of more than half a century, from the 1880s to the Vichy Republic of occupied France during World War II. In her introduction, Lopez-Duran reminds us that “race is a social construction that dangerously legitimizes the conviction that inequality is inevitable. This conviction has justified slavery, apartheid, genocide, and its current …