Archinect - News

MoMA exhibition on 20th-century Latin American design is a 'gem' says Michael Kimmelman

2024-04-05T13:31:00-04:00

The show is a gem. It focuses on domestic design from six countries (Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela), produced between 1940 and 1980. Latin America had entered a period of transformation, industrial expansion and creativity. Across the region, design was becoming institutionalized as a profession, opening up new avenues, especially for women.

Critic Michael Kimmelman has heaped praise on the 'Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980' MoMA exhibition in a new piece for The New York Times. As we reported in December of last year, the show looks at the growth of modernism through an industrial and entrepreneurial lens, using a selection of examples from well-known and revered architects and designers such as Joaquim Tenreiro, Lina Bo Bardi, and Oscar Niemeyer.

"The role that women and immigrants played in shaping professional design and developing a national design vocabulary in Latin America will be emphasized, including the work of designers such as Clara Porset in Mexico, Cornelis Zitman in Venezuela, and Susi Aczel in Argentina," MoMA said about their exhibition at the time.

How a Venezuelan shopping center became a prison

2019-01-29T14:00:00-05:00

A new interactive documentary from the BBC explores the Venezuelan shopping center that became one of the country's most notorious torture centers for political prisoners. Through interviews from ex-detainees, relatives, lawyers and human rights activists, the BBC aims to bring its mysterious history to light.

Designed by Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst, and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez—and topped with one of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes—El Helicoide was intended as the world's first drive-through mall. Conceived at the height of Venezuela's economic growth, the ambitious project promoted a narrative of progress centered around consumerism, car culture, and social mobility.

However, the economic and political upheaval in 1950s Venezuela caused the project to fall apart, halting construction and leaving it empty for many years. Eventually, it was taken over by the government, who used it as a temporary flood shelter before adapting it as the headquarters for Venezuela's intelligenc...

LA's Grand Ave to get a color makeover

2017-08-23T12:43:00-04:00

The Broad announced today that it will present a new work from Venezuelan-born artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (b. 1923), in collaboration with the Cruz-Diez Art Foundation. Couleur Additive has been commissioned by The Broad as part of the Getty Initiative, Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California.

Similar public installation done by the artist for Miami Art Basel, 2013

Installation of the public artwork will take place on four crosswalks at the intersection of West Second Street and Grand Avenue from Sept. 1 through Sept. 3. The work can be experienced by the public beginning Sept. 5, 2017 and will be on view into 2018. As part of the installation, and in order to further deepen the project’s ties to the Grand Avenue arts community, high school students from the nearby Ramon C. Cor...

Improbable transformations of a Venezuelan architectural icon, as reported by CityLab

2017-06-02T20:53:00-04:00

Sometimes called a tropical Babel, the one-time symbol of the country’s progress wound up converted into a prison and, according to some of its former inmates, a torture center for political prisoners.

The Helicoide's design was initiated in mid-fifties, the times of Venezuela's economic prosperity. Grandiose, ambitious and strange, the project proposed a first drive-through mall with over 300 stores, a car showroom, gas station, car wash and even a repair shop. However, the building's destiny, was much more complex and chaotic than originally planned. Its long transformation from the intended techno-utopia to a functioning prison is regarded by many as a cruel irony symbolic of the country's's dramatically unstable political climate.

Proyecto Chacras: a house built in ten days with only recycled materials

2016-07-22T19:04:00-04:00

Built in a scant ten days, “Proyecto Chacras” is described as “pop-up productive housing.” The 30 square meter home was designed by Natura Futura Arquitecture and Colectivo Cronopios out of donated materials and tools, with volunteer labor. Located in Chacras, Ecuador, it houses a family who lost their previous home in an earthquake last April.

The structure has a concrete and brick base that supports modules made of pine palettes. Windows were made from strips of recycled waste and wood. The roof, which was put on last, is zinc sheeting. The house includes two bedrooms and one kitchen-cum-living room.

h/t Architecture in Development

What are the world's most violent cities?

2016-03-30T13:11:00-04:00

The thorny task of comparing crime rates across the world is tricky because legal interpretations vary. Sweden's definition of rape is not the same as America’s, for example. Murder however should be easier to record because there is an identifiable victim, something that can be counted. But the way in which this is done in poorer, often more corrupt countries makes truly comparable statistics hard to pin down. Where there are inefficient public health systems or police, it is even harder.

"Latin American and Caribbean countries suffer disproportionately compared with elsewhere, mainly because of inequality, poor rule of law, impunity and corrupt institutions that are infiltrated by drug cartels. Only two countries outside the region feature on either chart, South Africa and the United States (the list’s only rich-world country)."

The article notes the difficulty of accurately ranking cities based on crime statistics; this chart is a revision of an earlier one. But the overall picture remains the same: the world's most violent cities are in the Americas, with the one notable exception being Cape Town, South Africa. The statistics exclude war zones.

For more on crime and the city, take a look at some Archinect articles from the archive:

"Latin America is where modernist Utopia went to die." – A closer look at the changing urban landscape of Caracas

2015-11-25T17:24:00-05:00

‘El mejor anuncio de la historia’, or ‘the best ad in history’ is a picture taken in February 2008, which neatly encapsulates several aspects of the city’s urban landscape: the formal, the informal and the promotional. '[...]Around and in between the super bloques a carpet of slums has grown, an organism that now seems to bind the blocks together in some symbiotic relationship. These are the kind of hybrid forms that are developing in Latin American cities [...]’

Related in the Archinect news:

Families Removed From 'Tower of David' Skyscraper Slum

2014-07-25T12:43:00-04:00

Andreína Contreras, a 26-year-old mother of two, lived until this week in the “Tower of David,” in Caracas, Venezuela, which has been described as the world’s tallest slum, because it is situated in an abandoned skyscraper. She is among an estimated 1,150 families living in the tower who are to be removed and relocated permanently this week, seven years after the officially named Torre Confinanzas was first occupied as a result of Venezuela’s financial crisis...

Venezuelan Government Evicts Residents From World's Tallest Slum

2014-07-22T13:54:00-04:00

Venezuelan soldiers and officials began moving hundreds of families on Tuesday out of a half-built 45-story skyscraper that dominates the Caracas skyline and is thought to be the world's tallest slum. Residents from the "Tower of David” were going to new homes in the town of Cua, south of Caracas [...]. President Nicolas Maduro's government has not yet said what it will do with the tower, but one local newspaper reported Chinese banks were buying it to restore to its original purpose.

Previously:

The world's tallest slum: Rare look at an illegal ghetto in the sky

2013-08-27T15:00:00-04:00

Welcome to the world’s tallest slum: poverty-ridden Venezuela’s Tower of David. Squatters took over this very unfinished 45-story skyscraper in the early 1990s, and they’ve been there ever since. The tower was originally intended to be a symbol of Caracas’ bright financial future, complete with a rooftop helipad, but construction stopped because of a banking crisis and the sudden death of the tower’s namesake, David Brillembourg.

Anywhere but Here: Deserted Banking Empire turned Skyscraper Slum

2013-05-13T14:04:00-04:00

It was built for stockbrokers and bankers in their thousand dollar suits to make million dollar deals, but for nearly two decades it has held the less impressive title of the world’s tallest squat. Welcome to the Centro Financiero Confinanzas, more commonly known as the Torre David (the Tower of David) in Caracas, Venezuela, an unfinished skyscraper which has now been colonised by an ad hoc community of over 700 families.

Anywhere but Here: Deserted Banking Empire turned Skyscraper Slum

2013-05-13T14:04:00-04:00

Winning Entry of Bike Path Design Contest in Caracas, Venezuela

2012-07-03T14:33:00-04:00

The proposal for a bike path system for Venezuela's capitol Caracas, designed by architects Andrea Hernández and Cruz Criollo, has won the first prize in the competition Metropolitan Transportation System, Caracas to Pedal. The best and most innovative proposals of this competition, which seeks to promote cycling in the city, were recently awarded by the Metropolitan Mayor of Caracas.