— CORAL GABLES, FL (March 5, 2015)

Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY, March 29. Seven models built by UM School of Architecture students, led by professor Jean-Francois Lejeune, are included in the exhibition, which is a “complex overview of the positions, debates and architectural creativity from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, from Mexico to Cuba to the Southern Cone between 1955 and the early 1980s,” according to a statement from MoMA.

“We immediately thought of Professor Lejeune when it became clear to us that our archival hunting was not yielding the fully array of historical materials we had hoped to unearth. Lejeune is not only a wide-ranging historian who produced an important exhibition a decade ago on Latin America, and thus knows the region very well, but an exquisite conceptualizer of models,” said Barry Bergdoll, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art. “Lejeune understands that a model is not a building in miniature but a set of historical/aesthetic decisions that render visible a key aspect of a work of architecture. The models produced under Lejeune’s supervision — like those he has made for previous exhibitions — are analytically subtle.”

The models were crafted at the SoA between August, 2014, and February, 2015. Lejeune and adjunct faculty member Rafael Tapanes, an expert in architectural visualization, taught a special class, also called “Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980,” that analyzed the buildings and produced new CADD drawings, as well as 3-D digital models using Rhinoceros software, according to Lejeune.

“Those drawings and models were then reformatted to print and cut the sheets of wood using laser technology at the School of Architecture Fab-Lab,” Lejeune said. “The same process was followed to produce the site contours and special features. The last phase, completed with the help of additional students, consisted in the meticulous assembling of the models.”

“I took the Latin America course because it was my first semester at semester at UM and approached it as a great opportunity to meet new people and learn more about Latin America architecture and design,” said Zachary Lim, a first year graduate student at the SoA. “The best part of the course was collaborating with my group and working together towards one common goal. It wasn’t an easy process at times and took a lot of sacrifice from all of us but finally completing the model was one of the best accomplishments I’ve ever had.”

The models were shipped to MoMA at the end of February, and Lejeune will travel to the museum for the press preview opening March 24. The buildings modeled are the Edificio Altolar in Caracas, the Torres del Parque in Bogotà, Urnario in Montevideo, the Centro Civico La Pampa in Santa Rosa (Argentina), the Escuela de Ballet in Havana, and the Colegio de Mexico and Las Arboledas, both in Mexico City. Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 will run through July 19 at MoMA.