Antonio Sergio Bessa - Beyond the Supersquare: Art and Architecture in Latin America After Modernism

William Morrish

Resource Extraction, Affiliated Infrastructures, Law of Indies = Oil City, Post-Oil City, Hinterland, Informationization of the Modern, Formalization of the Informal, Industrial and Artisanal Concrete, Collapse of Skin and Structure, Recycled Infill, Dynamic Protrusion, Battlefield, to Become Modern Versus to Keep Identity, Combined Vernacular Constructions with European Functionalism, Speak Architecture, Tlatelolco, Latin American Architecture = Art, Urban Genome, Automatic Beauty, Air Is Blue, Parque Vertical, Tlatelolcos Toilet, Recycling Device, Emergency Architecture, Molecular Urbanism, Nutritional Culture, Collective Economic Activation

The words modernizationand modernismare common in Latin and North American art, architecture, and city discourses, but the application of the ideas embedded in these terms builds very different urban landscapes. The opportunity offered by the premise of getting beyond the supersquare is evident in this cross section of deep historic readings and design inquiries providing a launching point for how we might better understand the critical difference in urban historic terms, and a further opportunity to get out of the box that confines todays common oppositional analysis such as urbanization versus urbanism and modernization versus modernism. The collective work in Beyond the Supersquarereveals a stunning body of hidden histories, actors, phrases, and terms upon which this work performsas well as a unique narrative, through design and experimentation, on the continual search for modern urban living in Latin America.

The work presented for Beyond the Supersquareis characterized from a key vantage point of urban prospectthat of looking at the built environment at the corner or at the intersection of two disciplines. This more outward-looking perspective allows one to discover how art and architecture become a system, a field, and a political landscape, not just a moment of didactic reflection. If this framework represents a lesson, it is this: the application of North American urban terms through the lens of the Latin American city experience has produced a radically different result, both historically and for future design and development. For example, in North America the word project