Latin America in Construction

Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and served as the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA from 2007 to 2013. He has been praised for "activist's sense of urgency and an academic's insistence on rigor." He is the author of European Architecture 1750-1890 (Oxford University Press, 200) in addition to the MoMA catalogues for Henri Labrouste, Home Delivery and Mies in Berlin. In his ongoing role as a part-time curator at MoMA, he is preparing an exhibition on Brazillian architect Lina BoBardi.

In 1955 The Museum of Modern Art staged Latin American Architecture since 1945, a landmark survey of modern architecture in Latin America. Published in conjunction with a new exhibition that revisits the region on the 60th anniversary of that important show, Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 offers a complex overview of the positions, debates, and architectural creativity from Mexico and Cuba to the Southern Cone between 1955 and the early 1980s. The publication features a wealth of original materials that have never before been brought together to illustrate a period of self-questioning, exploration and complex political shifts that saw the emergence of the notion of Latin America as a landscape of development. Richly illustrated with architectural drawings, vintage photographs, sketches and newly commissioned photographs, the catalogue presents the work of architects who met the challenges of modernization with innovative formal, urbanistic and programmatic solutions. Today, when Latin America is again providing exciting and challenging architecture and urban responses, Latin America in Construction brings this vital post-war period to light.