It’s easy, when you’ve lived in the best architecture city in the world as long as I have in Chicago, to think you’ve seen it all. But when I started visiting Brazil more than a decade ago, I found myself exploring a country where Oscar Niemeyer is revered as a national treasure, with his curvy, space-age take on modernism, and Brutalism is revered, not reviled. I came to appreciate the value of dialogue between all of the Americas.
As an accomplished architect and longtime professor at IIT, Dirk Denison had a broader knowledge of Latin American design than I did when he started the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP), but in our conversation he suggested a similar awakening brought on by the travel that this then-new award required. Those travels connected him to Buenos Aires native Florencia Rodriguez, the founder of the Argentina-based Plot architectural journal, who would soon split her time between her native country and Chicago. Here she became director of the School of Architecture at UIC, and now serves as the first-ever Latin American artistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB), where Denison serves on the board.
We asked Denison and Rodriguez to discuss the value of design dialogue between the two hemispheres, especially as the influence of Latin America’s traditional focus on housing and the environment make their way north more and more.
How are each of you connected to Latin American architecture?
Dirk: Well, I think Florencia’s [connection] is much deeper, of course, than mine, but it’s somehow also interrelated. The beginning of my deeper understanding of both the great built works, as well as the amazing talent and energy that’s happening in our current time frame, just goes back to twelve years ago when we founded The Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP). The idea of bridging between North and South America—a conversation—it really wasn’t actually conceived of as that. It was conceived of as showcasing what’s happening throughout North and South America.
What we realized is that we both embrace a lot of similarities, but we also have very different ways of working, and different products and different contexts. And so in the end, it has become a dialogue. And I think my relationship with it is through that extension of my teaching for an academic institution. Being ever-hungry for worthwhile information to share with our students is the foundation of why I now know more about what’s going on there, and have experienced now firsthand what the amazing product of the Americas is.
Did you have a personal or specific interest in Latin American architecture before the MCHAP project started, or did that develop it for you?
Dirk: Well, I’m going to say yes and no. I would say from a specific country or continental focus, no. From the trajectory of modernism, yes. Part of the foundation of my doing this prize is also personal in that I went to IIT, which is a school with a long-term doctrine founded by Mies and his twentieth-century-modern approach to architecture.
I went to school in the seventies and eighties in a time when we were maybe for a while the only school—in North America, certainly—that was holding on to our modernist trajectory. I think, in part, because we were living on a campus with twenty buildings designed by this modern master. So it was hard for us to separate. But also because every faculty member had been trained by Mies.
I was existing in this world where modernism was being attacked. And all of this—I don’t know what you want to call it, I call it a paranoia—that was going on in the grasping out to reconnect with the iconography of traditional architecture put us on the outs. So the idea of understanding the modernist contribution worldwide, not just in North and South America, but for me, looking at where our contributions as modernists have been successful, inherently included looking at Central and South America.
Florencia: It’s interesting to jump in at this point because my trajectory is the opposite in different ways, right? So I’ve been practicing in Buenos Aires. Very early in my career I started writing and took a role as a cultural producer, curating, organizing panel discussions and writing about architecture—first in a publication that was called Summa, and then founding my own publication, Plot, in 2010. And one of the main intellectual projects of Plot, particularly in my career, was to highlight and reposition contemporary narratives in Latin American architecture, responding to that modernism that had such a strong lineage and such a strong heritage.
So for me, I was a little bit rebelling against modernism as a cultural project, and trying to find the value in what’s happening today that is informed by that fantastic tradition—and I love it. I of course admire all of that production, and the pioneers of modernism in South America, and the production that left us—but also that was a little bit restrictive of new conversations, and I’ve worked a lot to generate the space culturally to understand what’s going on today.
When Dirk and I met, MCHAP was a fantastic platform for that; that resonated with Plot. We collaborated not only because I was fortunate enough to be invited to be a jury member in the second edition of the prize, but also [through] editing a book and having tons of conversations and doing things with Plot at that moment together with MCHAP. And that’s part of the Biennial right now—to bring voices that are very active in the region, but also to put them in relationship with global production and to talk about the future as well. So based on that modernist praise, there are lessons that I think can open paths for things that are really urgent and relevant nowadays.
Dirk: And I want to be very clear that this current undertaking and appreciation through MCHAP of the work of the Americas—South and North—is by no means rooted in some modernist venture. It is completely ecumenical, and there’s nothing in the structure of how projects are nominated or evaluated that has any modernist doctrinaire. Some of our board was just talking to us and said, “You just said ‘the best!’” So, there is nothing specific at all for the nomination process.
My own personal experience, let me just say for the record—I went to IIT, did the five-year Miesian curriculum, which was a beautiful foundation. I was one of the last classes to actually do his pedagogy. And then I went to Harvard and studied with Libeskind and Eisenman and Frank Gehry. I purposely did something different. And that, I think, is actually more in the spirit of why MCHAP is at IIT. It’s about that greater fertilization, not only that our students benefit from, but I feel that all architecture needs to benefit from.
What are some projects or architects in Latin America that you draw inspiration from?
Florencia: In this moment, there is a fantastic generation doing things that are rooted in local lineage but also [exploring] relationships with others in different parts of the world. There is something of the production right now—if you see offices like gru.a, for instance, in Brazil, or Adamo-Faiden in Argentina, or [a big group of examples] in Chilean architecture, or in Mexico right now—they are walking that double line that is super-interesting, of adapting to a very contextual condition in many aspects, [while] really not limited by that.
That’s interesting, understanding modes of production—the ways in which industries work, idiosyncrasies in each of the spaces, or the countries and responding to history. But also thinking about what I was saying before, these matters that we are discussing globally. That is, being responsible or empathetic with the situation, with the material culture; trying to understand the best situation or how it can work; trying to do a lot with little… Which is a very difficult thing in South America, right?
The idea of a crisis—a constant crisis that, instead of inhibiting cultural production, is like a sea of possibilities. How do you work and deal with those issues? So yes, there is a fantastic generation of architects right now. I would say the middle-aged and the younger generations are bringing a lot to the table, and that’s very valuable.
Are there figures like Brazil’s Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012) who loom over the Latin American architecture ecosystem in this moment? Is there an architect like Niemeyer in Argentina?
Florencia: Well, we had Clorindo Testa or Mario Roberto Álvarez, who was also—Clorindo was more like a Brutalist, but also very mannerist, I would say, very expressive and quite his own thing. And Mario Roberto Álvarez was, in a way, our own Mies. Let’s say he was a big fan of Mies, and he got a very strong production in Argentina.
And then other interesting characters such as Amancio Williams, who didn’t build as much, but was an interesting person that would do research and speculations that are fantastic. [His] archive is at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and there will be something about him at the Biennial. But I would say that the times have changed, right? And that we are not looking for these unique characters all the time or these pioneers now. It’s more of a collective thing.
Dirk: I want to reinforce Florencia’s position that I think we’re in a time in which we’re not looking at paradigms. We’re not looking at stars to follow. It’s looking at what the capability is at the most fundamental level to embed good thinking into design decisions: making space, use of materials, means of construction.
Florencia used the axiom of doing more with less. It’s one of the things that we very much found from our jury deliberations for the projects in MCHAP. The ingenuity that comes with having not just a real restriction of resources and funds—but actually, from our larger global ecology, one that we want to consciously push forward: to do more with less and to work with what we have—I think is a parallel concept, which I think is an interesting one that I see in examples in South America.
Unlike in North America, where a lot was torn down in the earlier, mid-, and even late-twentieth century, leaving us less to work with from the texture of our cities and also the history of the cities, I find that their cross-section of what’s been contributed, at least from my naive visitor standpoint, is more consistently still in place. Of course, bounced off against the moments of time.
But let me go back to what she was also saying about the production. Again, my filter is restricted to about 300 projects in a biennial cycle that comes in front of me through MCHAP. The amazing ingenuity of how you get things done—I call it “the agency of architecture”—that we see in brilliant efforts in Brazil and Ecuador and Argentina, where the architects are getting some of their friends and families together and saying we’re going to make stuff happen. Most often through housing as a vehicle, often in a very—especially in Argentina—very economically challenged environment. And the architects are taking on that role of fruition, of making things happen.
Then contrast, for instance, a couple of initiatives we’ve seen in Mexico. Similar things exist in other places, but not to the scale of the work that Román Meyer was doing as secretary of SEDATU, which is their department of the interior. Over the tenure of the last president, they did almost a thousand projects in villages, in communities and towns that were not in the major cities. There is also in Mexico City, Pilares, which is also a government initiative. Architects, of course, are behind it. But where there was great opportunity to give design challenges and through it engagements of communities to the best of the young minds practicing.
There’s a whole generation in Mexico that really, through this federal initiative, have become—we’ve just said there are no superstars, but they’re superstars, because they’re really good. And they’ve had an opportunity to do two, three, four, some of them even ten projects in this period of four or five years of the government having built almost a thousand projects throughout Mexico. So it’s happening at both scales, where the architects are making it happen themselves. There’s also some really smart [programs]—Mr. Meyer would say some of this stuff didn’t work. But the successes are countable.
Florencia, how will your background as the first Latin American artistic director of the Chicago Architecture Biennial manifest itself in this year’s program and exhibitions?
Florencia: It did shape my thinking because I believe in positionality, and that’s what I have breathed and what has made me as a thinker, as a critic, as a curator. So I grew up surrounded by these practices, these conversations, these ways of understanding the world, and that’s how I think. But yes, this is a biennial [where] I decided not to necessarily do the Latin American group as a group, but to have a big selection of architects that I think are participating in the ideas that are part of “Shift”—of these transformations in the architecture culture globally.
You will see architects from all the countries we have been mentioning. You are going to see things that are related to everyday life and making urbanism with a building, or understanding context. You will see things that are related to recovering material and reclaiming material and thinking about new possible creations from it. You’ll see the use of stanchions to organize space and how form sometimes opens new ways of understanding something that is in front of you and there.
So for sure, Latin American production is going to be very present. We will host some events, particularly because we are opening during Hispanic Heritage Month. And yes, me being the first Latino artistic director, we really want to celebrate that.
But what I want to do is think about reciprocity, and bringing these voices to talk with others—to talk with others that are practicing in other parts of the world, and to talk with the Chicago architects as well, right? So I think in this way, as you were describing at the beginning, MCHAP as a bridge—I’ve always also felt that as an echo, bridging north and south, and also bringing the Latin American production to a global window to understand the values that it can bring to the table. And also for Latin America to learn about other things happening in other parts of the world.
That’s also a big part of this biennial: the idea of learning from others or generating moments in which we can all understand different experiences that don’t necessarily translate directly, but you can take a look and understand how that would work in a very different context. And that’s part of what I feel is key for these big events—biennials, publications, [places] in which people are gathered. That’s the opportunity, to look at other things and allow that to challenge your own way of thinking.
Are there any particular practices or firms from Latin America that people should really look out for? Is there anything that will stand out for the general audience as opposed to the architectural audience?
Florencia: Yeah, I mentioned a couple already, but I could add Sol Camacho—her work for RADDAR that’s going to have a fantastic installation at Yates [Gallery in the Chicago Cultural Center] that I would suggest for people to go to. It’s going to be super-interesting, and you’ll learn about construction in glass through this fantastic experiential installation that she’s working on with her office.
There will be a lot of examples that also directly touch on the issue of housing. We are working on a big video exhibition that puts together around thirty cases of building collective housing in different parts of the world. Many of them are in Latin America—there’s a project by Productora, for instance, from Mexico and others related to the MCHAP family. Rozana Montiel is also going to be here. Natura Futura, which is an amazing practice in Ecuador.
Dirk: And both of those are winners of our Emerge Prize.
MCHAP operates on a biennial cycle, like the Chicago Architecture Biennial, creating excitement and generating dialogue in those moments every couple of years. How does this influence extend beyond these moments? Are they generating tangible change?
Dirk: It’s interesting that you’re bringing this up, because our MCHAP team is just about to start a yearlong conversation with our architects, our jury, former jury members, our winners of the prize, to assess exactly what you’re talking about: to look at impact, to see collaborations that have come out of opportunities that the gatherings presented, where people met each other.
Despite all of the advancement of our digital technology, I think we are still most engaged by the real—the realtime, the in-person and actually meeting people that you decide that you have something in common with, that you have a shared spirit with, where you see the opportunity to make something to work together.
Florencia: I think that’s a very interesting question, because when you do something like a biennial or something that has a cycle, or sometimes one book or one panel discussion—one thing that you really think is impactful and relevant—you want it to spread in a way. At least in my line of work, I’m always thinking about that. It’s like how do we make this evolve, or how do we throw it out there?
I always talk about the importance of making things public, and making them belong to the collective in a way, and that sometimes continues developing in ways that you are not part of anymore—or you continue to be part of it, but it’s beyond your control, right?
I like the idea that I also usually work with—that of the “discrete revolutions.” It’s like you position this thing, you have a conversation, and yeah, you can change the way that we understand some things, maybe in a small group of people or—when I was talking about the reciprocity, sometimes you make a panel discussion and two people that did not have anything [in common between] them, they feel that they connect at some point, and their work connects at some point, and that generates a new thing.
So I hope that with this big exhibition—bringing people to talks, organizing panel discussions, activating these things and experiencing an exhibition which is fantastic: you can touch things, go inside some things, contemplate some others—but I hope there is room for openness and allowing yourself to change.
And I think that’s the main goal of these things. For sure, there will be another Biennial in two years, there will be another MCHAP cycle. But there is a body of work that continues evolving, and some conversations that continue and take different new paths that are worth the effort of these specific events.
Dirk: We have more and more through each [MCHAP] cycle developed programming that we take on the road where we’re doing gatherings in all the places, the countries, the cities that we go to as a prize. Bringing people together, the networking of it and the sharing of information, is a fundamental benefit of the larger initiative, in addition to the teaching that was the original reason for doing it.
One of the examples of an interesting collaboration that’s come out of it is that I’m teaching with Monterrey Tech now for the third year. We started two years ago with a studio in Monterrey, Mexico, that was working on their dry riverbed. It’s an organizing element that goes through the city, but that the municipality had really sort of ignored. And I have to say, I came in with some secret weapons, because I came in teaching the studio with Maurice Cox, who was still our planning commissioner, my amazing colleague Maria Villalobos, who’s the head of our landscape and urbanism program at IIT—and what’s come out of it now is an ongoing project, along with Alejandro Echeverri, who’s from Colombia, but he is our professor of excellence there.
How will this Biennial tackle the issue of housing, which is a more and more urgent conversation in the United States? Latin America has long seemed a place of innovation in the practice of social housing.
Florencia: Going to Latin America, there’s a strong modernist tradition related to collective housing and social housing. And many of those projects that were heroic in the first part of the twentieth century or in the mid-century had proven to not necessarily be a success, but allowed us to learn from them and left some lessons.
In this exhibition and in some of the research that I have been working on—this started with Plot, and we are now in a network of collaborators with Alexander Eisenschmidt here from UIC, Camilo Restrepo from Colombia, Magdalena Tagliabue from Buenos Aires and Plot along with Águeda Gómez Suárez, Igo Kommers Wender—many of the discussions are in different approaches to housing and what are the essential transformations that we are looking at today.
We see some examples from Latin America in terms of cooperative design. You have the cooperativas in Uruguay that has been an example in Montevideo for years as a model. Brazil as well has developed those formats to really fund and be able to react to a need that is there and tangible, sometimes by the lack of response of some governments, right? So how is it that these models can work bottom up? There are others that are included in our exhibition that are not necessarily social housing and sometimes are even high-end housing, but they’re dealing with other transformations, in terms of how we build more ecological models or changes in how we share some of the spaces or how we react to new management situations.
Right now many of the explorations related to housing are trying to put together many of these things, engaging with many of these issues—material culture, and how these things are going to be in thirty years, in fifty years, a century from now. We are witnessing all of these issues in Europe of [preservation], right? Or these protests against demolition. So let’s do an adaptive reuse, or [figure out] how to take buildings that were there and bring them to the current needs, bring them to the present and adapt them.
There are so many things going on, and we are also facing migration issues. So again, what’s a home? What are the interconnections that we need? What’s the ecological stand that we take related to all of that? It’s a little bit overwhelming in a way, because there are too many things at the same time, but I think as cultural producers what we need to do is analyze, interpret and put out there examples that can allow us to think differently and can serve also as a tool for governments or for decision-makers when we are all sitting down together.
Dirk: I want to add—I mentioned the “architect as agent”—most of those projects that we’ve been fortunate to see are smaller developments where it might be only six or seven units, up to twenty or thirty. But at scale, what’s interesting, and what Florencia is saying, is that more and more architects are realizing or being made conscious that it’s not just [about] the physical structure—that it’s all of the culture that housing is at the foundation of that we need to inform ourselves about, and it needs to be what is driving and is a strong voice in design.
So that, for instance, what I think more than anything else, [what I found most eye-opening in] South America was to see the vast number of people that were living in situations where there was some municipality involvement—they might have supplied power lines or the water—but where the entire construction had been, for the most part, or entirely, put together by the occupants. That as an architecture is visible, but it really is about the culture, if you will, behind it, and the realities of economics and politics as well.
And I think what I will say—I don’t know how to say this boldly enough—that after seeing multiple examples of this and seeing where ingenuity comes out of it, and how humans survive—we’re a very strong, maybe too strong species—that my reaction was we need to be looking at what’s going on here in the north as we squander our resources and we live way above an appropriate level of how much space we all take and how much resources we all take.
It’s not “There but for you go I,” it’s like, “no, it’s I.” This is our future as well, and I think there’s so much to be learned for both the context as well as the way the design plays a role in working through that.
There definitely seems to be a more central focus on environmental concerns in Latin America in the architectural and built environment spaces.
Florencia: Latin American architecture has always been more sustainable in terms of using mechanical systems or doing what you can with what you have. There is a consciousness about possibilities and the impact that architecture has that is very present since the beginning. And again, in the modernist [practice], you can find examples in the very early twentieth century of people thinking, like Vladimir Acosta in Argentina, about the wind, the ventilations, and many things that are part of our discourse today.
But if I have to say something related to the ecologies and housing, those are urgent and pressing themes that are conditioning almost every discussion around the globe. But in the case of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, that capsule exhibition “Ecologies” has that S very much on purpose, because it’s beyond the idea of nature and sustainability. It’s trying to explore different approaches to the built environment and how we can interpret that.
You will see some projects that are not necessarily in the same line we were discussing, but that are generating environments for different bodies, for instance, and dealing with how we design for disabilities or other [environments] that [we] are thinking about. Very specific things like Amazonia and how we can think about that huge territory for the future, or [a project on] the markets in Lagos by Tosin Oshinowo and that research in understanding how this organization, this interconnection among people—capitalism, and buying and selling—can be done in a post-capitalist way in one way or another.
“Ecologies” is trying to put together different understandings and possibilities for the built environment from very different lenses. And I hope that those are inspiring. And again, some of them are very much related to sustainability and our responsibility in terms of material culture. But others are more related to another alternative way of understanding possible futures.
