Modernity for the Masses - Antonio Bonet's Dreams for Buenos Aires (Hardcover)

2022 PROSE Award Finalist in Architecture and Urban Planning 2022 Association for Latin American Art Arvey Foundation Book Award, Honorable Mention Throughout the early twentieth century, waves of migration brought working-class people to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This prompted a dilemma: Where should these restive populations be situated relative to the city's spatial politics? Might housing serve as a tool to discipline their behavior? Enter Antonio Bonet, a Catalan architect inspired by the transatlantic modernist and surrealist movements. Ana Maria Leon follows Bonet's decades-long, state-backed quest to house Buenos Aires's diverse and fractious population. Working with totalitarian and populist regimes, Bonet developed three large-scale housing plans, each scuttled as a new government took over. Yet these incomplete plans-Bonet's dreams-teach us much about the relationship between modernism and state power. Modernity for the Masses finds in Bonet's projects the disconnect between modern architecture's discourse of emancipation and the reality of its rationalizing control. Although he and his patrons constantly glorified the people and depicted them in housing plans, Bonet never consulted them. Instead he succumbed to official and elite fears of the people's latent political power. In careful readings of Bonet's work, Leon discovers the progressive erasure of surrealism's psychological sensitivity, replaced with an impulse, realized in modernist design, to contain the increasingly empowered population.

General

Imprint:	University Of Texas Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Lateral Exchanges: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Practices
Release date:	March 2021
First published:	2021
Authors:	Ana Maria Leon
Dimensions:	254 x 178 x 30mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	288
ISBN-13:	978-1-4773-2178-2
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > General Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Individual architects Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Residential buildings, domestic buildings > General Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political control & freedoms > General
LSN:	1-4773-2178-0
Barcode:	9781477321782

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