An historic exhibition at MoMA about the building of modernist Latin America shows an exuberant continent that is also rational and irrational

THE meditative tropical tints of Luis Barragán’s minimalism and the pristine geometric beauty of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília make star turns in “Latin America in Construction”, an inspiring new show that has just opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. These are the most familiar names in an extraordinary rich tapestry of exploratory, innovative and utterly exuberant works by dozens of key figures, many yanked from obscurity, which have been woven together by four curators, Barry Bergdoll, Carlos Eduardo Comas, Jorge Francisco Liernur and Patricio del Real.

The exhibition covers the years between 1955 and 1980, a fitfully idealistic era, when architecture had the capacity to literally build new societies. Photos, models, study sketches and videos exude the energy of post-war, post-colonial new beginnings.

The contrasts are dramatic: SEPRA Arquitectos, an Argentinian firm founded in 1936, and Clorindo Testa, a pioneer of the country’s brutalist movement, wrapped the glass walls of a Buenos Aires bank building with hole-dotted piers of silken concrete. They are like ebullient monumental buckles. A Uruguayan engineer, Eladio Dieste, built humble brick churches with undulating walls and high interior vaults that are at once sensuous and austere.

Some architects embraced international modern architecture, which they believed symbolised progress, with an imagery that was free of colonial associations. Carlos Raúl Villanueva, from Venezuela, built an architecture school with a roof that bumps up and down like a samba in concrete. Germán Samper, a Colombian, designed an oyster-shell stadium in curved thin concrete that puts the clumsy theme-parked nostalgia of American ballparks to shame. Others turned to local climate, extraordinary settings and traditional building techniques to inspire an architecture authentic to place and history. Fernando Martínez Sanabria and Guillermo Avendaño, both also from Colombia, moulded modest houses with steeply sloped roofs and soft curves, like ceramic vessels tucked into the side of a hill.

Early experiments undertaken in Cuba after the 1959 revolution were unsocialistically suave. In 1964 in the City University of Havana (CUJAE) Humberto Alonso leavened an impeccably proportioned complex of slab buildings with sunscreens, overhangs, arcades and lush, intimate courtyards. The voluptuous National Arts schools, brick-domed structures linked by serpentine open-air arcades by Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi, have attracted intense global interest in the last few years, though they are atypical. They glorified the human body in a way that was too explicit for the prudish Fidel Castro.

The agenda of rapid development often fell victim to the corruption and incompetence endemic to Latin America, with its tragic cycles of military coups and civil wars. Few of these many grand plans were fully realised; cities tended, instead, to grow convulsively, filling with refugees from the poverty-stricken countryside. Slums, initially considered a temporary aberration, became enduring evidence of institutional failure.

Brasília, with Niemeyer’s alluring, primary geometries gleaming in the sun, is the most recognisable of the showpiece megaprojects. It opened in 1960 after being willed into being in four years by Brazil’s then-president Juscelino Kubitschek. By the 1970s Lúcio Costa’s city plan had attracted criticism for its grandiosity, its rigid form and the isolation of its elegant, greenery-swathed apartment buildings. Since then, brasilienses have adapted and humanised their neighbourhoods, evolving them for better and worse.

Not all Brazil’s architects were as obsessed with the grandiose. Lina Bo Bardi, for example, explored ways that architecture could preserve and nurture rural folk culture—although this only happened after she designed a severely modern concrete-and-glass art museum in São Paulo. Her varied career fascinates a new generation today. A woman who enjoyed rare success as an architect and theorist, Bo Bardi resisted the label of feminist pioneer and conjured a cheerfully surrealistic community leisure centre out of an abandoned factory in São Paulo. By the late 1960s disillusioned architects, Bo Bardi among them, had turned to community-based planning. The MoMA exhibit includes housing plans that allowed low-income people to self-build all or part of their dwellings. Community-focused tactics would continue to develop as market-based development models took over after 1980, and have gained new currency as “urban acupuncture”—an influential export. The show can be daunting, threading together so many trends, styles and ideologies, but by bringing back the urgent energy of the decades after the second world war, MoMA may find that it has also rekindled its idealism.

“Latin America in Construction” is showing at MOMA until July 19th 2015