‘Beyond the Supersquare’ Looks at South American Modernism

Emon Hassan for The New York Times

In the mid-20th century, certain Latin American cities looked like the most modern on earth. Not only was their architecture imaginative, but so was the thinking behind it: ideas, amounting to faith, that design could positively shape civic life across lines of money and class; that art and architecture were inseparable; that while Europe and the United States were the cultural powers of the day, South America had a shot at tomorrow.

Then the momentum broke. In the 1960s and ‘70s, a rash of right-wing military coups swept the continent. Left-leaning utopianism was suppressed, and the architecture it had produced either abandoned or repurposed to new political ends. With such changes, modernist monuments to the future became, to some eyes, relics of a lost past, emblems of dreams betrayed and grim landmarks of a present that had to be survived.

One thing that didn’t change was the old link between architecture and art, though the two disciplines now often assumed an adversarial relationship. Art became a way for artists, many of them originally trained as architects, to talk critically about modernist architecture and the failings it represented. This dynamic continues into the postmodern present and is the subject of a subtle and elusive think-piece of an exhibition called “Beyond the Supersquare,” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts....Continue Reading

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