 Good evening everyone. It's really a wonderful pleasure to welcome you tonight to the Detlef Merton's lecture on the histories of modernity. This is an annual lecture in honor of the life and work of Detlef Merton's 1954-2011. In his essay collection, Modernity Unbound, Merton suggested that modernism was never a thing but a relationship. A relationship changing from moment to moment within the complex and ever-shifting context of modernity. And seen in the slight histories of modernity then assumes a new urgency as they select from and frame that unfolding context. After its initial launch, GESAP was incredibly honored to receive a gift from Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown to endow the series, which will enable the school to host this annual lecture in perpetuity. Already we have included incredible speakers such as Lucia Ale, Craig Buckley, Zaynab Shalik Alexander, Ayala Levine, Antony Achaveti and Sophie Housh Hall. And tonight I really welcome Anna Maria Leon. We're tremendously grateful to be the home of the Merton's lecture. I want to extend a very special acknowledgement to the initial committee of friends, historians, scholars who came together to think of forming this lecture. Keller Easterling, of course, Barry Bergdorf, Edward Dillman Berg, Felicity Scott and Mark Wigley. And again, I want to extend the warmest thanks to Elise and Jeffrey and again to Keller. Please welcome Felicity Scott to introduce Anna Maria Leon this evening. Thank you, Mal, and welcome, everybody. So the way it dispersed virtually today, I want to begin by acknowledging that GESAP is located in Lenapehoking, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Lenape peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging the Lenape community, their traditional territory, elders, ancestors and future generations, and in acknowledging that GESAP as part of Columbia University and like New York City and the United States was founded upon the exclusions and erasures of indigenous peoples. This acknowledgement serves as a commitment to engaging the process of working to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. So this evening, as the Dean mentioned, we gather for the seventh annual Detlef Melbourne's lecture on the history of modernity. And I too would like to very sincerely thank Elise Jaffee and Jeffrey Baum for endowing what has become an important annual event, both here at the school and I think for architectural history more generally. The series is also as that he mentioned hosted in honor of Detlef's life and scholarly work and celebrates his about commitment to coupling architectures, sorry, academic rigor with an ethics of disciplinary innovation or change. His historical project saw a type of open-endedness, sort of openness to the future, insisting that architectural history was never or should not be a practice of codifying norms, but quite the opposite. Detlef's major monograph on Mies, simply titled Mies, which appeared posthumously in 2013, stands as a testament to how architectural historians might critically rewrite histories of the discipline, sometimes even taking canonical figures like Mies as entry points to do this type of work. And it was on the occasion of that book, and in collaboration with Keller Easterling and others, the GESET launched this series seeking to identify and to support younger historians whose work and research also seeks distinct types of critical openings. Scholars whose work, we believe, opens towards a productive unsettling of architectural history. So this year we're really thrilled to be welcoming Anna-Maria Lyon to give tonight's Madden's lecture. Anna-Maria received her PhD from MIT in 2015 and is currently assistant professor at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where she holds a joint appointment between the Department of Art History or History of Art, the Department of Roadman's Languages and Literature, and the Talbman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. But her institutional affiliations are only the beginning of the complex web of intellectual, pedagogical, and activist platforms that she's involved with, including both through her academic research and other collaborations, which in interrelated ways seek to complicate the practice of architecture and its history. So her scholarship focuses on transnational networks, both across the Americas and across between the Americas and the Atlantic, that converged in Latin America after World War II, drawing out complex and nuanced historical readings of architecture's entanglements with often oppressive political regimes and the proliferation of forms of dissensus and resistance to which this nexus has given rise. Her first book, modernity for the masses, Antonio Bonnet's dream for Buenos Aires is out any day on the University of Texas Press, and she's currently working on another manuscript entitled Counter-Institutions, Architecture and Resistance in Brazil, Chile and Argentina, 1959-1983. Aspects of the second trajectory of her research have appeared, I believe, in articles such as Prisoners of Ritoke, The Open City and the Ritoke Concentration Camp, and Designing Descent, Villanova Artigas and the Sao Paulo School of Architecture, both of which I highly recommend and have taught in my classes. So Ana Maria has been invited to give this year's men's lecture not only on account of her important, extensive and highly original scholarly research. Additionally and critically, she's actively involved in several collectives working to reconstitute frameworks for architectural histories of modernity to hold the discipline accountable, both for its epistemic violence and the way that its concepts and norms have touched down on the ground in the built environment and upon people's lives. Engaging, decolonizing, anti-racist, feminist and deprovincializing strategies, these collaborations include the Settler Colonial City project, the decolonizing pedagogies workshop, Elm North is the South, the Architecture Lobby, the Feminist Art and Architecture Collective, Systems of the South, the GHTC and Detroit Resists, and these resolve into forms to varied, I think, to do justice to here, but they range from actions, exhibitions, workshops, interventions, crowdsourced reading lists, performances, digital occupations, and more, and she's also actually an editor-at-large for GSEP's own Avery Review. So her talk tonight about Eosurre modernity for the masses derives from the coming book, as the subtitle suggests, and it promises to forcefully remind us of the inextricable intertwining of histories of modernity and histories of coloniality, in this case focused on Buenos Aires. So we're very lucky to have a preview of this research tonight and very much welcome the appearance of the book, literally, I think, any day now. Before handing this virtual podium over to Anorea, I just also want to thank Dean Andreas, Kelly Easterling, my fellow committee members this year, Barry Burbdahl and Mark Whigley, and the GSEP events team, and also to reiterate, again, a thanks to Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown for ensuring this series remains such an important event in the annual calendar. And I also want to ask that you please use the Q&A function of this webinar to ask questions, which would be answered once Anorea finishes. And my colleague Lyla Coutelier will moderate this aspect of the evening's events. So a long distance welcome to Anorea, who I believe is in Ecuador. Thank you. Thank you so much Felicity. Thank you Amal. Thank you Lyla for the coordination. And thank you so much to the committee. I am greatly honored to be giving this lecture and very happy to be joining a great set of colleagues and friends in this tradition. I am speaking to you like Felicity mentioned from the land of the Juan Cavilca, who will still live and thrive in this territory today, which is ancestrally known as Zumba, and it's in the coast of present-day Ecuador. And I'm very honored to join this actual series, like I said, named In the Numbers of the Life and Work of Deaf Americans. It's a very timely invitation, gives me the opportunity to reflect on the book that I have just finished, Modernity for the Masses, which might be an example of those other histories of architectural modernity that Martin's points to in his essay collection, Modernity Unbound. Today, I will give you a very general framing of the main themes of the book, and then I'm going to dive into one specific case study and conclude with some thoughts on thinking with and from the set. Like many of us in my teaching, I use Marshall Berman's work to address the experience of modernity at the introduction of my courses. However, in his teaching slide, I juxtapose Berman with Anibal Quijano in his reflection on modernity, and the discussions of the modernity coloniality group, a group of scholars from Latin America working mostly around the 1990s and 2000s. These scholars understand modernity and coloniality as interrelated and inseparable concepts. They define modernity as an epistemological frame that undergirds the violent logic of coloniality, or as Quijano has coined the term, the coloniality of power. Thus, if modernity is a conditioner state of transformation produced by capitalism, the modernity coloniality group argues that this transformation is linked to the European arrival to the Americas. Modernity, Quijano argues, was also colonial from the start, and what he terms, coloniality of power, plays a key role in the Eurocentric elaboration of modernity. Moving away from the overdetermined geography of their initial critique, these scholars have framed an epistemic definition of coloniality that traces a history of violence present throughout the world. The second frame that I'd like to offer points to the two actors in the title of the book, The Masses and Antonio Bonet, who is the architect but appears very deliberately behind the column in the subtitle of the book. And I want to thank here my colleague, Andrew Harsher, who first pointed me to Columbia art historians, Brandon Joseph, and his reading of Mike Kelly in his book, Beyond the Dreams Syndicate, which uses the lens of the loose and watery to look at the notion of minor history. This concept of minor history was incredibly helpful in understanding the role of Bonet in the book, because the book follows the thread of Bonet as a so-called minor figure, in the sense that while he operated in close proximity to well-known canonical figures like Le Corbusier and José Riesset, and others, he never built or published at the international scale that they did. Bonet, Catalan, who arrived in Buenos Aires in 1938, witnessed major events in Argentinian history, but was never a protagonist. These are some of the projects that sort of framed the start of his career, but most of the projects I discuss in my book and these are two of them were never built. Thus, Bonet's induction into a modern canon is debatable, but I'm not interested in this debate. Rather, I want to understand his story as a minor history, one that doesn't quite fit into established categories and thus has the capacity to open these categories to their outside. And one of the outsides of this story are the masses, a term used, a sort of conceptual term, used in 1929 by Spanish philosopher José Ortega Ygasev. In his book, Revolta of the Masses, Ortega discusses what he calls the mass man, a man who lacks culture and education and only thinks of himself as part of the crowd. The book is based on Ortega's observation of the large crowds of Buenos Aires. Ortega observed that these populations were becoming more visible, larger and bolder and argued that the only way to manage them was through a democracy guided by enlightened elites. The untenable alternative was fascism, a system that capitalizes on the mentality of the mass man. Finally, the third big frame that I want to flag out has to do with the role of the plaza in this ostensible history of public housing. The relationship between plaza and housing is also a relationship between void and solid, between object and context. It's a relationship that points to the state's own anxiety to control potentially revolutionary subjects that had already, by virtue of their occupation of public space, changed the history and the politics of water in Argentina. So, let's move to Argentina. When I first visited Buenos Aires, I found it really difficult to orient myself until I realized that I was looking at the city upside down. The whole city is turned around and it turns its back from the river and looks to the south. This southern orientation goes beyond the geographic. This rendered a cultural manifesto by Catalina Uruguayan Arces, Joaquin Torres Garcia, who famously claimed our north is the south. This trove builds on the Spanish custom of saying, because you orient yourself to using the northern star and your sort of look to the north, colloquially in Spanish, a north is something that helps you orient yourself, that guides you. So, inverting this trove of orienting oneself in a compass that points north, for example, but let's see that claim that we must turn the map upside down and orient ourselves as South Americans towards the south. The trove of the south dominated the 20th century Perteño avant-garde and Perteño is what you, a citizen of Buenos Aires. And we can see it in the literary words of Jorge Luis Borges, who made it part of his psychogeography of the city by declaring that the south starts on the other side of the rodalia. And I don't know if you can read that, but that's the rodalia's this line here. This map of the city that I show you here is also a map of the book. And it points to the location of key built and unbuilt projects that I discuss in the book. And just to be clear here, north is again pointing up what a foot is, southern arrow and key built like that. So, the line that splits the city, the rodalia, the line that Borges referenced splits the north from the south. This is the rodalia stream and it ends in the Plaza de Mayo, the plaza that's in front of the presidential palace, which is a street divides the city in two halves, Valio Norte here, the northern neighborhood, but really not the top half, but mostly Necoleta here, which is a wealthier part of the city, and the second half, but really the area near downtown, this other neighborhood, the space, the so-called masses that Ortega feared, that's the space where they generally lived. In Borges and in much of the Portugno imaginary, the south goes beyond neighborhood. The south complates both the underprivileged half of the city and the south of the country itself. And in the short story that I read you a quote from which is called the south, Borges describes the south as an older and sturdier world. The story suggests that the south starts in Vivadavia, but it doesn't end there, it doesn't end with the city, it extends towards the plains or campas and the population that lived there. This population also happened to be the population that was increasingly migrating into the city and determining its growth. A avant-garde artist like Tomas Garcia Borges and Victoria Campo, editor of the journal Super from South, fetishized and capitalized on the notion of the south, while dwelling metaphorically and often literally in the more elite spaces of the north, and the resulting tension points to the challenges and possible pitfalls of the south as project. Let us now turn to this history of the plaza and the housing project of the masses and the architect Bonet and of coloniality and modernity. On October 17, 1945, thousands of union workers poured into the city center of Buenos Aires. They came from the southern edges of the city and here and took over the downtown converging on the plaza de mayo here. These masses demanded the liberation of a young general under arrest Juan Domingo Perón, the only member of the ruling military dictatorship who had maintained close relationships with the workers unions. This iconic photograph captures their occupation of the plaza. In the heat of the southern spring, men sit with their pants legs rolled up, dipping their feet in the neoclassical fountain at its center. Several men and women in the background stand inside the fountain. The photograph was given the derogatory popular name las patas en la fuente, the hooves in the fountain. Perhaps the conflation of these daring crowds and a herd of cows, the basic of one of Argentina's primary economies was no accident. The vast plains of the countryside were a source of wealth and also of the large migrations that contributed to the growth of the city. Overwhelmed by the masses, the regime freed Perón who subsequently ran for office and was elected president in 1946 and in years of conservative rule and changing the country from a land ruled by the few to a populist state addressed to the many. To consolidate his political support, Perón fostered a close relationship between himself and the Argentinian masses. He emulated some of the strategies of European fascism, which he had witnessed in Mussolini's Italy during his time there as a military attaché. At the same time, he was critical of the Italian dictator and eager to assert an independent political position through a fairly heterogeneous set of politics. Perón was a polarizing, complicated figure. He had toppled the traditional elites that had been trained by the pro-fascist Argentinian army and opposed more progressive communist and anarchist factions. He favored the traditional family unit but also enacted women's suffrage. His political support was based on his massive following and he nourished and promoted it. Capitalizing on Argentina's large urban populations and their long history of disenfranchisement, Perón transformed Ortega's mass man into el pueblo and described himself as their conductor. Who were these masses? Perón is nationalist rhetoric but distance himself from fascism's racialization, never choosing to target specific cultural or ethnic groups during his presidency. It was his opposition who disparaged, stereotyped and racialized his followers, calling them cabecitas negras or little black heads for their dark hair. In contrast, Perón celebrated the vestizo heritage of the inhabitants of the growing shanty towns, turning their countryside past into the marker of Argentinian nationality. He embraced for higher recuperations of the Gaucho and the Pampas, troops associated with his sympathizers. Although his celebration over-emphasized the influence of Spain and erased indigenous and African legacies that were part of these populations, as well as the 19th century importation of a European and largely Italian population to replace the effects of indigenous genocide. And here I want to say the revision of race in modern Argentina in the book Edidas by Paulina Alberto and Eduardo Elena has been key for my project and I'm very lucky to have Paulina Alberto as a colleague at University of Michigan and Eduardo was part of a book workshop where Barry Berco also joined us in a revision, you know, sort of looking over the manuscript and an intermediate stage. The celebration of the Perónist masses and of Perón and his popular wife Eva as their implicit role models appeared in propaganda campaigns used to promote and invent medical paths for the new Argentina. The growth of mass media and popular culture facilitated the connection between Perón and his constituents with printed material posters and films and ritual celebrations reenacting the original occupation of the Plaza but now having not the crowd rescue Perón but celebrate him all orchestrated to create Perónist citizens. Modern architecture and with it Bonet also participated in this production of the Perónist unconscious and this is an episode I examine in the third chapter of the book. In 1955, so 10 years after the first occupation of the Plaza, members of the Argentinian Navy and Air Force bombarded Buenos Aires targeting strategic locations including the Plaza de Mayo. They killed hundreds of civilians and injured thousands. The attack was one of several military actions against Perón that eventually led to his removal from power by an alliance of conservative right-wing military factions who took over the country in selling a dictatorship and sending him into exile. These three episodes in the Plaza de Mayo, its physical occupation, its transformation into a site of ritual celebrations and its subsequent destruction, are the context of Antonio Bonet's Vario Sur, a large housing project designed in 1956 that sought to occupy the space of the South and ultimately erasing. The newly installed regime of General Pedro Aramburo was eager to present itself as modern and technologically efficient at the same time balancing this modernity with an appeal to conservative politics. The regime sought to distance itself from Perón by depicting him as inadequate and decrepit. Perón and his recently deceased wife Eva were viciously attacked by the press. Their formerly ubiquitous names and images were sponged from the public ground and from the public record. Laws were enacted that prohibited any public reference to Perón, his wife, or his political party, as well as any phrases or images that evoked him or his presidency. The state also sought to discredit Perón's efforts in the area of housing. The growth of informal settlements or songs was interpreted as a sign of his favor to provide social housing. The reality was more complicated. By the time Perón was ousted, he had built several housing projects but they hadn't been able to catch up with the expansion of the city. In order to demolish Perón's legacy, the state needed a grand theatrical gesture and the answer came through Manuel Rosen, president of the National Mortgage Bank, which was a state entity charged with solving the housing question. Rosen reached out to Antonio Bonet for a series of conversations that resulted in a proposal for the old neighborhood of Santelmo. Santelmo is only a fragment of what is considered as the Vario Sur or the southern neighborhood but it is still a considerable site totaling 200 hectares or 500 acres. The neighborhood has a long history but in the lore of the city it is known as an originally wealthy neighborhood whose population moved to the north of the city because of a series of yellow fever epidemics in the late 19th century. This story is a basic building block of the history of the city and of its legendary north-south division. By the late 1950s, the old houses of Santelmo had been subdivided into rooms that were rented to whole families. The neighborhood was home to a large immigrant community including many of the Cavesitas Deiras, the Peronist masses that had supported Perón. This was the constituency the project ostensibly addressed. The regime of General Aramburo commissioned the project to Bonet to put together a team of about 20 employees including architects, draftsmen, model makers and other specialists. The team worked on a complete set of architectural and urban plans, a large site model that you see here, and an extensive folder detailing an introduction to and justification for the project ordinances, a budget and a draft of the law that would make these actions possible. Architect Justo Salsona, a well-known Argentinian architect now but back then, a draftsman of the project remembers it as a pharaonic work, housed in the offices that took over one full floor in a large modern building on Libertadores Avenue in the north side of the city. The contract was signed in February of 1956, and a large documentation folder with the finished project was turned in at the end of December of that year, giving us an idea of the team's frantic pace, 10 months. The resources and energy allocated to Ramio Sur point to different political and architectural projects coming together towards a new economic strategy, state intervention clearing the ground for private investment. In his narrative for the project, Bonet argues that Santelmo's tenements and slums require state intervention in order to clear the ground for private investment. Sketching out an abbreviated history of the city, he describes Santelmo as occupied by tenements and slums with appalling living conditions. The neighborhood, he tells us, quote, retains nothing of its former colonial appearance because an examination of its buildings does not show them to keep the characteristics of the time, close quote. And here you should read in the word colonial as a plus, as a desired Spanish passage. Having laid out an argument for demolition, Bonet mentions a few of the buildings that he considers salvageable and concludes by praising the logic of the grid, the block and the street as valuable urban planning tools that allow the first settlers of the city to grow and I quote from him again, occupy space an inherent purpose of any human settlement that establishes itself in a primary hostile medium that must be gradually dominated, close quote. This depiction of a primarily hostile medium resonates ominously at the end of a section dedicated to the current situation of Santelmo. The text leads to the conclusion that Santelmo must be demolished and that salvaging a reinterpreted grid is a rational way to honor the merits of Argentina's colonial past while looking towards a modern future. The arguments for the demolition are similar then to the language used by the regime to call for the erasure of France's traces in the built environment. In the next section, Bonet goes through earlier urban solutions highlighting the difficulties of the old city ordinance and the density of the medianeras. These are narrow vertical shafts you see here that provide ventilation between apartments lined up one behind the other in the city's D plus. He also dismisses his own prior attempts at urban planning, dramatically crossing the map here in these illustrations. He describes these projects as monotonous, oblivious to the human scale, and difficult to finance because of their low densities. This last justification is clearly strategic and meant to strengthen the argument for the barrio sort of. The development according to Bonet was dependent on private investment and would work because of its high population densities. Bonet expects all new development to be managed by private enterprise with the possible exception of a few housing projects by the state to house the population displaced by the expropriations or the option to house them elsewhere with preferential treatment facilitated by the National Mortgage Bank. Ultimately, this displaced population is considered insignificant in comparison to the incoming wealthier middle class population who is the real target of the project. The prior inhabitant's absorption into the near development is taken for granted. The multiple references to private investment and dense population in the introduction come together in the ordinance of the project. This density, Bonet argues, will make the project financially successful. The ordinance also specifies 19 buildings that would be exempt from expropriation and therefore demolition because of either their historic artistic and religious value and these are seven churches, the Writers Association, and a theater or their economic value of 10 apartment buildings. That's it. The rest of the neighborhood would be gradually cleared and eventually replaced by private development. The extremely detailed ordinance and plans that follow this section offer a marked contrast to this farce explanation of how this expropriation would take place. This process is summarily laid aside by stating that the exact order of expropriation and demolition would be determined, quote, at the right moment according to the circumstances, close quote, so that the new sectors would be built without affecting the normal activity of the city. The resulting design echoed the regime's careful balance between conservative politics and the modern technocratic aspirations by combining the grid and the plaza as elements of Spanish colonial planning with modern urban design. Bonet organized Barrio Sur by subdividing the neighborhood into six sectors and combining three main building types to create an urban fabric. This mega grid that he called it overlaid over the existing grid created a creating a system of large avenues for fast transit with intersections every 500 meters. Each sector was composed of an area of approximately 16 hectares meant to house a population of about 75,000 each for a total population of 450,000. Each sector followed a similar pattern with a plaza in the middle and the arrangement of three building types, vacas or cows alluding to this Argentinian staple were six meter or two stories high. Grecas or frets or freezes or prep works 30 meters or 11 stories and torres or towers 100 meters high or 35 stories. Bones interpreted these three types as poetic references to the city of Buenos Aires. It's busy streets and galerías which is a type of shopping arcade common and downtown Buenos Aires. It's tall trees in its sense of space. Perhaps inspired by the Corbusier's trifar type goal for the Villaladillas in Barrio Sur, these skills reference the specifics of the city supporting some urban typologies like the galleries that I mentioned and rejecting others like the Medianeras. So instead of having Medianeras he argued for isolated skyscrapers closer to the La Corbusier type. I want to flag also that the cows in the project repeat this conflation between the non-Indigenous Argentinian staple and the seemingly non-Indigenous mestizo-spanified Perones passes and note also that this is the noisy reference in the project. Finally, I'm taking advantage of a slope in the side towards the river that is to your right here. Bones separated car traffic, pedestrians and parking creating a three-dimensional grid. He placed car traffic on the ground level with the river, left the ground level for pedestrians and placed parking above and he capitalized on the Nuevo de Julio Avenue. This avenue here which you see here but at the time of the project was just more or less edging around here. He capitalized on the Nuevo de Julio Avenue which is a large project started back in 1936 that had been slowly demolishing a row of blocks across the city from north to south as you see it here ostensibly to increase communication between the two halves of the city. This project by the time of the demolitions were edging close to Santelmo they hadn't quite reached there and certainly their casual destruction of the city is part of this project's ethos. The three different circulation levels negotiated the large scale of the avenue marking a transition from the fast transit on the edge of the site around the six sectors to what Bones described as a suspended superstructure for pedestrians that would become the true and new urban land. In order to illustrate this new urban land the team focused on depicting the central plazas through a series of drawings and one photo montage. This photo montage seems deliberately produced to highlight the strategic presence of private enterprise in the project. Here the conspicuous store advertisements overwhelm the plaza with careful reproduction of foreign brands and their logos hinting at the kind of investment that the project hoped to attract. A few photographs of human figures have been collaged into the drawing. In the foreground a young woman mounts her bicycle. Behind her a man in a suit walks towards us. Various other figures still initiated spaces of the commercial galleries assuming the success of the project's retail spaces. We can productively compare this photo montage for Vario Sur with an earlier image produced for Casa Amarilla a project that Bones led in 1943 and addressed and which was addressed to the military dictatorship that preceded the realm. Back then an unhomely wilderness had engulfed the project which was populated by isolated and estranged characters. This wilderness has now been replaced by the world of advertising and the potentially dangerous masses have been molded into compliant consumers. The formal reversal of solid and void and the embrace of the plaza works together with a clear message in support of private capital. What led Bones to this reversal of his prior projects? In 1951 the 8th International Congress of Modern Architecture met in England under the topic the heart of the city. The proceedings of the conference were documented in this book of the same title published in 1952 and edited by Jack Winterwood, Ernesto Royers and José Luis Serb, president of the Siam and Bones former mentor and boss. Bones had worked for Serb and his partner, Tóvez Clave for four years while he was a student in Barcelona and again in Paris as the site architect of Serb's celebrated pavilion of the Spanish Republic. Serb's own attention to plazas and patios has started perhaps in 1947 when Peruvian architects brought to his attention the local patio and plaza technologies and I show you here where I think these typologies come from and how arbitrary it is to argue that they are Spanish but I won't get into it right now. Bones had reconnected with both of his mentors Serb and the Corbusier in Siam 7 in Bergamo, Italy and used this first return to Europe to visit Venice where he was greatly impressed by the urban space of the Piazza San Marco. He did not attend Siam 8 but it's likely that he followed the work of his mentor. In Siam 8, Serb started both the Congress and the book with a long quotation from Ortega's Revolved of the Masses from which I'm going to read a short extract with a racism trigger warning. This is Ortega being quoted by Serb at Siam 8. The man of the fields is still a sort of vegetable. His existence, all that he feels, thinks, wishes for, reserves the listless drowsiness in which the plant lives. The great civilizations of Asia and Africa were from this point of view huge anthropomorphic vegetations but the Greco-Romans decided to separate the Greco-Roman, sorry, decides to separate himself from the fields, from nature, from the geobotanic cosmos. He will mark of a portion of this field by means of walls which set up an enclosed finite space over against a morphous limitless space. Here you have the public square. Ortega focuses on public squares and plazas as civilizing enclosed outdoor spaces that bring citizens together in contrast to the fields where people roam without the ability to comfort with each other. Ortega proposes that these civilized spaces are a remedy for the increasing dominance of the masses, composed of people who think of themselves only as part of a crowd. So the architecture and the politics of Bavio Suru come together in this idea of the plasm. Ortega was popular in anti-paranist circles in Argentina which saw the labor unions that had supported Bavio as a threat. Bonet addressed this threat by reinterpreting Ortega and certain ideas and placing a plaza at the heart of each sector in Bavio Suru. The public cores of Bavio Suru are the civilizing spaces in which, according to Bonet, quote, social life will develop, unquote, creating new well-behaved urban citizens. But among the many large plazas in green parks of Buenos Aires, one plaza stands out, the Plaza de Mayo. Tragically bombarded by the Argentinian army in 1955, only one year before Bavio Suru. If we locate the project within the Buenos Aires grid, we can see how the six proposed plazas repeat the approximate scale and proportion of this one significant plaza, witness to so many events, and located just north of this project. In 1945, the Perones masses had occupied the Plaza de Mayo coming in from the south. Bavio Suru would have replaced them with a middle-class population and a privatized project that effectively acted as a barrier to defend the plaza from the Perones masses. We don't know if this was Bonet's intention, but in his attempt to create new spaces for Buenos Aires, he reproduced its most historic plaza and may inadvertently call that the memory that the regime was most eager to erase the bombardment. To argue for the civilizing action of the plaza as an urban device can only be understood as a tragic mistake in a traumatized city whose main plaza had been bombarded by the same forces promoting this project. In the aftermath of the 1955 coup d'etat, modernity for the masses was a matter of discipline and control. A combination of factors prevented the realization of Bavio Suru. A team of architects highlighted the unnecessary high densities which they denounced as financially motivated to maximize gain for both construction companies and the projects architects. An opposing political party assigned a commission to study the plan, publishing a piece in which they pointed out the existence of free land for which other projects had already been designed. These were projects in which Bonet had been involved in although this is a mention but clearly alluded to. Most importantly, Santelmo residents protested their complete exclusion from the process and the project successive demolitions and expropriations which would have resulted in very high costs. Ironically, the residents, probably informed by architects, noted that the project was not in agreement with the city hall funded plan started in La Corusia's office and which Bonet had worked on. The concerted efforts of architects, political activists and Santelmo residents worked and in August of 1957 the government halted all work on Bavio Suru. A less optimistic reading which I do engage with in the book also points to the transitional status of this project in the eventual privatization of all social housing and the expansion of this practice throughout South America. So I started the book like I started this talk with Anibal Quijano pointing to the link between modernity and coloniality and I want to finish it. I finished a book looking back in Europe and with these quotes from the Frankfurt School and Engels and perhaps it's also fitting to also end here today. In the dialectic of the Enlightenment, the author Adorno and Max Horkheimer point to the role of housing projects in perpetuating the subjugation of their inhabitants to the power of capital, someone as producers and consumers. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the Enlightenment's rational construction of the world through instrumental reason aspired to liberate humanity from the uncertainties of myth but ultimately resulted in unreflective compulsive and mindless oppression, a more pervasive type of myth that carries over to the present. The sense of unfreedom that they described connects fascism and capitalism as ideologies that ultimately aim to control their populations. In the project I have discussed today, the population of Buenos Aires is the subject of this dialectic from the potentially revolutionary residence of San Ferme to the residence of the consumer middle class meant to take over W. Sur. The attempt to civilize the population masks the regime's barbaric actions in the Plaza de Mayo. Adorno and Horkheimer's dialectic, I argue, is related to Quijano's own equivalency between modernity and coloniality. Projects like that will highlight that these lengths between modernity and coloniality, capitalism and fascism are dialectic relations that are not so much geographic as they are political. After all, the military dictatorship that bombarded the Plaza de Mayo had lengths to hit those Germany and Mussolini's Italy, where elite officers of the Argentinian army had traditionally trained. If Adorno and Horkheimer pointed to lengths between these authoritarian forces and the growth of consumer capitalism in the United States, the dictatorships that dominated the second half of the 20th century in Argentina are another instance of this same problem. Beyond the modernity, modernity, coloniality groups critique of Eurocentrism, it's important that to know that they look to the history of epistemic violence in all geographic locations. It is in reaction to this violence that I want to reformulate the Garcia's old charge of taking out the position of the South, no longer a geographic South, but a political South that is articulated against the violence of coloniality. Then when I proposed projects of histories from the South, I mean histories that look for the coloniality embedded in the emancipatory discourses of modernity. I mean histories that look into the public's architect's plan to start, and I mean histories that examine the environments produced by the architectural object instead of fixating on the object itself. There's a renewed attention to the decolonial discourse of the modernity coloniality group because of their work against Eurocentrism. But we have to be careful to address the root of their critique, which is against the violence of empire. It is to this violence, be it in the bombardment of the Plaza de Mayo, or in the recent invasion of the capital of the United States, that we must act against in our work. And it is to these violences then that I call upon us to resist today and always. Thank you. So the first question is from Michael Farahopara, and he says, thank you so much for the lecture. I have two questions. You mentioned the notion of minor history. Is this close to minor literature by Deleuze and Gotari, or minor architecture by Jill Stoner? It would be nice to hear more about that. And within South America, Buenos Aires is a major city. Many of the scholars focus on Argentina, Brazil, or Chile, excluding other minor cities, such as Quito or La Paz. Why choose Buenos Aires and not another minor case study? Thank you. Thank you, Michael, for this question that helped me just underline and sort of minor history, as I'm understanding it. And I do refer to the Deleuze and Gotari articulation of minor history, which Brandon Joseph refers to. So it's a collective of many scholars that got me to the concept. The way that I am understanding it, though, it's not a matter of whether Buenos Aires has a bigger population than my country, where I am right now. I want to make the argument in this minor history not as a matter of scale or importance. So it's not a matter of keep finding them more minor story, although I agree, and I am eager to have histories, not only of Quito, which is not my city, but of Guayaquil, where I'm from, or Salinas, where I'm at right now, of many minor spaces. But this is not the sense that I seek in discussing a minor history is not to elevate, enroll more cities, more architects, or more works to the modern canon. That's not what I want to do. I am interested in looking for minor histories in the sense that they don't quite fit a canon. They sort of open up question, push against what a canon is by opening up these categories, which is what I hope I have done or what I tried to do. But I also want to say that you can find a minor history in the middle of New York, or in the middle of a very canonical discourse. So this is what I'm sort of trying to map out with the use of that term. I think I sort of, yes, those are two questions I think I did answer them all. Thank you, technology. I'm so appreciating this talk. I loved how the conversation ended around the use of space and actually the focus on more global and specific movements. And I'm appreciating architects and I'm considering human interactions. And I'm also appreciating how much of our history is informed by the powers that promoted those kinds of constructions and designs. So I think my question to Ana Maria is more around, given that you started your talk with the southern hemisphere and this precious southern corner of ours, since I'm from Argentina. I have so many questions, but maybe the first one I'll start off with is the inversion of the cone as trying to sort of use our north to be our south. How do you tie that to the way we perceive spaces in Latin America that might be different from the northern hemisphere, the north as people call it? Thank you so much for that question. I think there's a lot that has been written about a different understanding of space. I'm going to give you, I guess, I don't think I can sort of summarize it now, but I'm going to just give you a more personal answer which is I think we, you know, this is a large territory. I'm not from Argentina, so working on a project in Argentina was, you know, very intimidating to start with. But I think South Americans, we have gone through, you know, those of us who are here now have to more or less agree, still memories of the second half of the 20th century, which is a very difficult and tragic second half of the 20th century for most of our countries. Many of us were born or raised or spent some part of our lives under dictatorships and under the understanding that there were more surrounding us. I think this is part of how we understand space. I think we also, we know how to claim it. We know the importance that defending that public space, the importance of claiming and standing in that space. I think that's, and we know that there have been scars, right, in claiming that space, scars that, you know, we can trace and that we, you know, that many people have been very, you know, that high price. I guess the part of me in one of the quotes that you have, the idea of creating walls, because my memory of growing up where public spaces were long for and wanted have now become places of violence and risk. So we no longer go to public spaces. And if you do, it's with a sense of risk because you're going to protest or to try, it no longer is about reengaging with neighbors, reengaging with people in the way that I remember conversations around that was. And it is, I'll say that piece and around architecture, at least in Buenos Aires, the idea was that it was the Paris of Europe, you know, of South America. And so this Eurocentric view around, around architecture and then the public spaces that implied had to do with as close to what had been imported, had been brought back. So, you know, even our look towards how manipulated our public spaces became and how the story inadvertently became one of, if we can be more like them, then we are better, but we didn't look down to our South or our own past to reclaim who we were, which is one of my questions around, I think we have a very confused identity. And in a way, it's different from the North because we still feel the remnants very clearly of where we came from because of the mixing that we have. So, yeah. Marcela, I agree. And at the same time, when I teach, I speculate that there are actually some similarities between Argentina and the United States in that both are separate colonial countries that went through indigenous genocides more or less at the same time in the late 19th century in very similar ways. Now, they have been racialized differently, but both spaces, the main, the Plaza de Mayo and the Capitol building, right, they both used a sort of a European language to sort of widen the identity of the country, right? So one difference which doesn't speak, I'm not sure if it speaks well or not, but we actually, our genocide was so complete that we didn't even have reservations. If indigenous people survived, it wasn't because they couldn't, yeah, so I totally agree. I totally agree. We just went further with the killing, I think. But we did integrate more of it in our genealogy. I'm discovering things about my own genealogy. So, yeah, and I'm appreciating the focus on violence to ourselves and to others in this process of trying to also find public spaces to reclaim that which is ours. Thank you so much, Marcela and Fernando. We'll move on to a question now from Brian Norwood. And he says, thank you for the wonderful talk. Looking forward to the book, could you talk a bit more about the function of the biography as a way to think about coloniality and modernity? How does a biographical focus on an architect help you approach these large questions? Thank you, Brian. Hi. This is the one good thing about this sort of zone reality is that you get to interact with good friends far away. The role of the architect in this project was always sort of a stumbling block. And I want to say very openly that this is a dissertation project and I feel like I started the project as a different person. And when I shared sort of those frames that I had, I really sort of started with the frame inside the box, right? I was going to look at a housing project by a modern architect. And I was trained in Ecuador as a modern architect and sort of in a very sort of traditional understanding of modernity and of what history was. And I completely sort of changed my framing as I worked on this project and then sort of in a way turned the project inside out. So the architect here ends up being a thread in a way because he's a convenient figure as a historian. He works for the regime before Perón. He works for a project during Perón and then for Aramuro for a project after. So these are one, two, three chapters of the book for an introduction. And keeping the same figure, which is a figure that has been trained in a way to be another cert or another Le Corbusier, right? And having him sort of stumble and sort of struggle in a completely different site, right? In the middle of Argentina going through these huge political changes becomes sort of the continuing thread. But each chapter in a way looks at keeps the project by Bonet, but Bonet often disappears completely into other actors and other characters and he's sort of the guiding line. Thank you so much. The next question is from Jonah Rowan, a PhD here at Gisele. You concluded by discussing a decolonial architectural history that can resist violence. Is there a possibility of an architecture that projects these ideals? Alberti, for example, describes beauty in terms of an ability to hold off would be attackers since they would be awed by the attractiveness of the architecture. Can a building impel that kind of reaction? Or is it only through acts of interpretation, architectural history, or criticism that can have that kind of agency? Hey, Jonah, how are you? Thank you. Thank you for that question. I feel that this points a little bit to the work, my work with Andrew Hersher and the Settler-Gloria City Project, where we have been thinking about the possibility of an architectural decolonization. Biographically, for me, initially, that's one of the reasons that I move from practice to history. So it's interesting for me that I am now returning to a different sort of practice. So I think, yes, but I think it's also a practice that's necessarily not a practice that works through content systems of beauty, as Alberti, perhaps, in that elaboration that you cite from Alberti, I think it's a practice that would need to be research-based and address the structural inequalities in some way. But I'm going to leave it open like that. And I think I get this, it's interesting to get this question from you. I usually get it from architecture students who want to find sort of an out. And I think I am interested in being a historian, but increasingly I'm interested in also in a practice that is based on history, but it also goes beyond a scholarly one. I think you probably know. Thank you. Okay, so from Madeline Aquilina. Thank you so much. Looking forward to the book as well. The image of the plaza replete with logos that you began with, reminded of the 1961 zoning law in NYC, which began the incentivization for corporations to create privately owned public space in quotes, in and around their office buildings. Is the discourse about zoning laws in Buenos Aires at this time relevant at all? I think what I sort of skipped quickly through, and this project offered sort of a revised zoning law. But what is more interesting to me is the finger of the project, I think, is because of the moment in which it takes place, because it's a transitional moment as not only Buenos Aires, but the whole of Latin America moving towards neoliberalism and increased privatization of social housing. So to me it's not so zoning laws are important, but what I was interested in is this sort of decoupling of the role of the state in housing as rights. And increasingly the transformation of social housing, which now in most of Latin America takes place through subsidies, through lending, and its private corporations that develop housing projects that then folks can buy into with lending from the state of some sort. But no longer is the state responsible for building housing projects. And Bones, this sort of was sort of a halfway project. He still saw a role for the architect as a modern architect. So he wants to build the project. Eventually the architects completely disempowered also. It's sort of private corporations that do these sort of huge matchbox projects that are, yeah. So sorry, I think I ran away from your question. violinist by student. So maybe I'll try to answer her more fully when we read again. But it seems to me that zoning laws, it's less a matter of zoning laws than structure of funding social housing projects and who gets to build them. Thank you. From Enrique Ramirez, can we locate in Bones's work a regional Latin American modernism? Is there an analogy to be made with the experience of authors like Vargas, Losa, Fuentes, Cortesar, and others whose work was acknowledged with a regional and not country by country context? I don't know. But Bones is Spanish. He's from Barcelona. He's Catalan. He falls really in love with Argentina. He goes back, you know, perhaps this is also a nod to what Marcela was asking before. When he goes back to Europe in 1949, for the first time since he arrives in 1938 in Argentina, he writes in a letter, it's so fascinating to look at Europe from America. He considers himself American in the sense of the continent, right? Just I'm looking now at Europe from America, from America nice. But this, you know, I don't know. So I don't know if I could quite discuss it as a Latin American project. But something I know also in the book is that the project is from 1956. So it's the same year that Brasilia is starting. And there's something very frightening about putting these two projects together. And Bonet discusses this sort of later in his life, and thinks about how Brazil got to build Brasilia. And he says in Argentina, we couldn't do it. And he says, it happens surprisingly, it happens during Corbishek. And then, you know, there's the dictatorship. And he sort of losses a little bit over the fact there was stability, political stability during the extended federal regime longer than Corbishek. So there's something frightening in thinking about that, looking back at the sort of second half of the 20th century than America, because if there's a modernism that happens in that second half, it's under the shadow of these sort of large regimes that sort of think and have a big scale of thinking, but also think about, you know, operate to a lot of violence and things. Okay. So I think we'll take two more questions. And from Korea, Fernandez Pedro, thank you for the wonderful lecture, your reading of a Torga Ortega e Gasset in quotes Massman, as having been the kind of sociological unit later transformed by Perón into in quotes El Pueblo is very interesting. And is it is exemplary, I think, of how other governments in Latin America at this time embraced nationalism as a means of constructing a new and expanded form of citizenship, one that often included the construction of mestizo racial types like the figure of the Gaucho in Argentina. Given the way indigenous paths were often erased from the heritage of these types to emphasize European origins, I was wondering whether the dictatorship after Perón and Bonet in particular utilized these types in any way to continue a racially determined nationalist discourse or whether they are simply or I'm sorry, whether they simply erased them in their larger deletion of El Pueblo from the political arena. Thank you, Pedro. This, you know, like I mentioned, Perón himself alludes to the mestizo population in and there's a great chapter about this in the Alberto and Elena's book, A Race in Modern Argentina. He alludes to the Gaucho tropes, but he tends to underline the Spanish so there's an erasure that's already happening in Perón, right? He points to a mythical Spanish past rather than the sort of mixed lines of indigenous African legacies in Argentina. And there's this myth, right, that Argentina is white and the genocide was complete. There's a revised history that argues against this of a bigger indigenous African legacies present in Argentina. The dictatorship sort of erases Perón and erases sort of the discourse, right? So and Bonet himself never refers to any sort of, there are hints of the fact that, you know, I pointed that cows are sort of the noisy building type, but beyond that, it's just a population that's in a way anonymous and homogeneous and non-racialized but also non-political, right? It's a population that's depicted as consumers, like I argued in the montage. Thanks. Okay, so before I read the last question, I just wanted to read a note from Lucia Ale, who congratulates you for the Detlef Merson's lecture and thanks you for a thorough and rich contribution to this fraught history and also this archive and such that she's looking forward to the book. So the final question is from Elizabeth Galvez. I'm curious if you imagine, I'm sorry, examine the interior layout of the domestic unit itself or its aggregation. Does the design and conception of the domestic spaces also contribute and further the goals that you analyze in the building and plaza relationship? Also curious about the products used as the cover image, which has an advertisement for Douglas Furwood products. Could you talk about that decision further? I don't know why they chose Douglas Furwood, but they reference, you know, if you look at the various different signs, they tend to be U.S. products and this is a very clear reference that they're seeking U.S. capital, right, which is not what Perón had done. So this is a reversal of what Perón sort of nationalists do. Perón is sort of following a developmentalist agenda, but very much against the United States. The domestic unit, I did not, I actually didn't look at it that closely. I looked closely at another of the examples at the project I, from 1943, I sort of go into, inside the apartments, but actually because it's such a large project, the bill, he doesn't go into the detail of the buildings, right? He lays out the buildings, but it's a building type, it's an ordinance that's supposed to have, you know, it's how tall they are, the type of hues they're going to have. And the idea is that private enterprise would design them, right? So in a way, this is the push and pull of this modern architect not wanting to surrender his job as an architect, but at the same time it's a master plan and he knows, so he's creating jobs for more architects. This is not what's going to happen in the end, sort of in the history of Latin America, is that these are all, you know, there's not even the, there's no appropriation of land, it's just everything is up for private development. There's no considered effort from the state. So he, in this project, he doesn't get to the level of designing for the plans, right? It's the idea that this is an ordinance. Okay, and I know I promised we were on our last question, but there's just one more from the current CCCP student. Andrea Comere says, thank you for the lecture. The notion of the people in quotes, here is an extra abstraction based on the subjectivation, I'm sorry, subjectivation that resists being undone within modern modes of architectural practice. And to what extent does the architect as a figure of the singular master or at times a placeholder for the state occupy a structural position within capitalism and the colonial modes of production? Does this pose a problem for thinking in other modes of dwelling in quotes outside, such as communes or other forms? Thank you, Andrea. This architect is commissioned by the National Mortgage Bank, so it's very clear to me that he, even though he speaks as himself, he is channeling and following the directions of the state in the way that he is very specific about how the project is going to financially operate. So, that on the one hand, like I said, in a way, my conclusion of the book opens up my new book project in the sense that I felt that I had, there was a limit, and I felt this type of narrative is not conducive to the type of history that needs to be done. So, I say this with all honesty in a way, I'm sure my friends will be delighted to hear that. But like I said, I sort of grew and learned as I was developing the project. And basically when I sort of zoomed out and realized what I had done and sort of the conclusion is, I think I need to write a different type of history, a history in which the architect, not a history in which the architect is part of the state, but a different type of history that can create friction against these forces of histories of resistance and opposition that you sort of point to as welling outside, but that I sort of slowly, slowly starting to think about in my current book project. So, that's probably not very part of me, but I'm honest in that this book was a learning process, and my realization at the end of it is that the next history needs to be a different kind of history. Thank you so much, Annemarie. This is wonderful. It's amazing to hear you talk a little bit about your process and how generous of you to kind of give us this glimpse into what you're thinking about now and what you're working on now. I think that's a perfect way to end actually. Thank you. On behalf of the Detlef Merton's committee, on behalf of G-SAP, and on behalf of all of your colleagues here in the room still today, I'm so sorry we couldn't do this in person, but so excited to host you at G-SAP again soon, and we really just appreciate your time and your scholarship. Thank you so much.