Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere - Couverture souple

González, Robert Alexander

 
9781477326671: Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere

Synopsis

Coinciding with the centennial of the Pan American Union (now the Organization of American States), GonzÁlez explores how nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. architects and their clients built a visionary Pan-America to promote commerce and cultural exchange between United States and Latin America.

Late in the nineteenth century, U.S. commercial and political interests began eyeing the countries of Latin America as plantations, farms, and mines to be accessed by new shipping lines and railroads. As their desire to dominate commerce and trade in the Western Hemisphere grew, these U.S. interests promoted the concept of "Pan-Americanism" to link the United States and Latin America and called on U.S. architects to help set the stage for Pan-Americanism's development. Through international expositions, monuments, and institution building, U.S. architects translated the concept of a united Pan-American sensibility into architectural or built form. In the process, they also constructed an artificial ideological identity-a fictional Pan-America peopled with imaginary Pan-American citizens, the hemispheric loyalists who would support these projects and who were the presumed benefactors of this presumed architecture of unification.

Designing Pan-America presents the first examination of the architectural expressions of Pan-Americanism. Concentrating on U.S. architects and their clients, Robert Alexander GonzÁlez demonstrates how they proposed designs reflecting U.S. presumptions and projections about the relationship between the United States and Latin America. This forgotten chapter of American architecture unfolds over the course of a number of international expositions, ranging from the North, Central, and South American Exposition of 1885–1886 in New Orleans to Miami's unrealized Interama fair and San Antonio's HemisFair '68 and encompassing the Pan American Union headquarters building in Washington, D.C. and the creation of the Columbus Memorial Lighthouse in the Dominican Republic.

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À propos de l?auteur

Robert Alexander Gonzalez is Director of the El Paso Program and Associate Professor of Architecture on the El Paso campus of the Texas Tech University College of Architecture. A historian and registered architect, Gonzalez is the founding editor of the bilingual journal Aula: Architecture & Urbanism in Las AmÉricas, which is devoted to the architecture, urbanism, and public art of Latin America and U.S. Latinos.

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Autres éditions populaires du même titre

9780292723252: Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere

Edition présentée

ISBN 10 :  0292723253 ISBN 13 :  9780292723252
Editeur : University of Texas Press, 2011
Couverture rigide