Date:
This event is virtual. To view the recording, click here.
Speaker: Patricio del Real, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University
Moderated by: Cristina Lopez Uribe, Professor of Architecture, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Why Architecture Belongs in the Museum | The Politics of Display and the Display of Politics: Dictatorship's Cultural Capital at MoMA. This conversation series is part of Curating Architecture Across the Americas (CAAA), an initiative that brings together institutions, curators, and scholars to discuss the role of architecture exhibitions and collections in the expanding world of curatorial practices and cultural debates. The series is run in parallel with the course Architecture in the “museum” a transnational seminar ran simultaneously by three institutions: Harvard University, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, each led by local faculty members.
Patricio del Real works on modern architecture and its transnational connections with a focus on the Americas. His forthcoming book: Inventing Latin American Architecture: Culture, Politics, and Race at the Museum of Modern Art, examines multiple architecture exhibitions and MoMA as a cultural weapon. It looks at its Department of Architecture and Design as its curators navigated the treacherous politics of Pan Americanism and the cultural conflicts of the second postwar era to secure its survival. Del Real co-edited the anthology, Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories (Routledge, 2012); was Visiting Associate Research Scholar in the Program of Latin American Studies at Princeton University, and worked in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art on several exhibitions, co-curating "Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980," which received the 2017 Philip Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award, recognizing excellence of architectural history scholarship in exhibition catalogues. Del Real holds a PhD in Architecture History and Theory from Columbia University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
Cristina López Uribe is an architectural historian who specializes in twentieth-century Mexican architecture. She holds a BA in Architecture from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and an MA in History of Art, Architecture and the City from the Universitat Polytecnica de Catalunya, where she is currently a PhD candidate in Architecture History and Theory. She is Assistant Professor of History of Architecture and a member of the Laboratorio Editorial de Arquitectura at the UNAM and is the editor-in-chief of the journal Bitácora Arquitectura. She is coeditor, with Salvador Lizárraga, of Living CU: 60 Years (UNAM, 2014) and is the author of several essays on Mexican architecture. She assisted MoMA curators in Mexico in the preparation for the exhibition Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980 and worked as an advisor on the LACMA exhibition Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985.
Presented in collaboration with Harvard Department of History of Art and Architecture