Modernity for the Masses

Ana María León's book explores the connections between modernist architecture, totalitarian nation-state projects, and “dreams” for modernity through mass housing in Buenos Aires between the 1930s and the late 1950s. More specifically, it is about the trajectory of modernist Catalan architect Antonio Bonet (1913–89) in Buenos Aires. Formed and trained in Europe with José Luis Sert and Le Corbusier (among others) and imbued in surrealist art, Bonet left a Spain caught in a civil war and the emergence of fascism. His practice in Argentina involved the development of several large-scale housing programs. León contextualizes Bonet's most significant projects (three of them unbuilt) within Argentine political and ideological conjunctures, the intellectual and artistic debates about the role of the masses and the avant-garde, and the scale of urban intervention entailed. From a decolonial, interdisciplinary, and transnational perspective, León explores the intersections between architecture, art, literature, visual culture, and psychoanalysis. Bonet represents the tension between modernist architecture as avant-garde, the revolutionary potential of surrealism, and professional architectural practice at the service of different ideological state projects. Ultimately, Bonet is, for León, part of the “history of modern architecture's complicity with totalitarian states” (p. 7).Chapter 1 focuses on the “built architectural manifesto” of the Austral group, the porteño modernist architectural avant-garde (p. 53). The 1939 Artists' Ateliers condensed Bonet's experience in Barcelona and Paris, his attraction to surrealism, and his involvement with Argentine intellectual and cultural circles. The structure was the work of an aspiring, recently arrived foreign architect seeking publicity and commercial success with an eye to the state as a potential client.Chapter 2 explores the Casa Amarilla project for the La Boca neighborhood, a modernist monumental large-scale housing program commissioned by the military government that ruled Argentina from 1943 to 1946. León connects it to European and Argentine intellectual debates about the monument as a guiding reference to tame emotions in the mass society era. Roger Caillois, José Ortega y Gasset, Jorge Luis Borges, and the literary journal Sur are part of the ideological framework in which intellectuals, artists, and architects assumed the role of enlightened leaders. Bonet also combined his take on surrealism with Le Corbusier's, Sigfried Giedion's, and Sert's calls for monumentality, lyricism, and emotions. While Bonet's visual presentation of Casa Amarilla evoked the “irrational” of architecture and surrealism, the project was a “machine” of discipline and order, a colonial apparatus of control and civilization, according to León (p. 122).In chapter 3, León takes on the difficult task of unveiling the “Peronist unconscious” through the government's narrative of pastoral modernity in the Bajo Belgrano project, commissioned by Buenos Aires municipality in 1946. The project was part of the Estudio del Plan de Buenos Aires, the “dream” of Le Corbusier and the porteño architectural avant-garde for the city. For León, Bajo Belgrano was a “public relations strategy in which modernist architecture” served Perón's state project to mobilize the masses (p. 132). Architecture, psychoanalysis, mass media, visual culture, public exhibitions, brochures, publications, promotional films, surrealism, and art were modernist tools for a “deliberately conservative strategy,” at the service of Perón's “propaganda machine” (pp. 137, 143). Ultimately, the Bajo Belgrano's modernism was framed as part of the nationalist nostalgic, mythical, and idealized past of the Pampas from where the masses came.The last chapter explores Barrio Sur, a state project commissioned by the Revolución Libertadora government in 1956, the year after it had ousted Perón. The project's envisioned bulldozing of a large area of the San Telmo neighborhood symbolized the authoritarian regime's attempts to erase the memory of Perón from the people's minds and hearts. Bonet's urban intervention implied a resignification of the plaza as more contained, made of concrete, and surrounded by retail. Bonet was now serving a state-led project that conceived mass housing as a technocratic, industrial, and market solution to the shortage of dwellings. This commercial approach would be part of Bonet's practice once he finally returned to Spain in the late 1950s. By then, the architect who had dreamed about enlightening the masses through housing would dedicate his practice to producing resorts and homes in a country that was turning to promote tourism as part of Francisco Franco's economic miracle.Modernity for the Masses makes a significant contribution to the history of modernist architecture and urban planning and to the history of modernist architecture's connection with politics, ideology, and state-led modernizing projects in Latin America. León achieves this via an interdisciplinary scope that connects architecture, art, literature, and psychoanalysis. For those interested in the history of the circulation of architectural and urban planning ideas, the book's decolonial theoretical framework will also pose new questions about the role of experts and their dreams for modernity for the masses

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