Designing Pan-America
Designing Pan-America
U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere
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.
Designing Pan-America is an important survey of the architectural culture generated by Washington geopolitics for building the idea of the Western Hemisphere between the global expansion of US empire around 1800 and its seeming regression around 1970. It impressively demonstrates the synergy between diplomatic designs and the design of diplomatic sites. The visual research is vast and striking, a capacious trove vibrantly rendered in color. Consequently, this good read provides a fresh perspective on both the history of international ideas in action and the idea of the Americas in (mainly) the United States.
Rigorously researched, imaginatively conceived, broadly situated, supported by a wealth of highly relevant illustrations, and replete with a stellar cast of architects. . . . Gonzalez cleverly decodes the dance between subject and object that accompanied the lengthy history of the Pan-American idea, and establishes the emerging centrality of modernism as a common ground for hemispheric identity, just as its most dramatic form of built expression threatens to be a militarized wall.
González draws from considerable archival research to show how an array of built expressions engage and ossify the ideological formation of Pan-Americanism. This work offers much to scholarship exploring recent cultural and political shifts in North America agitating for the construction of intra-American walls and the policing of borders.
One of the gifts this book makes to the reader is the inclusion of a plethora of maps, photographs, posters, postcards, stamps, lithographs, and etchings. The visual contents of the book are thus as inviting as the critical analysis. We are able to literally see the development of an iconographic syntax and grammar of a visual language.
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.
- Foreword by Robert W. Rydell
- Preface: Entre autopista y puente
- Acknowledgments
- Pan-American Architecture Chronology
- Introduction: Entering Pan-America
- Mapping the Sources of the Pan-American Idea
- The Pan-American Citizen
- Equal Representation for All Americans
- Chapter 1. The Birth of Pan-American Architecture: Hemispheric Fairs, 1884-1901
- Logical Pan-Americanism at Two New Orleans Expositions
- Before the White City: Quadricentennial Visions for 1892
- The Pan-American Exposition in an American Power City, 1895-1901
- Chapter 2. A Rubber-Fig Tree for the Patio: America's Peace Temple, 1907-1913
- The Competition
- After the Competition
- Transforming the "Latins" with Patio and Pool
- Nuestra Pan-América
- Chapter 3. In Search of Modern Pan-America: The Columbus Memorial Lighthouse
- Kelsey's Perfect Competition
- Pan-America's Heritage Is Explored in Stage One
- Kelsey Orchestrates the Second Stage
- Gleave's Transformative Cross
- Building the Unwelcomed Columbus Memorial
- Chapter 4. Gateway to the Americas: Dreaming Interama, HemisFair Living
- Interama and the Inter-American Subject
- HemisFair '68 and New Liaisons with Las Américas
- The Last Hemispheric Fairs
- Epilogue: Enter Here: The Great Pan-American Way
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
