Latin America Made in Italy

Since Casabella-Costruzioni first published the Brazilian Ministry of Education building in 1939, Italian magazines have repeatedly documented modern architecture in Latin America. Looking closely at articles published in Domus, Casabella-Continuità and Architettura: Cronache e Storia along the mid-decades of the twentieth century, the paper rehearses the circumstances of this editorial concern, and argues the existence of tendentious narratives that perform an “Italianization” of Latin American architecture. On the one hand, one such arbitrary construction brings into the spotlight subterranean impulses of postwar Italian architecture, which range from the vindication of a leading role in the international scene to the need for reconciling unfamiliar instances of modernity with deep-rooted vernacularism. On the other hand, the orientations of the Italian journals also betray something far more programmatic: the priority of the political–ideological credos of the magazines” directors over the proper overview of Latin American architecture. Unravelling this tendentious narrative, the paper will seek to unmask an act of instrumentalization that has gone largely unnoticed until today. And at the same time, it will recast Italy’s encounter with the Southern hemisphere in ways that read more as a window on postwar Italian architecture than on its Latin American counterpart