The iconic building that houses the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) in Santiago, Chile, will be one of the protagonists in an exhibition on modern Latin American architecture, opening March 29 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
The exhibit Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955 – 1980, which will run through July 19, will include more than 500 works, including pictures, drawings, blueprints and videos of constructions that are representative of modernism in the region.
ECLAC’s headquarters, opened in 1966, was inspired by the architecture of French artist Le Corbusier and is characterized by its visible concrete construction, in addition to varying volumes and the combination of elements that allude to Latin American history and art.
The show will include a mock-up of the building, which was the result of a collaborative project between the MoMA and the Chilean office Constructo headed by architects Jeannette Plaut and Marcelo Sarovic.
For more than a year, both architects led a team that built the large-scale mock-ups of seven emblematic buildings in the region, with support from 12 students from the Catholic University of Chile and over a dozen other collaborators. The project required thorough research of documents, archives and blueprints, some of which were incomplete.
The mock-ups in the show, which have already been shipped to New York, include the Church of the Benedictine Monastery in Chile; the San Martín Theater and Bank of London in Argentina; the Celanese company building in Mexico; the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana building in Venezuela; and the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.
The case of ECLAC’s building had already been studied in the book CEPAL 1962 _ 1966 that Constructo developed two years ago, which covers the entire process of management, construction and debut of this architectural work.
The exhibit in New York will include some of the snapshots taken by a group of ten amateur photographers that visited ECLAC’s headquarters on Monday, March 16, to take pictures of the building and publish them on the Instagram social network with the hashtag #ArquiMoMA, in the framework of an event known as InstaMeet in which the MoMA participated on this occasion.
“Instagram and MoMA joined forces so that people could show how they see these buildings today. We chose to come to this building because it is an icon of Latin American modernism and its architect, Emilio Duhart, is a great mentor for us,” said Tomás Westenenk, one of the participants in this initiative.
Its main building is considered an emblematic landmark of Modern Architecture and included in the DOCOMOMO’s (International Committee for the documentation and conservation of buildings, sites and monuments of the Modern movement) watch-dog's list, as a heritage of this architectural movement in view of its innovative design concepts and novel structural model, Andrea Henrichsen, Chief of ECLAC’s Division of Administration said.
