Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet's Dreams for Buenos Aires (Lateral Exchanges: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Practices)

2022 PROSE Award Finalist in Architecture and Urban Planning 2022 Association for Latin American Art Arvey Foundation Book Award, Honorable Mention Throughout the early twentieth century, waves of migration brought working-class people to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This prompted a dilemma: Where should these restive populations be situated relative to the city's spatial politics? Might housing serve as a tool to discipline their behavior? Enter Antonio Bonet, a Catalan architect inspired by the transatlantic modernist and surrealist movements. Ana María León follows Bonet's decades-long, state-backed quest to house Buenos Aires's diverse and fractious population. Working with totalitarian and populist regimes, Bonet developed three large-scale housing plans, each scuttled as a new government took over. Yet these incomplete plans—Bonet's dreams—teach us much about the relationship between modernism and state power. Modernity for the Masses finds in Bonet's projects the disconnect between modern architecture's discourse of emancipation and the reality of its rationalizing control. Although he and his patrons constantly glorified the people and depicted them in housing plans, Bonet never consulted them. Instead he succumbed to official and elite fears of the people's latent political power. In careful readings of Bonet's work, León discovers the progressive erasure of surrealism's psychological sensitivity, replaced with an impulse, realized in modernist design, to contain the increasingly empowered population. "Ana María León's manuscript studies how the discourse and practice of modern architecture was transformed by its encounter with large populations and volatile politics in midcentury Argentina. The country saw a shift in power from landowning elites to the working class beginning in the 1930s, and with that shift came large migrations from the countryside into Buenos Aires. The urgent need for housing that followed created both an opportunity and a set of challenges for architecture--practical challenges, certainly, but also political and philosophical ones. How close to the centers of power should potentially revolutionary populations live? How dense or dispersed should their housing be? As these questions suggest, this is ultimately a study of the place where, in the author's words, "the discourse of modern architecture met the mandates of totalitarian governments." A deeply interdisciplinary work, Modernity for the Masses accesses architecture, politics, and culture through the work of Catalan architect Antonio Bonet--and specifically, through the unbuilt housing projects of Bonet. (The "dreams" of the subtitle evoke the strong influence of surrealism and psychoanalysis on both Bonet and the culture more broadly.) The focus on unbuilt work not only allows a new perspective on Bonet (himself understudied), but it permits a crucial perspective on the shifting nature of political regimes in the postwar years. As León writes, "These were far from schematic or utopian projects--these housing schemes were sponsored by different authoritarian regimes and reached a high degree of design development before folding to different political and economic circumstances. As such, they stand in for a particular combination of ambition and frustration common to South American modern architecture--one in which the potential of the new was alternatively bolstered and discarded by different regimes.""-- Provided by publisher Throughout the early twentieth century, waves of migration brought working-class people to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This prompted a dilemma: Where to situate these restive populations relative to the city's spatial politics? Might housing serve as a tool to discipline their behavior? Enter Antonio Bonet, a Catalan architect inspired by the transatlantic modernist and surrealist movements. Ana María León follows Bonet's decades-long, state-backed quest to house Buenos Aires's diverse and fractious population. Working with totalitarian and populist regimes, Bonet developed three large-scale housing plans, each scuttled as a new government took over. Yet these incomplete plans--Bonet's dreams--teach us much about the relationship between modernism and state power. Modernity for the Masses finds in Bonet's projects the disconnect between modern architecture's discourse of emancipation and the reality of its rationalizing control. Although he and his patrons constantly glorified the people and depicted them in housing plans, Bonet never consulted them. Instead he succumbed to official and elite fears of the people's latent political power. In careful readings of Bonet's work, León discovers the progressive erasure of surrealism's psychological sensitivity, replaced with an impulse, realized in modernist design, to contain the increasingly empowered population A provocative examination of how the discourse and practice of modern architecture was transformed by its encounter with large populations and the volatile politics of twentieth-century Argentina.