A discipline in crisis: disputes over architecture at La Escuelita of Buenos Aires (1976-1983).

Author(s)

Jonas Delecave de Amorim

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU/SBI)
• Defense date: 2020-06-05

Examining board members

José Tavares Correia de Lira; Carlos Alberto Ferreira Martins; Laís Bronstein Passaro; Graciela Silvestri

• Advisor: José Tavares Correia de Lira; Claudia Shmidt

Abstract

The dissertation focuses on the pedagogical experience in architecture known as La Escuelita, developed in the city of Buenos Aires during the last Argentine military dictatorship, between 1976 and 1983. Marked by a great institutional fragility, La Escuelita offered independent courses in design and architectural history for architects or students in the last years of undergraduate studies. Founded by four architects - Tony Díaz, Ernesto Katzenstein, Justo Solsona and Rafael Viñoly - the pedagogical experience had its dynamics constantly transformed throughout its short duration. We argue that different discourses on the discipline (its procedures, potentials, limitations and possible relations to its own history), coexisted in its interior, constituted from the recognition of the crises that architecture was going through in the 1960s and 1970s, both in Argentina and internationally. At the same time, significant historiographic transformations were carried out, initially around Jorge Francisco Liernur, which placed the history of architecture in a broader intellectual field. This research seeks to understand the particularities of these discourses, as well as the ways in which they related to each other and to the cultural and social fields of which they were part. Always marked by the military dictatorship, which defined and contextualized it, La Escuelita was also a fundamental space for social encounters in the most difficult years of that country\'s recent history. Studying it allows us to better understand the Argentine architectural culture of those years and, from its dialogues, to illuminate different nodes of an international network of circulation of ideas of which it was part. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 16/22985-7 - Autonomy and historiography in Lantin America: architecture, education and the historical narrative in the Escuelita of Buenos Aires, 1976/1983
• Grantee: Jonas Delecave de Amorim
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate