'Radical Cities': 3 lessons from Latin America's activist architects

Anyone following the architectural profession at the turn of the millennium might be forgiven for thinking that it was all about splashy icons: Frank Gehry's undulating titanium sails in Bilbao and Los Angeles, Norman Foster's naughty-lookingGherkin in London, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's super-tall Burj Khalifa,known for being ... super-tall.

But as some were rushing to plant icons all over the planet, a generation of architects and planners in Latin America were focused on other issues: affordable housing, transportation infrastructure, zoning issues, the creation of public amenities, cross-border relations issues that don't necessarily make for sexy buildings, but that are key to creating cities that function well.

British architecture writer Justin McGuirk tracks the phenomenon in his new book, "Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture"(Verso; $29.95), which he will present at the MAK Center for Art & Architecturein West Hollywood Friday evening.

Why Latin America?

"The continent has a history of testing radical ideas about architecture," McGuirk says. "We keep hearing that the world is more than 50% urban and that there is this huge shift of human civilization to cities. But Latin America experienced a massive explosion in its urban population long before China, India and Africa. ... Many countries in Latin America are 80% urban. They've been throughthis process. Therefore, there must be lessons."

"Radical Cities" looks for these lessons all over the continent, from the slums of Rio de Janeiro to a small canyon along the U.S.-Mexico border, tracking publicly minded architectural and planning projects from the 1960s to the present.

This includes the PREVI project in Lima short for Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda which brought together some of the world's leading architects to create housing solutions flexible enough to be expanded over time (making for some pretty terrific vernacular architecture). But it also includes a case study of the city of Medellin in Colombia, which shows the ways in which architects can collaborate with broader coalitions of politicians and community organizations to help bring together a deeply divided city with strategically placed parks and well-designed libraries.

McGuirk's highly conversational book, blessedly free of architecture-speak, also reflects on the way in which some of today's architects have found ways of working within the informal sector slums, some would say for projects that can bring renewal without requiring the razing of entire communities. This might include surgical additions to a community: a gondola system to get residents up a Caracas hillside or a small block of housing in the Chilean city of Iquique, which provides a basic structure that residents complete on their own.

"One of the lessons of the book is that housing is often not the problem," explains McGuirk. "People can build themselves houses, but they can't build a transport network or a sewage system. This is where I see architects playing a key role. They become the strategic planners that connect the bottom-up impulses of communities with the public resources and strategic planning that sits in the hands of the government."

These "activist architects," as McGuirk calls them figures such as Alejandro Aravena in Chile, the firm Urban-Think Tank of Venezuela and Teddy Cruz in San Diego operate quite differently from designers who go from commission to commission.

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'Radical Cities': 3 lessons from Latin America's activist architects