Faith in the Profession

“It takes six hours to fly from Mexico City to NYC but twelve hours to Buenos Aires,” Enrique Norten, principal of Ten Arquitectos, said at the start of a conference about Latin American architecture at the Center for Architecture. Norten’s aim had been to convey the sheer size of the region before identifying the region’s single most common typology: the higher-education single-building campus. Rather than the Anglo-Saxon manner of placing “objects in a garden,” the single-building campus deployed by universities from Caracas to Sao Paulo descended from the great public structures of Machu Picchu, Norten argued.

A sprint through projects of fifteen emerging Latin American architectural practices followed. The highly diverse work spanned geographies and design approaches, materials and social contexts, and all exhibited a keen awareness of climatic challenges. Projects ranged from the design of planters to the creation of new city districts and were united only by a zealous sense of responsibility. There was little handwringing to be had; indeed, the event felt like …