ABSTRACT

From 1925 to 1948, the famous architect Le Corbusier's work aligns with eugenics and its practice of racial urbanism. Three roots come from the trunk of the French state. The left root represents the man and his immediate environment, the region. Lamarkian eugenics was a social and biological movement that strove for nothing less than the improvement of the human race, using heredity and the environment as its primary tools. This "ingeniousness", this move to replace unpredictable, seasonally restricted, nonidentical live trees, with concrete and thus formable, identical, white, implacable, and undying replications foreshadows what architecture could and would do for eugenics movements in Latin America. Between Le Corbusier's first trip to Latin America in 1929 and his first trip to the United States in 1935, his discourses were centered on the racial and sexual other, the primitive, nature, and death.