ABSTRACT
In 1985, during the First Architecture Biennale of Buenos Aires, an international group of architects launched the rst of a series of periodical seminars to promote debate about architecture produced south of the Mexican-United States border. Until then, their contacts had been informal and sparse. The period of unfettered modernization, nation building, and political and cultural prestige that gave architects from Latin America international exposure in the second quarter of the twentieth century was long gone. So was the time when critics and leading cultural institutions in the United States and Europe had turned their eyes to the region. They no longer sanctioned and analyzed it in books, magazines, and exhibitions as they had done in the decades that preceded and followed World War II. Architectural production and experimentation slowed down and remained isolated in Latin America between the late 1960s and 1980s, but activities and dialogues had gradually increased since then. Work circumstances were dierent from the ones found by early modernists. Economic, social, and political adversities called for the reevaluation of previous practices and the creation of new ones. The time had come to organize a collective discussion as a means for overcoming isolation and the lack of visibility.
