Conference Presentations by Giovanna M Bassi Cendra
Flyer for upcoming Global Modernism Forum, to take place on April 3rd at Rice University
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Papers by Giovanna M Bassi Cendra
ROCKEFELLER ARCHIVE CENTER RESEARCH REPORTS, 2023
The following research is part of my ongoing dissertation project, which examines the planning, d... more The following research is part of my ongoing dissertation project, which examines the planning, design, and construction of university campuses vis-à- vis the intensification of mining and oil extraction in South America between 1945 and 1975. In this report, I offer a brief overview of the technical and financial assistance that the Ford Foundation (FF), the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), and the UN Special Fund (UNSF) gave to one of my case studies, the Universidad de Concepción (UdeC), located in mineral-rich Chile. Multiple holdings at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) reveal that these organizations provided significant aid to the UdeC between 1956 and 1968—a critical period during which the technical and financial assistance programs of the US became entangled with a national developmentalist agenda that tied scientific and engineering education to economic development. The RAC holdings I explore are extremely useful in understanding the geopolitical and economic context that shaped these aid programs, the UdeC’s modernization efforts, and the agendas of the multiple actors involved in this process. The textual and visual documents I analyze also underscore the critical role that modern architecture played in all of this as an enabler of the academic reform and the economic transformation of the region, and as a persuasive signifier of “development.”
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ICAA Documents Project Working Papers: The Publication Series for Documents of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art 6, 2018
Giovanna M. Bassi Cendra analyzes Argentinean-Czechoslovakian artist Gyula Kosice’s installation ... more Giovanna M. Bassi Cendra analyzes Argentinean-Czechoslovakian artist Gyula Kosice’s installation La ciudad hidroespacial (1946, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) as a challenge to the notion of a functional city, an idea jointly conceived by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier and the International Congress of Modern Architecture in 1933. Critical of the core principles that guided functionalist architecture and urbanism (i.e., dwelling, trans- portation, work, and leisure), Kosice envisioned a city built with floating, mobile cells through which people would be free to travel—and be unbound to notions of private property and political boundaries. Thus, La ciudad’s relevance resides not only on its art historical value and precocious challenge to conventional and modernist paradigms, but also, Bassi argues, in the manner that this installation’s setup is conducive to the acknowledgment of the consumptive relationship that modern and contemporary societies have created with their environment.
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Conference Presentations by Giovanna M Bassi Cendra
Papers by Giovanna M Bassi Cendra