A modern architecture collection: Image and narrativity in Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalog on Latin America (1955)

ABSTRACT

Are buildings collectible? Some people collected projects, like the Tremaine couple, for whom Niemeyer and Johnson designed houses that they never built; some exhibitions incorporated architectural prototypes, such as the house installed by Breuer in MoMA’s garden in 1949. But in most cases, works of architecture enter museums (and historiography) by their representations. These representations - photographs, drawings - usually compose catalogs that, in a way, enjoy a life independent from their exhibitions of origin, whose longevity they surpass. Latin American Architecture Since 1945, the catalog of the homonymous exhibition organized by Henry-Russell Hitchcock for MoMA in 1955, is now widely recognized as a central piece in the historiographical construction of Latin American modern architecture, like Brazil Builds by Philip Goodwin (1943). Architectural catalogs are bibliographic products where pictures have a predominant role over texts. They fall into the category of the picture collection, or the photographic album. But despite the priority of image over word, the catalog is also a narrative. The purpose of this text is to examine the intrinsic narrative condition of the catalog as a photographic album and as an architecture collection, in its correlations with the historiographic methods and with the formation of the modern architecture concept, by using Latin American Architecture Since 1945.

KEYWORDS:
Collection; Narrative; Modern architecture; Latin America