Spatial Theories for the Americas - (Culture Politics & the Built Environment) by Fernando Luiz Lara (Hardcover)

About the Book

Confronts the Insufficiencies of Canonical Architectural Texts

Book Synopsis

Shortlist, 2025 Architectural Book Award in Architectural Theory

To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from Europe, a very different continent. With this book, Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space--drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and architecture--and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for the Americas offers a critique of Eurocentrism in the discipline of architecture, problematizing its theoretical foundation in relation to the inseparability of modernization and colonization. The second part makes explicit the insufficiencies of a hegemonic Western tradition at the core of spatial theories by discussing a long list of authors who have thought about the Americas. To overcome centuries of Eurocentrism, Lara concludes, will require a tremendous effort, but, nonetheless, scholars and architects of the Americas have the responsibility of looking at their built environments through their own lenses. Spatial Theories for the Americas proposes a fundamental step in that direction.

Review Quotes

The impact of Lara's book on how architecture around the globe is taught and the need for decolonization cannot be understated. There is much to unlearn. This book is an important resource for those wanting to learn about and advocate for a reciprocal, reflective, relational, relevant, respectful and responsible approach to design.-- "Arizona Journal for Hispanic Studies"

While human beings have inhabited the lands of the Americas for some thirty thousand years, why is it that people act like only the last three hundred matter? Author Lara explores this oversight in Spatial Theories for the Americas. Recommended. All readers.--Choice

Spatial Theories for the Americas represents a fertile ground for new questions on contemporary space-making and on how to counteract the unjust materiality and sociability of neoliberal cities across the continents.-- "Journal of Urban Affairs"

This book is an indispensable read for scholars and practitioners invested in the evolution of architectural theory and discourse across the Americas. It challenges, disrupts, and ultimately transforms how we engage with architecture in the region, offering a road map for a more inclusive and representative architectural future.-- "Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians"

In Spatial Theories for the Americas, Fernando Luiz Lara passionately advocates for a revision of the history of the Americas, emphasizing the need to address the absences and omissions that have distorted our understanding, and the development, of architecture as a field. Lara weaves together numerous theories and scholarly positions with compelling historical evidence to argue that pre-Colombian American knowledge played a crucial role in shaping European modern thought. At the same time, he calls for a thorough re-evaluation of how architecture has been, and continues to be, taught, practiced, and historicized in the Americas. As such, this book makes a significant contribution to the growing stream of architectural studies known as decolonial theory, positioning itself as a pivotal text within the rapidly evolving landscape of architectural academia.--Felipe Hernandez, University of Cambridge

Fernando Luiz Lara has offered us a road map to a fundamentally new way of understanding the history of architecture. He carefully and painstakingly delinks this history from European master narratives, creating a space from which to tell new stories.--Joseph Heathcott, The New School

Fernando Luiz Lara offers a bracing challenge to those of us steeped in Eurocentric urban and architectural histories. In a sweeping set of essays, spanning Amazonian cosmology to postmodern design, about places as diverse as Tenochtitlan, Chicago, and Rio de Janeiro, Lara offers a powerful decolonial critique of dominant architectural theories and practices, calling attention to narrative erasures and offering compelling alternatives.--Thomas J. Sugrue, New York University

In this lucid and brilliantly provocative book, Fernando Luiz Lara asks us to embark on a journey to unlearn the very foundations of modern architecture. Opening up design thinking to knowledge systems marginalized for five centuries, it is an invitation to reshuffle myths of land, building, and history and bring back to the drawing board relational processes indigenous to the Americas.--Swati Chattopadhyay, University of California, Santa Barbara

About the Author

Fernando Luiz Lara is professor of architecture at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Rise of Popular Modernist Architecture in Brazil and coauthor of Street Matters: A Critical History of Twentieth-Century Urban Policy in Brazil and Modern Architecture in Latin America.