Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

Modern design meets Latin America: the role of pioneering design
magazines Habitat and nueva visión in Brazil and Argentina
AMORIM, Patricia / MA / Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) and School of Higher Education in Marketing & Communication
Management (ESPM-SP) / Brazil
CAVALCANTI, Virginia /PhD / Federal University of Pernambuco / Brazil
Modern Design / Design criticism / Habitat / nueva visión / Latin
American Design
The introduction of modern design in South America took place
in the early 1950s and had amongst local protagonists Tomás
Maldonado and Pietro Bardi, founders of n/v nueva visión 1 and
Habitat magazines, respectively. These publications were defined
by a modern discourse in tune with graphic arts and industrial
design and here is observed how they emerged and contributed
for the dissemination of modernist paradigm in Brazil
and Argentina.
1. Introduction
The early 1950s sets the introduction of modern design in South
America. Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo were spreading anchors of
the new design model at that part of the continent, acting as a
gateway to the rush of modernization promoted by the European
avant-garde as well as the innovative precepts about art and
technology developed at Bauhaus and the Ulm School of Design.
Amongst the local protagonists of that movement were the Argentine
architect Tomás Maldonado and the Italian journalist
and curator Pietro Maria Bardi. Maldonado, who would become
director of The Ulm School in 1954, founded n/v nueva visión
magazine (1953), in Buenos Aires, which focused on mapping
the development of architecture, art and modern design in the
Americas and Europe.
Bardi, director of the Sao Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), created
Habitat magazine (1950) in partnership with his wife, Italian
architect Lina Bo. The publication provided a critique of Brazilian
architecture and emphasized the importance of training
design professionals in the country by following constructivist
guidelines.
Stated thus, this paper aims to explore how nueva visión and
Habitat worked for the introduction and dissemination of modern
design concepts and projects in those two countries. Structured
as a literature review, this article is a result of a doctoral research
in progress at Federal University of Pernambuco Design
Program (PPGDesign/UFPE), based on comparative-historical
methodology and cultural studies theory.
1 According to its original spelling, some modern Argentine projects are written
here in small caps.
2. Modernity and editorial market in Buenos
Aires
During the government of Juan Domingo Perón, started in 1946,
the state played a decisive role in the economy, stimulating the
production of consumer goods for the domestic market. Associated
with this industrial growth, economic redistribution in favor
of disadvantaged sections of the population and the expansion
of urban areas led to a change in consumption habits (De Ponti &
Gaudio 2008). In the field of culture, the emergence of concrete
art and the growth of publishing and film industries complemented
the landscape that allowed Argentina to join in modernity
in the 1940s.
Art defended the industry and production as vectors of modern
design, in line with the European abstraction and the avant-garde
Latin Americans. Amidst that background, it is the concretist
group of artists who will publish for the first time in Spanish texts
of the Swiss Max Bill, leading exponent of abstract art internationally.
In 1942, the Austral Group, formed by architects linked to Le
Corbusier, will launch the magazine Tecné.
A landmark in the beginning of the 1950s was the foundation
of the first local design offices, axis and Cicero Advertising, and
the publishing house ediciones infinito. Specialized in projective
disciplines, infinito was headed by the architect Carlos Méndez
Mosquera, who founded the journal ciclo in 1948 and in 1963
would still create the leading design and arquitecture magazine
summa.
Cultural magazines in Buenos Aires: the Maldonado’s
trajectory and nueva visión
In the Argentine context, studies indicate visual arts and architecture
as essencial providers of publications that best
translated the ideals of the modernist era. Arturo: abstract arts
magazine is one such example. Launched in Buenos Aires in
1944, housed in an avant-garde desire to total transformation,
focusing on overcoming the bourgeois structures and the consequent
union between art and life. Its first and only issue was
a development of young artists and poets Carmelo Arden Quin,
Rhod Rothfuss, Gyula Kosice and Edgar Bayley. With woodcut on
the cover designed by Tomás Maldonado, Arturo rejected figurative
art and reformulated international artistic debates through
regional Latin American connections (García 2011).
It was, however, the group Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención
that more strongly established links with design, and specifi-
Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies / Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the International Committee for
Design History & Design Studies - ICDHS 2012 / São Paulo, Brazil / © 2012 Blucher / ISBN 978-85-212-0692-7