The Latin American Look

Since the war, one of the greatest building booms in history has changed the face of Latin America, and no letup is in sight. To house a population that is growing at double the world rate, the countries south of the border have built thousands of large-scale apartment projects, office buildings, stadiums, university halls and government buildings. In the major cities, new, skyscrapered skylines rise amidst one-and two-century-old slum clusters and rows of two-story stores. To portray a decade of tumultuous growth, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art is currently displaying a photographic exhibit (assembled by Architecture Historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock) of 49 major building projects in ten Latin American countries and Puerto Rico. The display demonstrates that Latin American architects have not only developed a dramatic style of their own, but one ideally suited to their climate and way of life.

Common Style. Most modern Latin American architecture, whether along Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma, Caracas' Avenida Bolivar or Sao Paulo's Avenida Anhangabau, has a distinctive look. Almost all Latin American architects use combinations of louvers, grills, projecting concrete slabs and movable screens to control the dazzling sunshine; they share a lavish liking for color, usually dramatically set off against sparkling white. There is a dearth of structural steel and timber, so the designers have almost universally turned to reinforced concrete. It is a building medium that can easily become clumsy and heavy, but the Latin Americans have seized on its highly plastic quality to fashion shell-like vaulting, bold cantilevers, curving fac,ades that give high sculptural qualities to their best buildings.

Many of the younger Latin American architects finish off their studies at U.S. universities, but so far, U.S. influence shows up chiefly in technical details like plumbing and elevators, in living-space layouts and the general addiction to the skyscraper principle. Main inspiration for Latin America's new architectural forms is the international style pioneered by such men as France's Ferret and Le Corbusier. A prime example: Brazil's beehive-fronted Ministry of Education and Public Health in Rio de Janeiro, the work of a team of architects including Le Corbusier and his brilliant Brazilian disciple, Oscar Niemeyer. Historian Hitchcock calls it "still perhaps the finest single modern structure in Latin America."

The Leaders. Brazil started early, and, thanks to booming Sao Paulo (TIME, Jan. 21, 1952), has the greatest number of distinguished buildings. But in recent years other countries have made giant strides. Historian Hitchcock labels Mexico's University City (TIME, Feb. 23, 1953) "the most spectacular extra-urban architectural entity of the North American continent." In about five years, the building boom has raised the height of typical buildings in Caracas, Venezuela from one to 20-odd stories. Such handsome buildings as the auditorium of Caracas' University City, with its high concrete vault filled with free-floating colored panels by U.S. Mobile Maker Alexander Calder, have put Venezuelan Architect Carlos Raul Villanueva in the front rank of Latin American designers. Puerto Rico boasts a well-done hotel, the Caribe Hilton, and Henry Klumb's outstanding Catholic church near San Juan.

The boom has had its flaws--grandiose plans that take years to complete, antiquated methods, shoddy workmanship, poor maintenance. Though Latin America has so far produced some dozen architects of high reputation, none has as yet developed a style as effective as that of Niemeyer, now 48. But Latin America's "grand old men" of architecture are only in their 50s or younger, and a host of younger architects is coming up; the boom goes on and the future is bright.

Poor Treasure House

London's famed National Gallery calls its collection of paintings "perhaps the best balanced and most representative, if not the most extensive . . . in the world." To that proud boast it now adds a mournful confession: the gallery is so poor that it cannot even care properly for the treasures it has, let alone acquire more. In its first official report since the war, the National Gallery complained that inadequate maintenance is endangering some of the world's most marvelous paintings. Among them: Michelangelo's Entombment, Piero della Francesca's Nativity, Holbein's Ambassadors, Rubens' Chateau de Steen. In one room, the only humidity control is a teapot, kept boiling around the clock. As many as 60 paintings have been lined up at one time for the repair of cracking, flaking or rotting canvas. Said a gallery official sadly: "The damage goes into the millions."

What bothers the National Gallery almost as much is that it is expected to make new purchases on an annual government grant of only -L-10,500 ($29,400), very little more than it got in the 1880s,* plus other income that rarely exceeds -L-10,000 a year. Faced with today's soaring prices for old masters, the National Gallery is priced out of the market. More and more British masterpieces are leaving the country. "The hope of saving what remains of our national heritage and providing for expansion," said the report, ". . . must remain largely dependent upon the accident of shock tactics in public appeals and supplementary votes [from Parliament] upon special occasions."

NEW ACQUISITION: Boston's Wild-Man Tapestry

TALES of ferocious wild men of hairy mien and brute strength have been hearthside favorites from the days of Babylon's fallen King Nebuchadnezzar, who "was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen . . . till his hairs were grown like eagles' feathers and his nails like birds' claws" (Daniel 4:33), down to the celluloid Tarzans of Hollywood. But at no time did the wild men populate the public imagination more densely than during the Middle Ages. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts put on view this week, as its latest acquisition, a 16-ft.-long Rhenish tapestry woven around 1400, one of the world's outstanding relics of the medieval mixture, of man, beast and folklore.

Medieval romances often portray the wild man as a lunatic, and doubtless the dark forests of the Middle Ages harbored many an uncouth idiot or demented outcast. From the held-over repertory of paganism, gossips and telltales invested such men with legendary powers--ferocious temper, ability to rend lions barehanded or smash their skulls with trees or mighty Neanderthal clubs, to ride the wild bucks and unicorns. Their likenesses appeared on the fac,ades of churches, as decoration for manuscripts, and in tapestries. In literature and song, from the Arthurian legends to the ironic romances of Spain's Cervantes, the wild men were fixtures. Edmund Spenser in his Faerie Queen (1590) made Elizabethan eyes roll in describing how the wild man is taught to put his hand "upon the Lyon and the rugged Beare; and from the she Beare's teats her whelps to teare."

A tamer concept of the wild man inspired Boston's newly acquired tapestry. Emblazoned with the family arms of Bluemel (Alsace) and Zorn (Strasbourg), the tapestry unrolls a legend more bewitching than forbidding. The artist designer, in giving free rein to his fancy, incorporated a world of friendly animals, forest flowers, wild men bedecked with crowns of leaves, and, as an extra fillip of delight, exotic blackamoors and a besieged castle of love. And the craftsmen who wove it worked well. Five and a half centuries later, it still keeps its freshness and true woodland colors.

* Last year New York's Metropolitan Museum spent $1,170,912 on new purchases.

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