Geopolitics and spatial experimentation. Another narrative of modernity in Guanajuato, Mexico

Abstract

The world of the 20th century can be understood as a conglomeration of diversity, exchanges and interpretations of what Modernity means. There is a network in which architectural objects, languages, authors, cities, etc. coexist unbalanced. This network is sustained by power relations that range from the geographical, to the institutional, to the historiographical. The geopolitical field is fundamental to the discursive field of Latin American architectural historiography, but it tends to be depoliticized. Thus, the narratives focus on authors, styles, and forms of production in terms of national cultural specificity and/or North European canonical influence. This logic has avoided observing modern architecture from broader frameworks such as globality. The text questions these categories based on the reconstruction of other networks of relationships whose guiding principle is not objects and their languages. In addition, it proposes that peripheral contexts are spaces of freedom and the possibility of identity experimentation. The Juárez Theater in Guanajuato, Mexico, is taken as a case study to show the complex relationship between modern architecture and globality.