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Fernando Luiz Lara, "Spatial Theories for the Americas: Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hi, and welcome to the New Books Network. My name is Keldin Vu, and I'm an architect, landscape architect, and dancer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Today, I'm speaking with Fernando Luis Lara, the author of Spatial Theories for the Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2024. Fernando is professor of Architecture at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. In his own words, he works on theorizing spaces of the Americas, with an emphasis on the dissemination of architecture and planning ideas beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries. Welcome to the New Books Network, Fernando, and thank you so much for joining me. How are you doing today?
- [01:47]
C
Good. Thank you so much, Kelvin, for hosting me. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [01:52]
B
All right, so you write in the book that, quote, this book navigates between histories and theories of the American built environment, in a way mimicking your own scholarly moves over the last 25 years. You also write that you were, quote, never comfortable choosing only one box, always moving among architectural history, urban history, architectural theory, and design studios. Briefly, how would you describe this navigating between and moving among in your professional journey? And how did that intellectual dance bring you to this project?
- [02:25]
C
I think academia has a way to force us to specialize. We are rewarded for being the world specialist on a very tiny, tiny topic or a tiny, tiny perimeter of knowledge, I was never very happy with that. And I was more interested in the movement, in the translations from one topic to another. So taking architectural theory to studio, taking studio mode to the courses that I teach on the history of the Americas, moving around those cores of attached to education has been always more interesting to me than specializing on one only. And so I've taught studios, I've taught theory courses, I've taught history courses, I've taken students abroad, I have done a little bit of administration. So I am happy and comfortable doing a little bit of everything and knowing that every few years we change. So what I wanted to do 10 years ago when I started the idea of this book is not exactly what I want to do now. And I'm glad the book is done because it registers those thoughts from, in my case, from 2012 to 2022, when the manuscript was finished.
- [04:10]
B
All right, yeah, I love that idea. Books as sort of time markers, but that we and our goals change over time. But getting to this book, you write in the introduction, and I love this quote you write. I'm aware that the scope of the book is quite ambitious. And to that criticism I would respond that I'm just a storyteller connecting the dots that I see as shiny new points of light elaborated by hundreds of other scholars trying to show you a new constellation. Let's call this exercise an attempt at theorizing, because to me it is clear that our American spaces have been under theorized. Can you talk more about how you see your role as a theoretician and how that influenced your approach to this particular project on the Americas?
- [04:54]
C
Yes. And I will go back to your previous question, because trained as an architect and practicing architecture my own way, I do believe in drawings. I have faith in drawings, let's put it that way, as a way not only to register what happened, but also to project the future. When I was trying to think about what this book should be about, I was thinking of a diagram. And you know that child's little game that you have a blank page with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and you connect the dots and then you have a picture. And I thought what I was doing with the book was something like that, but I was shifting the position of the numbers. There is a global architectural history that is very centered on the Mediterranean, on the antiquity, so from Egypt to Greece to Rome, and then it shifts to Europe and it kind of includes the United States. Back later in the 19th and 20th century. What I'm doing with the book is shifting those numbers and placing all those dots in the Americas. And then when I connect them, I'm trying to figure out what picture emerges when I see the history of the Americas. And I see, no, I decided to use no national boundaries. So I don't care if the border is at the Rio Grande, Rio Bravo, between an Anglo America and Latin America. I see the Americas as a whole. And I'm trying to look at the spatial history of this entire continent, connecting many dots to see what picture, what kind of constellation drawing can we take out of those, out of those incidents, out of those pieces of history that we know. And of course, there's a lot of the history that we don't know because it was burned or erased or completely swiped under the rug kind of thing.
- [07:12]
B
On that note, you write in the first part of the book, you write about the erasure of the Americas from canonical volumes of architectural history, which in turn has led to the under theorizing of American spaces, which is what you say kind of brought about the impetus for this book. So you do. And like in the maps that you mentioned, in the drawings that you mentioned, you try to close that gap between geography and theory and history, which I love that framing of it. So how do you historicize theory to make sense of this erasure, exclusion and under citation of the Americas? And also I would add on to that, you know, how does the drawing, how did that help you see these things?
- [07:54]
C
I'll start by saying that if you look at the title of the book, the real content of the book is counterweight to five centuries of Eurocentrism. That's the real content of the book. Spatial Theories for the Americas is an ambition. It's a goal. We don't have special theories for the Americas yet. And this book is not enough to articulate spatial theories for the emeritus. It's just a first step. And the first step was acknowledging the erasure of the emeritus. I have taught a course for almost 20 years now, 17 years, 14 of them at the University of Texas and three of them here at Penn. And it's a course for undergraduates about the history of human habitation in the Americas. And in this course, I asked the students in the first day of class, where are they from? And they tell me where they grew up, where they. Where they think of as home. And then I ask, give them the first assignment, which is to write two pages about somebody that is their age, their gender, and lived exactly where they lived. But 500 years ago. And in that exercise, it is always the same result. The students from the Americas, very few of them know who lived in their neighborhood 500 years ago. Maybe they are from Mexico City or from Peru or from Bolivia, in which case they know. But if they are from Houston or from Sao Paulo or from Santiago, Chile, or from Vancouver or from Quebec, they don't know. It's really remarkable. Students from Europe know. Students from Asia know. Students from India know the long history of the places they call home. We don't. It's something specific to the Americas that our. The history that we know always start with the arrival of the Europeans. And there you go. To me, it's a major problem.
- [10:05]
B
Yeah. And you say that you quoted a colleague in saying that Western knowledge is necessary or fundamental but insufficient. I think that was the quote. And I think that really comes across that there's a huge gap of vocabulary, a huge gap of concepts that exist and have existed, but through erasure or under citation or exclusion, isn't available in a way that we can sort of pull people from easily.
- [10:37]
C
Here's the thing. The knowledge is available, but it's never brought to the surface. So to learn who grew up, who lived in your neighborhood 500 years ago, it's one Google search. There's actually. There's a map on the. On the US context, there's a map that you can search by zip code and you find out who lived in your zip code 500 years ago. So it's just one Internet search away. But this knowledge is never brought to us, which is my problem. For instance, architectural history. There was an expansion of the global reach of architectural history in the 19th century. We have a major book of global history written by Bennist Fletcher in England, late 19th century. And he was comfortable saying that the architecture of the ancient Americas is irrelevant to the point that a few lines are sufficient to describe its character. We are not comfortable with that anymore. We have expanded the scope of our histories. We teach architectural history in a much more global, much more inclusive way. But those other histories that are not Eurocentric or NATO centric, as I call them, to include the US in the 20th century, those histories don't come to the present. It's like, yes, there was this thing in the Mississippi Valley, but it's gone. There was this thing in Mexico, but it's gone. There was this thing in India, in Vietnam, in the Philippines, in China, but it's gone. No, they are not gone. They are here. They are just under the surface. And that's part of the problem, in my case, dedicated to the Americas, those special knowledges are still here. They just have no space to manifest.
- [12:43]
B
Yeah, that's a really good point. I like also that in the book you write about how those spatial knowledges have much more impact on what we might consider general architectural theory and history than we might think. Right. That there's actually more lines of influence and more directions of influence than we typically think of, but kind of shifting to and focusing on architecture specifically, since you're trained as an architecture, um, you write that architecture had a fundamental role in the erasure and exclusion of the Americas, but also that architecture as a profession would not have developed as it did if not for the invasion and occupation of the Americas. Which is a really, really. I mean, that's a huge point. Right. Can you speak more about this dynamic of architecture as both instrument and consequence of colonization and how it shifts our understanding away from what you call the diffusionist model of influence?
- [13:43]
C
Thank you, Kelvin. This is a important point for me, and I take credit for being the first scholar to make that connection and explore that connection. Architecture as a profession, as a practice, develop architecture as we know it today. There are many architectures, but what we today call architecture developed in Europe during the 16th century. They were systematized by treaties like Scamozi Palladio in the 16th century, Vignola. @ exactly the same time, the European kingdoms were conquering, invading and conquering the spaces of the Americas. Those two events have been dealt with separately until there was a body of knowledge developed in the first years of the 21st century. It started in the 1990s, but basically was developed in the 2000s and 2010s that we call decolonial theory. And those authors, they put together the the occupation of the Americas and the colonization of the Americas as the birth of modernity. And when I read that 15, 20 years ago, and I had the architectural theory on the back of my mind, I thought, wait, this is not a coincidence. Architecture was systematized as a process to control spaces from afar. And this afar can be in time or in space. We usually only deal with the controlled spaces afar in time. We design today what's going to be built in a year or more in the future. But it's exactly the same process that allowed London to control what was being built here in Philadelphia, where I am, in Boston, where you are, that allowed Madrid to control what was being built in Mexico. That allowed Lisbon to control what is being built in the Brazil that I grew up is the exact same process. This Systematization of spatial control is a process that gave birth to architecture and gave birth to colonization and modernization. So that is the. The connection that I made a few years ago. First publication was in 2020, that I have been exploring ever.
- [16:23]
B
Since. And I guess a corollary to that is that the body of knowledge that came from that, the birth of architecture as a profession, the theory and the history of the profession itself, has a lot more influences from colonization, from occupation, you know, really kind of redirecting the conceptual arrows that we typically think of. So you conclude the first section of the book with what you describe as the most polemical of all your arguments. And this I find really interesting. So you argued that American spaces directly influence the European baroque. So how did you come to this thesis and why do you think it's so.
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C
Polemical? It's polemical because no other scholar beyond Seth Alo professor in New York have yet acknowledged this counter influence. I found this moment very, very rich. It's the moment in which Europe is at war with itself because of Protestantism versus Catholicism. It's the moment of the 1550s to 1600. And it's the exact same moment that the Catholic priests, especially Jesuits, are in Mexico and Peru developing tools for converting the natives. So bear with me here, because it's a long explanation. First, the issue of Baroque as an urban theater. There was no urban theater in Europe before the 1580s, before the Catholic Consilium of Trent in 1580 that established the Baroque strategy as a strategy of reaffirming the Catholic faith. A danced the Protestants of the North. But there was urban theater in both Mexico and Peru before. Way before, in fact, When Dominicans and Jesuits got to Mexico City or the Central Valley of Mexico in the 1540s, 1550s, they developed a typology, a new typology in Christianity called open chapels. Then, the natives of Mexico, they did not like to go inside temples. They worship on big empty spaces outside of the temple. So the Catholic priests adapted to that and created chapels that are open that the liturgy, the priests and the officials, they stay in kind of a stage. And this stage is open to a large public space where the local people are watching as an audience to that spectacle. In 1580, the cardinals in Rome prohibited the construction of open chapels in Mexico. They called them heretic. At the same time, they adopted the idea of urban theater for the baroque strategy in Italy and in France and in Spain. So wait a minute. Those are exactly the same things. They took the idea of open theater from Mexico and Peru Peru is more the idea of the axis, that the urban axis is important. Mexico is the idea of the open theater. They took that, they brought it to Rome, they debated in the Catholic elites, the intellectual elites of Rome, and they decided to one repress this very manifestation in Mexico at the same time that they adopted it in Italy first, and then it went throughout south of Germany and France and Spain. There are very little literature on that. And what I have are those questions. As I said, the only other scholar that talks about that is Setha Lo when she talks about the Plaza Mayor in Madrid being a small copy of the Zocalo in Mezuro. But this is something that we should explore. I think. For me, for now, the question is sufficient. Let's see what we do with this.
- [21:06]
B
Question. I think that really embodies this approach of finding the dots, the one, the two and the three and the four, in space and in time, and then connecting them. Because I think when you lay it out that way, it feels very intuitive that things are happening in a certain sequence in time. We see them happening at a certain sequence in geography, and yet somehow there's not the literature in the foundation of history and theory as it's written today. So, yeah, that's really.
- [21:35]
C
Interesting. There are bits and pieces of evidence of that. Like scholars of the 18th century in the Protestant north, scholars in England, in Germany, they called the Baroque Jesuit style in order to diminish it and connect it to Catholic Counter Reformation. The interesting thing is that in the 16th and 17th century there were way more Jesuits in the Americas than in Rome. So if, again, if it's a Jesuit style, it is the style of the Americas. That's where they were. They were in Macau, they were in Goa, they were in Japan, but they were mostly in the Americas. So if it is a Jesuit style, as the 18th century Anglo Germanic scholars call them, it's an American.
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B
Style. Yeah, that's really fascinating. And I want to kind of shift a little bit to the methods that you use in the book because, you know, you're saying that there's bits and pieces of evidence that we can find, you know, whether it's in time, whether it's in space, whether it's in distribution of influence, like what you just talked about, the Jesuits. So you use a couple different methods in the book that I find really interesting. And to both make and communicate your arguments. Like in the first section, you do a lot of mapping of texts. You also use juxtaposition, inverting sentences and paragraphs, which I think is also Really, I hadn't seen that before, and I really like that also letting history whisper and embracing what you call patchworks and constellations of knowledge and of. Of content. Can you talk more about how you develop these methods and kind of how they work as a whole in this.
- [23:27]
C
Project? It's this. I. I did not created any of this. I. I borrowed it from what I call the colonial theory. What we call the colonial theory, because Valter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, they have done that. Enrique Du Cell, they have done that in the last 40 years a lot. And it's basically trying to avoid the traps of the methods that reinforce Eurocentrism. Like when you deal with comparison, for instance, when you compare, you are choosing one as the standard and the other as the not so good copy, the secondhand manifestation. When you juxtapose, there's less of a value judgment. It's not a comparison. I don't want to decide which one is the original, because again, as you mentioned in the beginning of our conversation, I don't believe in the diffusionist theory. I don't believe that things are developed in one place and then just transplanted to the other. Things are developed in the movement. Things are developed as ideas move, as people move, as concepts move. So things manifest differently in different places. So juxtaposing those different manifestations of architecture is a way to avoid the value judgment that is embedded in the idea of.
- [25:10]
B
Comparison. That makes a lot of sense. I love that the content of the book is also reflected in the methods, and vice versa. And that movement in this relationality is very much a core of the content of the book as well as the methods. But let's shift gears to the second section of the book, which is, as you say, are the aspirations of spatial theories. So in the second section of the book, you start by exploring spaces indigenous to the Americas through three categories. Humanized nature, materiality and embodiment. To propose what you call relational urbanism, to combat the erasure and exclusion that abstraction imposes. So how would you describe relational urbanism and how does it counteract.
- [25:57]
C
Abstractionism going back to the beginnings of arteta as a profession, the way that we work traditionally is by enforcing a very high degree of spatial abstraction. We take reality and we reduce reality to a certain set of registers in order to manipulate them. In the old days in the paper drawing, I was maybe the last generation trained in paper drawings. People who came five to 10 years after me are already completely proficient in computer drawings. But the process is still the same. You take reality and you abstract that into a certain set of lines, planes and points in order to manipulate them. That was the process developed in the 16th century. That is parallel to colonization, modernization. Now, the problem is, which variables are you selecting to be present in your drawing, in the set of variables that you are working with? Mostly we select variables that have to do with some kind of physical reality of the place, but things like memory, things like community value, those things are very hard to draw. And the method becomes the driver here. And we don't deal with memory and community relations because they are not easy to draw. So they are discarded. Now, inverting the logic here, they are discarded because we developed a method that have no space for them. So the question becomes, how do we bring them into the design studio process? How do we bring memory? How do we bring the body? How do we bring emotions into the design studio process? I think we are still taking baby steps on developing those ideas. And computer abstraction does not help. I mean, I have some hope that we might someday develop techniques to bring those knowledges into the design process. And maybe the digital realm can help. But so far, we just have doubled down on more and more abstraction, more and more distance between what we manipulate and the reality of those.
- [28:59]
B
Places. One thing I really appreciate in the book is the sort of weaving in of pedagogy that you bring into multiple places. In thinking about how the pedagogical aims of architecture education often reflect the, you know, the violences and the erasure and exclusion of the profession as a whole, but kind of on each individual student. So there's this kind of meta. There are meta processes at work. But I guess thinking about abstraction, one of the icons of abstraction is the grid. I was really fascinated by your conversation or your discussion of the. About the grid as not just a single entity, but as a. What you call a flexible and convenient device. So you bring up what you call counter histories of the grid. So what are these counter histories? And how do they change our understanding of the grid's role in colonization, but also colonization's role in the.
- [29:55]
C
Grid? So, again, if you read traditional architectural history, they all insist that the grid was invented in Greece by Thales de Milito, the designer urbanist, who laid out a city at the port of Athens at the Piraeus, a city that doesn't exist anymore. It's under the water there. But that narrative, that idea that the grid was invented in Greece doesn't fit reality because the Forbidden City in Beijing is on a grid. Tenochtitlan in Mexico was on a Grid. There were cities in the Andes that were on perfect grids. So the grid manifested in many different places on our planet in different moments. What I see in common is that the grid is a manifestation of power and control. Always, every time that a governing body wants to show off how powerful they are, they use the grid. So the Romans did it everywhere. They went around the Mediterranean, they implemented a Roman grid, the Cardo and the Tuminus, the different Chinese dynasties did when they wanted to show off their power. The Nahua in the central valley of Mexico did to impose their power. The Incas in the Andes had a different kind of grid, was not orthodont, was axial. They imposed axes that connect to the royal city of Cusco. From the entire empire. You have axes that connect to Cusco, kind of like what the Muslims do to Mecca. There's always. You have to know the geographical reference of Mecca in order to do your prayers. So the grid have always been used as a manifestation of power. And in the Americas, of course, it's exactly the same. When the Europeans arrived, first day Spanish, they implemented gridded cities. That was a military strategy of control. And then later on, the grid under the young United States and Thomas Jefferson became a blanket that cover the entire territory for issues of control and appropriation into a commercial, commoditizing kind of market. So, yeah, and we're still doing that. We're still building this very long axis in Saudi Arabia, right? That is a many, many miles long city. Again, a manifestation of.
- [33:07]
B
Control. And also, you know, bring it back to the pedagogical discussion. You know, oftentimes for, you know, when students start a project, one of the first things they do is they lay down a grid, right? Whether whether it's to analyze a site or whether to just set up the structural grid for something that, you know, there's there. The aspect of control and power is there from very beginning how we understand.
- [33:28]
C
Space. And one thing that is important to highlight is that it's not any grid. It's the orthogonal grid. We can create any kinds of grids based on curves, based on diagonals, based on a certain mathematical distortion. Any grid can be used as a basis for design. But we somehow equate the orthogonality of one kind of grid, choose something that is proper, something that is correct, and we even use the word the right angle. All the other ones are wrong. That one is the right angle, and that reduction is a way to serve power. We could have infinite numbers of grids to inspire our designs, but we choose to use 1. The 90 degree grid as the correct one and that has strong connections to arbitrariness and control and the implementation of power on our.
- [34:50]
D
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- [35:16]
A
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- [35:35]
B
California. And for delivery I want to shift gears a bit to other parts of the second section of the book, in which you discuss Frank Lloyd Wright, Juana Gorman, and Lucio Acosta and how they made sense of American spaces. You continue to talk about and focus on the work of Carmen Portino, Catherine Bower, Jane Jacobs, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown, and later discuss the role of CPAL liberation theology and pedagogy of the oppressed. And I'm kind of lumping all of these together because I think there are similar strategies. We don't have time to talk about each one of them specifically, but one sort of overarching argument that I took away from these chapters is that theorizing has been in great abundance in the Americas, even if much of it wasn't and still isn't recognized as such by the architectural establishment. So I'm wondering, is this your way of kind of closing the gap between theory and geography? Can you talk about your aims in these.
- [36:36]
C
Chapters? I think we so we have foundational texts about the Americas starting in the 20th century. We have the ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright, Hono Durban, Luther Kosta. Those three men were very important to help define certain aspects of the spaces of the Americas. For instance, the MOMA in New York being such a neurocentric museum, they have tremendous difficulty placing Frontal Right in their narrative. They never could. They never could. They don't know where Frontal Rite would fit because Frontal Rite would challenge their diffusionist theodocentric narrative. And then a few decades later you have those three women, right? It's important to highlight that they are three women Carmen Porcinio and Katherine Bauer back in the early 20th century, and then later Jane Jacobs and Denise Scott Brown. Those Four women. And they challenge those traditional modes of modernism. They challenge the result of those issues. Not so much Camin Porcinio and Kathleen Bauer, they were mostly early 20th century thinkers, but when you get to Jane Jacobs and Denise Scott Brown, they are using relational knowledges to challenge the abstraction of the 1960s plans. The Jane Jacobs in Manhattan and Denise Scott Brown here in Philly. Denise probably saved my neighborhood, right? You know, there was a plan to cut expressway on south street like a twin of the expressway on vine street up north. And that would completely ruin the entire neighborhood where I live. Here I am two blocks away from South Street. And what were they doing? They were challenging the ideas that you can only select a few variables, put them on the drawing board and solve the word. And they were saying, no, the word is way more complex than that. Now, both Denis Todd Brown and Jane Jacobs were here in the US In New England. Meanwhile, at the same time, there is this flourish of theories from the global South. The CEPO in Chile, liberation theology in Colombia, Peru in Brazil, and Paulo Freire, mostly in Brazil. And they were doing the same thing. They were bringing relational knowledges to a post war American centric world economic order that was disseminating poverty and inequality everywhere. So that's the basic of liberation theology. That's the basic of what Paulo Freire was doing. And the Seppala also more on the orthodox side of economics. But people from the cepal, like Celso Furtado and Anibo Quijanu, are very important tenets of decolonial theory. They laid the groundwork in the 1950s and 60s on economic analysis that later made possible the critique of NATO centric capitalism and how it was concentrating wealth in the north and impoverished in the global.
- [40:39]
B
South. Yeah, I want to pick up on that in the way you apply it, in kind of the way you conclude the second half of the book. So you think about knowledge and theories and these sort of foundations of knowledge in the Americas. So you conclude the second half of the book by arguing that what many call informal architecture, like favelas are actually territories of resistance, kind of recapturing a domestic or a space indigenous to the Americas, but using language of the Americas and theories of the Americas to describe and to theorize them. So I'm wondering, how did you develop this argument of the favelas as territories of resistance, and how do you see this redefinition as an important component of theorizing American.
- [41:29]
C
Spaces? So favelas as territories of resistance is not my idea. There is a lone body of Afro Brazilian literature that showed that the favelas are black spaces. And at the root of those black spaces is the resistance against an oppressive government, an oppressive economic order that extracts profit from black bodies. And it has always been there. And I explained a little bit in that chapter, the birth of the favelas in Brazil and how they were related to the end of slavery and the new mode of exploitation of non white bodies. My contribution to this debate is my problem with the term informal. I know that the term informal comes from economics, and it's about the economy that is not properly registered in the. In the books, in the. In the information bureaucracy of the state. Some economists argue, wrongly, that those informal economists don't pay taxes. That's wrong. They pay taxes. They pay a lot of taxes along the way. They're just not properly registered by the bookkeeping of the capitalist bureaucracy. Now this term has spilled over and has been applied to the built environment. And to me, this is very problematic because those buildings have form. Architecture is basically about creating form. When we name something informal, what we are doing, we are placing it outside the boundaries of architecture. This is not something that we care about, that's not something that we deal with. And I have run several studios taking students to Brazil to work with the favelas. And it's always fascinating the way that students manipulate that form. So they take the favela structures and they turn them into 3D models, and they start applying the traditional architectural methods to those structures. And the result is fascinating. Also, when you look at those buildings closely, you see that there is a material and economic structure to them. There is a certain components, ready made components that people buy on the Brazilian equivalent of a Home Depot. And those components are in every building. And they end up dictating the form of those buildings. It's economic strategy. Like those are the windows that are cheap, those are the slab components that are cheap, those are the cement blocks, the concrete blocks, and the ceramic blocks that are the cheapest. And those economic realities end up being the structure, the substructure of the form. And the buildings respond formally to those economic realities of the space available, the labor available, and the cheapest materials available. So I call them undrawn instead of calling them informal. Because what is missing in those spaces is the drawing. They are never drawn. They are not drawn before construction, they are not drawn after construction. There is no drawing. It's the absence of drawing. The absence of drawing is very problematic because there are lots of inefficiencies that are created by not drawing. Drawing is a tool for efficiency. And you can improve the layout of spaces, the ventilation, the lighting. You can optimize the materials just by anticipating those spaces on a drawing. But they are not built that way. So there's a lot of waste, there's a lot of problems, pathologies that come up by the absence of drawing. But if you remember that in the beginning of the book, in the first few chapters, I articulated drawing as a tool of control, as a manifestation of control, then my colleagues on the Afro Brazilian literature are absolutely right to claim that those spaces are spaces of resistance. They don't draw in part because the construction workers are not so proficient in drawing and in part as a strategy of resistance. To draw means to submit yourself to the rules and regulations of the state by not drawing. They are, in fact, I don't know if consciously or not, but they are, in fact rebelling against those regulations. Set bets, property taxes, boundaries. All of those things are being fought against by not.
- [47:18]
B
Drawing. It's a really nuanced point, and I really appreciate how you lay out that argument in the book. And part of me really wishes there were more drawings to look at in this chapter to see things. But I think that's also the heart of it, that it is. It's very formal. It is architecture, but it's not in the way that's normally sort of given to us as architectural knowledge or as architectural content. But so we kind of have to wrap things up just in the interest of time. But I'm wondering, so now, after this book, hey, what has been some of the response to it? And then how does that inform what you're working on.
- [48:06]
C
Next? So I think the response has been very positive. People have reached out to me to say how much they enjoyed the book and how much they were waiting for those books. The reviews on the academic journals have been very good. But as I expected, the reviews are positive, coming from the Americas, from India and from Africa. Europeans are not interested in this kind of dissolution of their centrality. And so they just don't respond. I went to England last year to present. But England is a special case because England as the U.S. the best universities, Cambridge, Newcastle, the Bartlett, they have faculty from all over the world. It's not the case in continental Europe. So the silence there, as I expected, is deafening. But that's not my audience. I didn't write the book for the Europeans. I wrote the book for the people of the Americas who need to engage with the spaces of the Americas in a more conscious.
- [49:24]
B
Manner. And I think that response is, you know, very illuminating also of. Of the aims and of the sort of framework in which you're. You're doing your work. You know, I think that's great. So, last question. What is a book that maybe you'd recommend to our listeners, whether related to your work or unrelated? Yeah. Any.
- [49:44]
C
Recommendations? I would strongly recommend the latest books by Arturo Escobar. Escobar is somebody that changed my knowledge, changed my worldview. His first book is from 1995. It's his PhD dissertation. I only read it 15 years later, like 2010, and it completely blew my mind on this relationship between modernization, colonization, and. Escobar was a professor at UNC Chapel Hill for many years. He is now retired. He's now emeritus, and he's writing about design. And his latest book, Design for the Pluriverse. And there is another one whose title I forgot in the moment, but he is engaging design as a tool for empowering communities to take control of their spaces and their political lives. So it's really, for me, it's really remarkable, and it fills my heart to see somebody so important on decolonial theory as Arturo Escobar writing about design and using design as an important tool for envisioning a better.
- [51:09]
B
World. All right, thank you so much, Fernando. On that note, thank you so much for talking with me today, and congratulations on the publication of the book. It's a really wonderful publication, really amazing project. It's been a pleasure talking with you.
- [51:23]
C
Today. Thank you, Kelvin. The pleasure was all mine, and our conversation will continue for.
- [51:28]
B
Sure. Yeah, I sure hope so. All right. And finally, thank you to the New Books Network and to all of our listeners. Until next time, please take care and enjoy.
- [51:37]
C
Reading.