Q&A: Fernando Lara, Professor of Architecture

Professor of Architecture Fernando Lara joined the faculty at Weitzman this fall, after teaching at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan. Over the last 20 years, Lara has written four books and numerous articles on theorizing spaces of the Americas with an emphasis on the dissemination of design ideas beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries. In an interview, he describes his interest in the ways that the creation of abstraction in architecture aligned with the colonialist expansion of European cultures, and the lessons that can be applied from this history to architectural education today.

You are known as an architectural historian, but a core part of your research has focused on looking at structures beyond buildings designed by famed architects. 

This has been a thread in my career for 20 years. For my PhD dissertation, which became my first book [The Rise of Popular Modernist Architecture in Brazil], I analyzed the phenomena of how the middle class in Brazil took the vocabulary of famous buildings by elite architects and applied it to their homes. These houses, which were being designed by contractors and even construction workers, were imitating modern architecture. This began in the 1950s at the facade level, and then about a decade later, even the internal organization of homes started to change.

At that time, canonical scholarship was not very interested in this work of mine. As a PhD student, I had a few encounters with senior professors who would tell me, "Why are you wasting your time studying something that is not designed by architects?" It was a difficult start to my career, but now I feel like this work was a major asset in forming the way that I see the world, and how I see architecture. I think that every piece of the built environment is architecture. I want to study the totality of the built environment, and not only buildings designed by architects.

You also have written about the role of abstraction in architecture, linking it to history of colonialist expansion of European influence throughout the world. What does abstraction mean in this context?

After a decade as a Latin Americanist, I started working more and more with decolonial theories, a body of scholarship that mostly comes from Latin America, with contributions from Africa and South Asia. An important tenet of decolonial theory scholarship is that modernization and colonization are one and the same—one does not exist without the other. Architecture scholarship has celebrated modernization, while trying to avoid the issues of colonization.

Looking at architecture’s role in all this, I see that abstraction is a tool for controlling spaces far away in space or in time. As architects, we manipulate spaces that will be built by somebody else in the future. We also use abstraction as a tool to control spaces far away geographically. Spatial abstraction is a process of distancing. We take a distance from the object, using tools and techniques to separate ourselves from the object, so that they can be manipulated. Historically, abstraction relates to the systematization of the design process in the 16th century, paralleling the European occupation of the Americas. With spatial abstraction, London could control New England, or Madrid could control Mexico. Architecture as we know it is integral to that process.

One result of what I call the overdoses of abstraction are the two emergencies of the 21st century: the growing emergence of social inequality and the impact of climate change. I don’t think we can solve those with more abstraction. Instead, we need to enhance relational processes that will shorten these distances, serving as a kind of antidote. I've been writing lately about these antidotes to spatial abstraction. There are many ways to bring these about in the design process, including participatory processes and community-engaged dynamics.

For instance, almost all schools of architecture treat the student as a tabula rasa, ignoring their previous understanding of space, in an attempt to teach them anew what is a porch, what is a window. We need to calibrate this pedagogy. This dislocation is important to push architecture further, to encourage innovation. But too much abstraction creates an irreconcilable distance between our knowledge and the needs of most communities. Things that are hard to measure like emotion, history, and affection are needed in this “calibration” of spatial abstraction.

Those relational processes of design have a long history, almost completely erased in the so-called West but very much alive in the rest of the world. We need to foreground knowledges from the global South and from Asia that have been excluded from traditional architectural scholarship, for example knowledges from China, from India, from many different parts of Africa, from indigenous peoples of the Americas. These need to be brought back into our understanding of our built environment.

Your interest in built-environment processes extends to urban planning. You’ve written about the ways that urban policy and planning have been used to expand civil rights for communities, but also can be to used worsen inequalities in cities. Can you tell us about your 2022 book Street Matters: A Critical History of Twentieth-Century Urban Policy in Brazil?

My latest book, Street Matters, is the result of collaborative research with Professor Ana Paula Koury [of Universidade São Judas and Mackenzie University] in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2012 and 2013, we were investigating participatory processes that we felt should be brought into the planning process in urban design, to show inequalities and exclusions in urban planning. Then, in 2013, while we were in the middle of the research process, there was an explosion of protests in Brazil. These protests became the basis of the book.

Historically, there was a literature of urban design and urban planning in Brazil. And there was a second literature of the history of social protests, movements, and organizations. Those two literatures barely touched each other. Looking at them together, we saw many points of contact, points in which social protests pushed some kind of decision from planners and designers. We also saw points in which planners and designers either walked towards more exclusion and, also, when they embraced activating processes that were able to mitigate and improve the lives of the working class and the lower classes in Brazil. We decided to go back more than 100 years to talk about these moments.

The book highlights several moments where the literature of social movements is very connected to the literature on city planning. For example, the wage gains of Lula da Silva’ first term (2003 – 2010) were erased by a real estate boom that pushed people further away from well-serviced areas. No wonder the protests of 2013 were sparked by a bus rate increase.

What’s your next book project?

The first half of my next book is an analysis of how Eurocentric our own discipline has been. The second half of the book describes moments in the history of the Americas where scholars from the Americas articulated important thoughts about our built environment. “America” here is understood as the entire continent, native Brazilian, native Canadians, native Chileans, the Mapuche, the Xingu, the societies of the Great Lakes.

I move on to documenting colonial-era inventions and developments, for instance, in Mexico where Jesuit priests invented a new typology called an open church. It's a church with no main front wall, a roof resting on columns, that is open to the fields. Priests used this as a way to convince the native Nahua population that they should follow Jesus Christ and Catholicism. The book follows similar moments. I talk about Frank Lloyd Wright and his concepts related to land. There's a chapter on Denise Scott Brown arguing that after Learning from Las Vegas in the early 1970s, we should talk about Scott Brown and Venturi – not the other way around. Her ideas after that book are always more prominent than his ideas. Throughout, I am talking about spaces that are not about abstraction, that are not about following the grid. They are much more relational, and therefore they resist the coloniality of the modern state. I think spaces like these should have more prominence in the discussion of the built environment of the Americas. We don't know enough about our own cities.

How are you finding life in Philadelphia, and at Penn?

The intellectual life at Penn has been amazing, as I expected. What has been beyond my expectations is how much I am enchanted by Philadelphia. I am afraid that someday the honeymoon will end, but right now it is an absolute delight. I live close to Fitler Square, so it takes me 22 minutes to walk to Meyerson Hall. I am enjoying driving less and walking more. We have a car, that I park somewhere on the street— sometimes I even forget where.

Walking in Philadelphia, I am, of course, looking at the architecture. Already, buildings I have seen by Frank Furness and Louis Khan are contributing to my understanding of the Americas, along with Scott Brown and Venturi buildings. I am really looking forward to incorporating the built environment of the place I now live into my reflections and questions.

I should add that I am a big sports fan, so being in Philly has been great. I grew up with soccer, but I also love basketball. Becoming immersed in this city’s sports culture here is a plus. Last year, my family and I were already in the process of moving to Philadelphia when three teams were runner ups—soccer, baseball, and football. This year I hope that one of them will come in first.