Prof. Fabiola López-Durán's fascinating work on eugenics in architecture is currently on display at CIVA Brussels in Sick Architecture, an exhibition curated by Princeton University’s Beatriz Colomina that examines how architecture and illnesses have always been tightly intertwined.
The exhibition is also accompanied by a series of essays on e-flux Architecture with Prof. López-Durán contributing, “Fantasies of Whiteness,” an insightful read that can be viewed online.
Learn more about Prof. López-Durán’s research and display on “Eugenic Architecture”:
“In the early twentieth century, eugenics moved from the realms of medicine and law to architecture, landscape design, and urban planning, becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity in the newly formed nation-states of Latin America. Physicians and architects on both sides of the Atlantic participated in a global strategy of social engineering, legitimized by science. The documents presented on display reveal the ideological trajectory of architects Alfred Agache, Lúcio Costa, and Le Corbusier, all of whom deployed architecture as a means to perfect and whiten the Brazilian population. Whole landscapes, demonized because they housed Black communities and immigrants of color, were flattened in an effort to implement idealized urban plans and buildings for a new, white population. Race was the main tool in the geopolitics of space, and racism was and remains, an ideology of progress.”
Sick Architecture is a collaboration between Beatriz Colomina, e-flux Architecture, CIVA Brussels, and the Princeton University Ph.D. Program in the History and Theory of Architecture.
Prof. López-Durán is an associate professor of art history whose teaching focuses on the history and theory of modern and contemporary European and Latin American art and architecture. Her most recent book, Eugenics in the Garden: Architecture, Medicine and Landscape from France to Latin America in the Early Twentieth Century, investigates a particular strain of eugenics that, at the turn of the twentieth century, moved from the realms of medicine and law to design, architecture, and urban planning—becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity.
[Images: Fabiola López-Durán, Installation of “Eugenic Architecture” in Sick Architecture. 2022. CIVA Brussels.]