• Título:  VUELO AL PORVENIR! HENRY KLUMB Y TORO-FERRER. PROYECTO MODERNO Y ARQUITECTURA COMO VITRINA DE LA DEMOCRACIA (PUERTO RICO, 1944-1958)
• Autor:  RODRÍGUEZ LÓPEZ, LUZ MARIE
• Universidad:  Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya
• Departamento:  COMPOSICIÓN ARQUITECTÓNICA
• Fecha de Lectura:  13/06/2008
• Programa de doctorado:  TEORIA I HISTORIA DE L'ARQUITECTURA
• Dirección: 
  • ÁLVAREZ PROZOROVICH, FERNANDO-VICTORINO    (Director)
• Tribunal: 
  • PÉREZ ESCOLANO, VÍCTOR    (presidente)
  • MONTANER MARTORELL, JOSÉ MARÍA    (secretario)
  • SILVESTRI, GRACIELA    (vocal)
  • GUERRA, ABILIO    (vocal)
  • USANDIZAGA CALPARSORO, MIGUEL    (vocal)
• Descriptores: 
  • HISTORIA DE LA ARQUITECTURA
• Localización:  BIBLIOTECA RECTOR GABRIEL FERRATÉ
• Resumen:
  This thesis questions the architectural works from the standpoint of their capacity to define an architectural other. It tries to understand the articulations between discourses, space, architecture, and image that defined the construction of "modernity" in Puerto Rico. Taking into account that a governmental architecture, or one sponsored by the government, and inscribed in the colonial treads can be nothing but political, it revises modernity's official project in the island by way of specific architectural case studies. Inasmuch as unquestionably, cultural forms, especially those developed in colonial, post-colonial and/or neocolonial timeframes, are hybrid, architecture is not exempt form being as well, an impure discursive genre which, as a document with a strong communicational force, becomes a text that allows for interrogation. That way, we face modern architecture in Puerto Rico -as a text- from an interdisciplinary strategy highly influenced by Post-Colonial Theory, Subaltern Studies, and Colonial Discourse Studies. This work's time scope starts in 1943 with denunciatory critiques to the colonial administration in North-American magazines such as Harper's and Life, and ends in 1958 with the exhibition in Times Magazine of the showcase or "democracy'S laboratory in Latin America" in which the island had transformed itself. From the North-American hegemonic dynamics, and in its function as conciliator between "antagonistic" cultures, Puerto Rico produced images -some of them architectural- which activated interpretations from the standpoint of its role as bridge, were part of the democratic discourse, as well as of the structure of domination that the United States aimed towards the other America. Contrary to regionalist readings, analysis bases on colonial criticism insist on the tensions arisen from cultural difference and the negation of the subaltern. On the other hand, since they emerge form a rhizomatic structure, they allow for analysis within more expansive contexts. For that reason we propose a revision of architecture from the concept of hybridity. Projects from the Committee on Design of Public Works, Henry Klumb, and the architectural firm of Toro y Ferrer will serve as case studies. The projects of the Committee on Design of Public Works for the rural zones of Puerto Rico, from Richard Neutra and Klumb, have been studied under the regionalist rubric. This research focuses on them form another historical-theoretic-critical view placing them as initiators or transitions towards a hybrid architectural production. The analysis of the Caribe Hilton hotel by Toro, Ferrer y Torregrosa, confronts the tropicalist and the internationalist discourse from a colonial dynamic that defined a mimetic-hybridist attitude and drew a milestone for identification. The Master Plan and the Student Service Center at the University of Puerto Rico, by Henry Klumb, are studied from the standpoint of the dialect. Some parallelisms between the architect and his mentor, Frank Lloyd Wright, are pointed out to allow for a theoretical approach that set forth a tropical version of organic architecture but also, subscribes it to a paradoxical and ambivalent expressiveness of the democratic freedom discourse within a colonial state. From the working standpoint of hybridism, it must be argued, that there were local Operations -economic, political, cultural- that pretended to direct and activate "modernity". The hybrid works that stem form them, fed from ambivalence and contradiction; that way, apart from translating ideologies, they defined a place that justified their media purpose as showcases, while openning an in-between space, ambivalent, that allowed at the same time, to re-present otherness, or negate it in such cases where the intention was to underline sameness.