Metaphors of modernity in photographs of argentines architectural magazines, 1929-1955

Abstract

This article focuses on the architecture photography analyzed in the pages of the Argentinean magazine Nuestra Arquitectura (Our Architecture) from its beginnings until 1955. The author maintains here that the discourse of these images – which regard photography as text – gathered together sufficient conditions so as to consolidate the beginning of the Modern Movement in the local context. This study is based on the communication mechanisms that facilitated the construction and spread of new codes, whose paradigmatic criteria took into account visual perception, space aesthetics and volume. They favored the shape of an architectural object over its habitability, and installed the form of an imaginary modernity.