Ana María León

Professor León will be on leave for the academic year 2018-2019.

I am trained as both an architect and an architecture historian. My research focuses on the intersection of modernity, pedagogy, and politics in art and architecture, with special emphasis on networks between the Americas and Europe. My current project examines the housing projects of Catalan architect Antonio Bonet in Buenos Aires as mediators between the avant-garde’s fascination with the unconscious and the state’s mandate to control the crowds.

I have worked on the intersection of pedagogy and politics in Latin American art and architecture, particularly in the influence of the participatory discourse of Marxist pedagogue Paulo Freire in the work of artist Lygia Clark and architect Vilanova Artigas in São Paulo, and in the Open City architecture school in Valparaíso. A second theme that connects my research is the translation of ideas across distant sites, as a consequence of migration or exile. I have traced these changes in the movement of Lina Bo Bardi from Italy to Brazil, and in the contrasting interpretations of Aldo Rossi’s ideas by Peter Eisenman in New York and Marina Waisman in Buenos Aires. Finally, I’m interested in public space as the ground were states and their constituents come into contact. I compare the “publicity” of the Plaza of Three Cultures in Tlatelolco in 1968 with the more recent acampadas at Parasol Metropol. I consolidated my interest in public space as the site of dissensus in thresholds 41, the journal of the MIT Department of Architecture, which I edited under the theme REVOLUTION! The issue argues for the capacity of architects, artists, curators, and historians to take a critical stance in the reformulation of the commons.

Affiliation(s)

• Romance Languages and Literatures
• Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning

Award(s)

• Graham Foundation Research Grant for the project: Counter-institutions: Producing Pedagogies of Freedom (2018)
• SAH Edilia and François-Auguste de Montêquin Junior Fellowship (2015)
• JAE Best Scholarship of Design Article Award 2014 for “Prisoners of Ritoque”
• MIT HTC C.C. Royal Fund Finishing Grant (2013-2014)
• MIT Schlossman Research Fellowship (2011)
• Harvard GSD Gerald McCue Medal (2001)
• Fulbright-LASPAU Scholarship (1998-1999)

Field(s) of Study

• Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Architecture and Art in the Americas and Europe
• History and Historiography of Architecture and Urban Planning
• Participatory Politics, Pedagogies, and Public Space