Ana María León

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. Additional research 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.

Selected Publications

Edited Volumes

thresholds 41: REVOLUTION! The Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture, editor (Cambridge: SA+P Press, 2013).

In the Distance: *research-in-progress 2010 Proceedings of the Graduate School Conference, editor with Alla Vronskaya (Cambridge: Puritan Press, 2011).

Peer-Reviewed Articles

“Prisoners of Ritoque: The Open City and the Ritoque Concentration Camp,” Journal of Architectural Education 66:1 (Fall 2012): 84-97. Excerpt reprinted in The Public School for Architecture (Brussels: Common Room, 2015). Reprinted in The Architectural Review Academic Annual (London: AR, 2015).

“Lygia Clark: Between Spectator and Participant,” thresholds 39: Inertia (Cambridge, SA+P Press, 2011): 45-53.

“The Boudoir in the Expanded Field,” Log 11 (Winter 2008): 68-82.

Conference Proceedings

“Sites of Occupation: From Tlatelolco to Metropol Parasol,” in Whose Participation? Mechtild Widrich and Martino Stierli, eds. (forthcoming London: IB Tauris, 2015).

“Translating Rossi: From Buenos Aires to New York,” in Aldo Rossi, la storia di un libro: L’architettura della città, dal 1966 ad oggi, Fernanda De Maio, Alberto Ferlenga, Patrizia Montini Zimolo, eds. (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2014).

“Designing Dissent: Vilanova Artigas and the São Paulo School of Architecture,” in Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, Ines Weizman, ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), 74-88.

Affiliation(s)

• History of Art
• Romance Languages and Literatures
• Taubman College of Architecture and Planning
  

Award(s)

• 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