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Utopías Construidas: Las unidades vecinales de Lima

Article  in  Planning Perspectives · September 2018

DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2018.1523834

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 Planning Perspectives

ISSN: 0266-5433 (Print) 1466-4518 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rppe20

Utopías Construidas: Las unidades vecinales de

Lima

Héctor Abarca

To cite this article: Héctor Abarca (2018) Utopías Construidas: Las unidades vecinales de Lima,
Planning Perspectives, 33:4, 681-682, DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2018.1523834

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 PLANNING PERSPECTIVES 681

transnational flow of planning ideas, contributes to the literature and suggests new perspectives into the
study of the history of urban planning in North Africa.

Nazan Maksudyan
Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany
nazan.maksudyan@zmo.de http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0918-7807
© 2018 Nazan Maksudyan
https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2018.1523839

Utopías Construidas: Las unidades vecinales de Lima, by Sharif S. Kahatt, Lima, Fondo
Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2015, 520 pp., 28 US$ (paperback)

Peruvian modern architecture usually has been out of the scholar’s radar, as it has not produced promi-
nent world figures or projects of interest to glossy magazines. Nevertheless, there is an area where Per-
uvian modernism took the lead: public housing policies. In Utopías Construidas Sharif Kahatt revisits four
iconic housing developments built between 1945 and 1975 to explain the progressive ideals of Peruvian
public housing. In a developing society like Peru, the mere existence of these housing complexes would
constitute a built utopia; Kahatt goes beyond this point to state that these projects challenged the conven-
tional views of modernity, rejection of tradition, history, and the machine-like aesthetic products of
industrialization and capitalism to set their own principles.
Kahatt starts rebuffing Ramón Gutiérrez’s idea Latin American architecture as a modernism without
modernity.1 For Kahatt, the region’s modernity cannot be understood following the European experience.
Building upon Néstor García Canclini‘s Hybrid Cultures, Kahatt looks at Latin American modern culture
as a continuous process of negotiation between past and present, localism and internationalism, tradition
and contemporaneousness; ideas that were later expanded to the architectural field by Felipe Hernán-
dez.2,3 Kahatt makes use of the hybridization hypothesis to explain the discourse of the Peruvian modern
project through the study of the ‘Built Utopias.’
Peruvian President Fernando Belaúnde (in office 1963–68 and 1980–85), an architect, graduated from
the University of Texas at Austin, built his political career promoting low-income housing in the mid-
forties when he gained a seat in the parliament and decades later the presidency of Peru. He was an advo-
cate of affordable public housing from the pages of his own magazine El Arquitecto Peruano (1937–1977),
passed legislation creating the Peruvian National Housing Strategy, structured after CIAM’s Athens
Charter’s four-functions of the city, and promoted the principles of the neighbourhood unit and the gar-
den city. For his plans, he borrowed from Walter Gropius, Martin Wagner and their Harvard students’
12-point neighbourhood unit plan outside Boston (Architectural Forum; July, 1943). The formal endor-
sement of Richard Neutra and Paul Lester Wiener during their lecture tours to Peru gave momentum to
Belaúnde’s ideas. While Neutra, Wiener and Josep Lluis Sert’s visits have been already documented,
Kahatt’s highlights their high importance to Peru: research shows that the creation of the Institute of
Urbanism of Peru was a direct consequence of Wiener lectures (p. 97). One of the extraordinary merits
of this book is Kahatt’s archival work, including the personal papers and collections of Neutra, Sert,
Wiener, Gropius, the CIAM (at Harvard and ETH Zurich), and Le Corbusier Foundation, enriching
the history of Peruvian and Latin American architecture.
1
Gutiérrez, Arquitectura latinoamericana en el siglo XX.
2
García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures.
3
Hernández, “On the Notion of Architectural Hybridisation in Latin America,” 77–86.
 682 BOOK REVIEWS

Kahatt explores the two failed attempts to establish a CIAM Peru group, Sert’s proposal for a CIAM 8
in Lima, and Belaúnde’s plea to discuss housing as a human right in CIAM 7 (Bergamo). The correspon-
dence between Peruvian and CIAM architects reveals the strategies Peruvian professionals developed for
their own narrative conscious of their advancements in the international scene. The ‘first built utopia’ was
Unidad Vecinal Nro. 3 (UV3), the first neighbourhood unit built in Latin America and one of the first in
the world. Belaúnde called it the cheerful city (ciudad risueña). Kahatt labelled it ‘bucolic modernism’ for
its measured no-frills and low-tech construction. UV3 faithfully reprises the democratic intentions of
Clarence Stein’s Radburn Idea as well as the financing structure and aim for self-governance. Its hybrid
nature did not permit its fall for the sharp lines of a German Siedlung or the crisp look of Brazilian mod-
ernism, their closest modern referents.
The second built utopia was the Unidad Vecinal Matute, one of the Peruvian entries in MoMA’s 1955
exhibition Latin American Architecture Since 1945. This truly modern development of walk-up buildings
on stilts was left incomplete for more than a decade as housing policies officially shifted from fully
equipped neighbourhood units to the provision of site and services as a way to cope with the explosive
growth of informal settlements in Lima. Kahatt tells us that Fernando Belaúnde knew about aided self-
help housing in Puerto Rico during his 1951 visit, years before John F. C. Turner, William Mangin and
Colin Ward popularized these ideas. Belaúnde’s response to the new official housing strategy was the
sponsorship of a design competition of an affordable bungalow (La Casa Barata, 1955) that brought sol-
utions that incorporated the principles of prefabrication, affordability and capacity for growth. A project
that planted the seeds for what would become the UN PREVI Experimental Housing Project, Kahatt’s
fourth built Utopia.
The author’s four utopias have in common the neighbourhood unit as the minimum housing com-
ponent and the desire to incorporate the most advanced innovations in housing design of their time.
As an example we can look at Residencial San Felipe (1962–69), the third utopia. The original project
(partially built) meant to incorporate ‘Streets on the Sky,’ just like Alison and Peter Smithson proposed
at the Golden Lane competition of 1952. After reading Kahatt’s account it is difficult to understand why
there was little faith in the success of housing strategies besides Belaúnde’s and his cohort. However, the
author reminds us that Latin American culture is hybrid, and at times, as Mexican writer Octavio Paz
explained, modernity can suddenly vanish only to abruptly reappear again.
In Utopías Construidas Sharif Kahatt not only sheds new light on the study of Peruvian modernity, as
well gives it a new stature in relation to the regional context. Utopías Construidas is meant to become a
sourcebook for future research in Peruvian and Latin American studies.

Bibliography
García Canclini, Néstor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1995 [1989].
Gutiérrez, Ramón. Arquitectura latinoamericana en el siglo XX. Barcelona: Lunwerg editors, 1998.
Hernández, Felipe. “On the notion of architectural hybridisation in Latin America.” The Journal of Architecture 7, no. 1
(2002): 77–86.

Héctor Abarca
Architect AIBC
hrabarca@yahoo.com
© 2018 Héctor Abarca
https://doi.org/10.1080/02665433.2018.1523834

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