Arquitecturas híbridas de culturas híbridas, el caso de Quito en el siglo XX

Resum

The history of Latin American cultural phenomena had its first stories from the countries that had predominance over the media and the hegemonic circles of dissemination of messages and ideas. This created, in the Ecuadorian case, a foreign vision of local processes. This situation not only created distortions in the knowledge of history, but also simplified complex and particular phenomena and, therefore, failed to define them clearly enough. This document is added to a set of investigations that seek to review the historiography of architecture in Latin America and that, on several occasions, have managed to understand the cases of the region with greater fidelity and recognition of their specific features. The thesis is based on the postulate of "Hybrid Cultures" described by Néstor García Canclini in the year 1990 in the homonymous book. This definition allows us to understand the ways in which foreign cultural influences nested in Quito, merged with the local ones and produced an architectural project language that combined concepts, strategies and compositional values, reconfiguring the starting notions of the original proposals for local new ones. The research specifically studies the case of Quito between the years 1940 to 1970, a period in which the university education of architecture in the city was formalized. Moment in which the first qualified architects in the city began to exercise their profession in a kind of collective laboratory that sought an innovative message in a city of traditional thought. In this effervescent context, the local Modern Movement emerged with unique characteristics, expanding the catalog of local resources for adapting cultural influences. Within the structure of the thesis, the agents that affect the decisions of the architectural project are examined in three families: Condition, Situation and Option. These analyze the territory of Quito, its characters and their decisions on the construction of the city from a concatenated approach, not in a chronological or linear way, but from a system of interactions of the actors and their influences. Subsequently, the hybridization codes that analyze the strategies with which the architecture of the Modern Movement was produced in the city of Quito are declared. These codes allow diagnosing the result of a powerful conjuncture between the professionalization of the first generation of local architects, the modest technological development in the Modern Movement of Quito at the hands of unusual immigrants, and a social behavior of adaptation of the foreign with a postcolonial logic. , achieving a singular, complex and relevant phenomenon. Finally, multiple products related to the thesis are presented that have allowed the dissemination of research at the local and regional level.