2019 China Prize
High-Density Habitation: Urban Planning and Residential Building

The vast land of Latin America has undergone unprecedented renewals and changes in the past half century to respond to the rapidly growing population. While bringing infinite possibilities to the architectural culture of this vast region, there are of course challenges. As early as the twentieth century, Buenos Aires already attracted the attention of the world. During World War II, the development of many Latin American countries such as Mexico and Brazil seemed to provide an avant-garde vision for future cities and postwar reconstruction. The vision of the architectural culture development brought about by this largescale development can be inferred from the preface to Arthur Drexler's book, Latin American Architecture Since 1945, "The quality of current Latin American building exceeds our own, the appearances there of predominantly 'modern' cities gives us the opportunity to observe effects, which we ourselves still only anticipate."

However, the rapid expansion of the population in Latin American cities made it a symbol of extreme urban ills—lack of security, extreme and deep-rooted poverty, rampant temporary housing and shanty towns, poor infrastructure, and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor—in the decades after World War II. This background not only made Latin America's many cities embark on the road of exploring new planning ideas, but also undoubtedly made the 1950s and 1980s a very experimental era for Latin American housing. People often forget that in the 1950s the region was declared a hopeful sign of a better future.

Perhaps the ideas of specific planning and design goals in Latin American projects during this historical period are far from the economic and social conditions of the twenty-first century, but both the lessons and the advantages that can be learned are worthy for today’s architects. In response to the surge in urban population density and the rapid development of cities, there may be differences in economic and social backgrounds in different regions, but the consideration of space, the discussion of housing demands, the traditional culture, and the response to climate are fundamental. And without doubt, more than half a century of architectural experiments in Latin America have brought us the history of architectural heritage and provided material for contemporary reassessment.