The distant gaze. The image of Latin American architecture in the international media after World War II

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782) said that "the great defect of Europeans consists in always philosophising about the origins of things according to what happens around them". Thus, early histories of modern architecture presented it as a movement born in Europe, transferred to the United States and, from both nodes, radiated to the rest of the world as an adaptation of the original. This paper reviews the evolution of the image of architecture in Latin American countries through its presence in European and American magazines after World War II. Based not only on the periodicals, but also on their interaction with contemporary catalogues and books, we will cover three decades of changes and analyse the different approaches of the receiving countries, in an attempt to locate and explain the great moments that took place in the dissemination of Latin American modern architecture.