Spatial Solidarities
Architecture and Resistance in 1970s Chile
Will be published approx. on 8. December 2026
Book
Hardback
296 pages
978-0-8229-4921-3 (ISBN)
Description
Between 1973 and 1990, the authoritarian military dictatorship of Chile maintained its control through a network of detention and torture centers designed to create fear and isolation. Spatial Solidarities illuminates how architects, artists, activists, and other political agents resisted the Chilean regime through spatial practices. Within these spaces, prisoners responded creatively: producing drawings, performances, and architectural projects; rearranging their bodies and living areas; and connecting through songs, shadows, and mutual care. They collected resources, created systems of mutual aid, and smuggled out site plans and names to expose the regime's crimes. Some imagined their detention centers as free towns, reversing the logic of imprisonment through theatrical acts. These cultural responses, Ana Maria Leon argues, are forms of spatial solidarity-acts of connection, care, and imagination. By focusing on spatial history, Leon reclaims the experiences of the disappeared through the spaces they shaped, conveying how architecture can be a tool for resistance, justice, and collective survival.
Reviews / Votes
Spatial Solidarities is unique, well argued, and covers an important blind spot in the scholarship, dislocating several tenets of our canon and expanding the normative definition of architecture in ways that are very much needed today. -- Fernando Luiz Lara, University of Pennsylvania A remarkable and deeply original contribution, Spatial Solidarities offers a compelling new perspective on the spatial configuration of power in Pinochet's Chile. Through its nuanced account of bodily practices and subtle material gestures of resistance, the book powerfully shows how observing creativity and poetic action are indispensable both to an architectural understanding of space and to imagining fissures within violent spatial orders. -- Amari Peliowski, Universidad de Chile Ana Maria Leon's study of built environments such as torture centers, prison camps, and holding cells deepens our understanding of how the Pinochet dictatorship consolidated power through state violence while also illuminating how victims of human rights crimes developed forms of resistance to survive. Clearly written and well-argued, Spatial Solidarities will appeal to scholars of architecture, Latin America, and human rights. -- Eden Medina, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Spatial Solidarities takes the reader on a vivid architectural journey through the violence of the Pinochet dictatorship, a journey at once heartbreaking in its accounts of brutality and heartening in recovering creative acts of resistance and solidarity under extreme duress. Tying social and political histories of Chile firmly to spaces of detention, torture, and murder, Ana Maria Leon synthesizes a vast and important literature for Anglophone audiences. -- Felicity Dale Scott, Columbia UniversityMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Pittsburgh PA
United States
Illustrations
72 b&w illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 254 mm
Width: 178 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-8229-4921-3 (9780822949213)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Ana Maria Leon is associate professor of architecture in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. She is the author of Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet's Dreams for Buenos Aires and A Ruin in Reverse / Bones of the Nation.