Spatial Solidarities

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 University