(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2015-12-18) Huapaya, José Carlos
The exceptional professional career of Peruvian architect and urbanist Eduardo Neira Alva (1924-2005) was not only limited to Peru. Between 1960 and 1980, Neira worked with important Latin American institutions created to promote economic development in the countries of the region such us the Center of Development Studies (Cendes), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES). The positions he held enabled him to know professionals from several countries and different ways and methods used to promote economic development in each reality. The main purpose of this article is to understand the development of his ideology and his contributions in Latin America. To do so, this research analyzes the most representative texts that Neira wrote in the aforementioned professional contexts (including both published and unpublished works) between 1961 and 1998. These texts reveal his eagerness to understand the link between architecture and human habitat, and his concern to «expand scales», from regional development to territorial planning, and discuss issues that had not been discussed before, such as eco-development.
(Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2015-12-18) Saldarriaga, Alberto
Thomas Reed, who was born in 1817 in the Tortola Island, in the Caribbean, and passed away in Daule, Ecuador in 1878, worked as an architect and engineer in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador between 1843 and 1878. Most of his works were requested by the governments of these three countries, and some of them are renowned for their exceptional quality at the time. That is why his name always appears in textbooks regarding the history of architecture in the 20th century in these three countries, and in each of them he is appreciated in a different way.
Thomas Reed was an architect of his time with a solid academic background. He was also a talented engineer, well versed in structural principles and management of materials. Among his works, the most exceptional ones include the San Pablo Theater in Caracas, which was never built; the National Capitol and the former Panopticon, which is now the National Museum of Colombia in Bogotá; the Panopticon and School of Fine Arts in Quito, and the Jambelí Bridge in Ecuador. His work, inspired on the historicism of the 19th century, does not reflect nostalgia, but rather the way of thinking during his time. The historical time of his work is the present.
