INMUNDO: ARCHITECTURAL METAPHORS FROM THE EDGE OF THE WORLD Ingrid Quintana Guerrero – University of Los Andes Abstract The metaphor used by Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos for referring to his country as “an island surrounded by ground” reveals not only the geographic condition of Paraguay (as it lacks a coastline) but also its isolation from the rest of the Southern Cone, in economic and cultural terms. Actually, there are two coexisting systems of reasoning in its territory: the official one, following the canons of the Western World, and the aboriginal one, totally ignored by neighboring countries. These differences would also explain the country’s disconnection with architectural discourses on local modernity and critical regionalism in Latin America. That is why in 2014, Paraguayan architect Javier Corvalán published an article titled “Un fin del mundo: fragmento del libro negro”, which aimed to contextualize his country’s contemporary architecture. The publication coincides with the recent international interest on Paraguay´s architectural production. In his text, Corvalán compared the mundus to the Inmundo, a Latin voice used for defining everything unrelated to the mundus system (enclosed by the walls of the urbs). As the meaning given to the “inmundo” term in Spanish is “unclean”, the Guaraní meaning of Inmundo could be fundamental for decoding architectural practices in Paraguay. This chapter discusses the notion of Inmundo not only as a metaphor to understand Paraguayan architecture but also as a possible framework for other metaphors supporting the emerging architectural production in similar South American countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia – countries which frame a theoretical “edge of the world” –. Due to the relevance of oral tradition and the role of the architect as a builder, metaphors become a didactic tool for communicating the meanings and execution processes of the architectural project in these countries. Keywords: Latin American Contemporary Architecture; Javier Corvalán; Paraguayan Idiosyncrasy; meta-metaphor Introduction Metaphors have been frequently used for baptizing geographic places: in the Americas, European colonizers appealed to this figure for relating their worldview to the untold landscapes revealed before their eyes. For this reason, today, several hills in the territory occupied by South American cities are called pan de azúcar (sugar bread) or panecillo (little bread); Brazil got this name because the bandeirantes compared its red-colored lands to the pigment of an Asian tree whose wood was widely appreciated in Portugal: the pau brasil. Later, metaphors also served to characterize young cities and countries, connecting them with urban images of the Old World: for instance, “Venezuela” is the name Columbus’ crew gave the territory currently occupied by that country, a possible deformation of Venizuela (little Venice), due to the pile-dwellings standing across its lands. Even local writers have formulated this kind of comparisons: Colombian poets of the late 19th century assigned the epithet “South American Athens” to Bogota. Many places in the Americas have recovered their indigenous names in the last century though, as a strategy against cultural colonialism. Other, more visual kinds of metaphors have contested the very concept of Latin American, which was also formulated in Europe. One of the most prominent cases is the inverted map of the Americas 1 (1943), where Uruguayan painter Joaquín Torres García placed Patagonia at the top and Panama at the bottom, as case in point of his generation’s dream: a metaphor about another possible world and its hierarchy. One more metaphor of a dreamed-of South America comes from “Amereida”, the poetic journey imagined by Chilean architect Alberto Cruz and Argentinean poet Godofredo Iommi in 1967: a collective poem that proposes to re-found a cultural subcontinent. “Amereida” also served as a rhetorical figure for the formulation of new standards for the architectural discipline, a conception that emerged originally in Valparaíso School of Architecture1. Amongst the many drawings illustrating the poem, an inverted map of South America appears once again, this time with a line connecting two of the main cultural centers in the region during the first half of the 20th century: Buenos Aires and Caracas. This shape was crossed by a horizontal line: The Equator. However, these iconic images disclose a subtle leaning towards colonialism; an intellectual supremacy from the Southern Cone: while Argentineans, Uruguayans and Chileans claim to have been colonized by Spanish and French scholarship, Andean and Caribbean countries would have received European erudition through Austral mediation. This is also true in architectural studies, especially during the last decades of the 20th century: authors such as Marina Waisman from Argentina or Enrique Browne, from Chile, elaborated theoretical discourses around the notion of local modernities and the search of a Latino identity, dialoguing with similar concerns in Mexico – the other intellectual extreme of the Latin American continent2. All of them reverberated in the architecture and discourses subsequently emerging in Colombia, Peru or Venezuela. The alleged hegemony of the Mexican and Southern architectures (the latter including the works from the Brazilian South-East) was first legitimated by overviews in the canonic historiography of the modern architecture, in exhibitions and publications curated by American scholars such as Philip Goodwin and Henry Russel-Hitchcock. Even in the 2015’s MoMA exhibition “Latin America in Construction”, curated by Barry Bergdoll and Patricio del Real, this traditional structure persisted, albeit with a more notorious status to Central American architectures from Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. The recent international interest on the production by architects from smaller countries such as Paraguay, Ecuador and Bolivia – which have rarely been included in regional overviews, even by Latin American authors – unravels two issues in the Latino architectural studies: the second-rate role of these countries’ architecture in the historiography, and the misunderstanding of cultural frameworks that shape their own buildings and projects. Thus, this chapter does not aim to characterize these countries’ specific architecture but rather, to understand it as a corporate response to both the Latin Americanist discourses rooted on an idea of genius locci, and the agendas and aesthetics that dominate the global scene of contemporary architecture. 1 Marco Ballarín, “Forme di sintesi. L’invenzione americana nei progetti di Javier Corvalán” (PhD dissertation, Università Iuav, 2017), 36. 2 The debates propelled from the Argentinean magazine Summa, by authors such as Alberto Petrina, Francisco Liernur –later cocurator of the 2015 MoMA exhibition “Latin America in Construction” – and Waisman herself, were new scenarios for discussing the current condition of Latin American architecture, such as Seminarios de Arquitectura Latinoamericana (whose first version Was held in Argentina, in 1985); the Taller América in Santiago (led by Enrique BroWne and Christian Fernández Cox) and the Buenos Aires and Santiago biennales. The creation of these neW stages had place in a transitional decade towards democracy, in several countries of the region. This transition fed the discourses behind a neW canon, in publications like Roberto Segre’s América Latina Fin de Milenio: Raíces y Perspectivas de su Arquitectura (editado en Cuba en 1991), and Marina Waisman’s El Interior de la Historia (1991) and La Arquitectura Descentrada (1994). 2 Paraguay: fertile land for the rise of metaphors The former invisibility of Paraguayan architecture in the Latin American discourses on modernity and critical regionalism is a multidimensional phenomenon. On the one hand, Paraguay, whose name derives from the Guaraní voice “waters going to the sea”, has been described by the local writer Augusto Roa Bastos3 as “an island surrounded by land”; by the dry land of El Chaco. This metaphor goes beyond a geographical condition – Paraguay only connects to the coast by a hydro- way through the Paraná river – entailing unfortunate events in the country’s history: an early and extended dictatorship started in 1816 (right after its independence from Spain), by José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia; the late abolition of indigenous slavery (1870); the wars against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay (the “war of the Triple Alliance”, 1864-1870) and against Bolivia (the “El Chaco war”, 1932-1935); and finally, Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship (1954-1989, being one of the longest military regime in the Americas), sponsored by the US government. All these events resulted in a financial and ethnic devastation whose consequences have still an impact in the political, social and economic dynamics of Paraguay and the eventual isolation of this country from the rest of the region. On the other hand, a linguistic issue proves this isolation: despite the variety of tongues in the Latin American continent, Castilian Spanish remains the common language and one of the most cohesive factors of the region. Paraguay is nonetheless one of the few countries in the Americas with two official languages: Guaraní and Spanish. Both of them reveal two systems of reasoning coexisting in the Paraguayan territory: the internationally recognized one, following the canons of the Western world, and the aboriginal one, ignored by scholarship and popular culture in neighboring