Landscape Spoliation: Linking Latin America with the Mediterranean

Dear Colleagues,

What lies at the bottom of the ocean between the American Mediterranean and African Mediterranean Seas? For instance, at the turn of the twentieth century, in Mexico City, a ship sailed some blocks of white marble from Massa Carrara, Italy, but they never arrived to be installed at Adamo Boari’s National Palace of Fine Arts. They were lost overboard and remain at the bottom of the ocean today. “Waves of Mediterranean have lapped at the development of modern architecture since the Enlightenment, reshaping its contours often as self-conscious initiatives to redefine or redirect prevailing styles, discourses, or practices” (Bergdoll in Lejeune and Sabatino, 2010: xv). Mediterranean and Latin American cultures and their built topographies have architectural spoils in common.

Through the so-called front line of climatic change and architecture, spoliation (or fragmentary architecture) in the landscape is not about identifying defects in the constructed landscape but the reconciliation of architecture with the damaged terrain. Spurred on by the need to house and insulate people, “landscape spoliation” (Condello, 2022), that is, the process of reconciling modern architecture and its past and present relations with new open-ended places, offers refugees a lifestyle worth living for, enabling urban resilience. How does landscape spoliation affect the design of Mediterranean architecture through its various places and vice versa? How has Latin American architecture and its transoceanic tides in two directions altered the Mediterranean landscape and its inhabitants?

This Special Issue provides a platform to question the overlapping themes of the environment, the transoceanic trade of building materials, architectural theories, and design strategies between Latin American and Mediterranean countries.

Dr. Annette Condello
Guest Editor

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• productive reuse
• botanical and cultural luxuriance
• modern and contemporary architecture
• environmental design
• landscape architecture
• urban resilience
• lost buildings