December 16, 2011 ∙ Buenos Aires
The Argentine newspaper La Nación included Margarita Gutman’s Buenos Aires. The Power of Anticipation on its “books of the year” list. The daily newspaper noted that there is nothing more entertaining than considering the various ways in which the future was conceived in the past: “In this lavishly illustrated volume, the researcher Margarita Gutman shows how the future Buenos Aires was imagined in the early twentieth century.”
This is the first book that comprehensively examines the imagination of the urban future in Buenos Aires. At the time of the Centennial, its people imagined and consumed a large and exciting set of images, desires, plans and expectations for the future of the city.
Former residents and newcomers, different social sectors, professionals and workers, artists, journalists and readers, all shared a time of great change and aspirations. They were convinced that a future of endless progress was waiting for them. This book tells the story and shows the texture and energy of the power of anticipation in those years. Today as before, the past enriches our present and provokes us to envision and build the future.
This volume contains 185 selected visual images selected from 7,150 local and foreign journals, professional and specialized mass media, which were circulating in Buenos Aires between 1900 and 1920. Those images show the diversity, creativity, humor and excitement expressing the many expectations for a promising urban future.
Manuel Castells, professor of sociology at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, notes: “This book presents important visual and documentary material that has been rigorously examined and developed in theoretical and analytical terms. This is a very original book on an unusual subject, allowing us to understand the relationship between the discourse about the city and the construction of the city from a historical perspective. I am convinced that this book will be an influential publication in the field of architecture and urban studies, both in Argentina and internationally.”
+ Read the complete list of La Nación books of the year (in Spanish)
Buenos Aires: El Poder de la Anticipación. Imágenes Itinerantes del Futuro Metropolitano en el primer Centenario. (Buenos Aires: The Power of Anticipation. Itinerant Images of the Metropolitan Future at the Time of the Centennial). Buenos Aires: Ediciones Infinito, 2011.
Available for purchase at:
McNally Jackson Books | 52 Prince Street | New York, NY | 10012 | 212.274.1160
