Colombia's history of modern architecture revisited through the housing agency Instituto de Crédito Territorial : 1939-1965

This dissertation examines the housing program of the Colombian state agency Instituto de Crédito Territorial (ICT) implemented in the mid-twentieth century. Three case studies of housing projects located in the city of Bogotá serve as a means to critically assess the agency’s contributions to modern architecture in that country and the major transformations this agency and its housing program experienced during the period of the study: Muzú (1949), Centro Urbano Antonio Nariño - CUAN (1952) and Ciudad Kennedy (1961). This dissertation sheds light on the ideas and beliefs that animated the stakeholders—technicians, agency leaders, and politicians—intervening in the building of low-cost housing, as well as on the implications of their assumptions about the populations to be housed in the ICT projects, i.e. low income and middle class sectors. This exploration is based on minutes of the ICT’s board of directors meetings, and supplemented by a wide range of additional primary sources, including, but not limited to, blueprints, photos, publications, technical national periodicals, and regulations. A multidimensional analysis and interpretation of these sources emanating from different authors and stakeholders involves different fields of inquiry, such as politics, socio-economics, architecture, and urban planning. Drawing from postcolonial theory, this dissertation revisits the visible, official narratives around concepts such as progress, modernity, and modernization, in order to question the emancipatory discourse of modern architecture. This dissertation argues that the ICT's housing program emerged as a significant contribution to the advancement of modern architecture in Colombia through unexpected and, until now, unexplored ways and actors. Simultaneously, this work illuminates the intersections of the housing program with the government's political agenda and with the geopolitical dimension of international cooperation programs promoted by the United States. These intersections, mediated by rationales of development and modernization’s discourse, lay bare the power relations underlying the housing program and explain its social component. Through its social programs, the agency sought to "educate" and "civilize" the future inhabitants of the housing projects, in order to make them compliant with the logics and goals of policies nurtured by the discourse of development.