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The Leaders. Brazil started early, and, thanks to booming São Paulo (TIME, Jan. 21, 1952), has the greatest number of distinguished buildings. But in recent years other countries have made giant strides. Historian Hitchcock labels Mexico's University City (TIME, Feb. 23, 1953) "the most spectacular extra-urban architectural entity of the North American continent." In about five years, the building boom has raised the height of typical buildings in Caracas, Venezuela from one to 20-odd stories. Such handsome buildings as the auditorium of Caracas' University City, with its high concrete vault filled with free-floating colored panels by U.S. Mobile Maker Alexander Calder, have put Venezuelan Architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva in the front rank of Latin American designers. Puerto Rico boasts a well-done hotel, the Caribe Hilton, and Henry Klumb's outstanding Catholic church near San Juan.
The boom has had its flaws—grandiose plans that take years to complete, antiquated methods, shoddy workmanship, poor maintenance. Though Latin America has so far produced some dozen architects of high reputation, none has as yet developed a style as effective as that of Niemeyer, now 48. But Latin America's "grand old men" of architecture are only in their 50s or younger, and a host of younger architects is coming up; the boom goes on and the future is bright.
Poor Treasure House
London's famed National Gallery calls its collection of paintings "perhaps the best balanced and most representative, if not the most extensive . . . in the world." To that proud boast it now adds a mournful confession: the gallery is so poor that it cannot even care properly for the treasures it has, let alone acquire more. In its first official report since the war, the National Gallery complained that inadequate maintenance is endangering some of the world's most marvelous paintings. Among them: Michelangelo's Entombment, Piero della Francesca's Nativity, Holbein's Ambassadors, Rubens' Château de Steen. In one room, the only humidity control is a teapot, kept boiling around the clock. As many as 60 paintings have been lined up at one time for the repair of cracking, flaking or rotting canvas. Said a gallery official sadly: "The damage goes into the millions."
What bothers the National Gallery almost as much is that it is expected to make new purchases on an annual government grant of only £10,500 ($29,400), very little more than it got in the 1880s,* plus other income that rarely exceeds £10,000 a year. Faced with today's soaring prices for old masters, the National Gallery is priced out of the market. More and more British masterpieces are leaving the country. "The hope of saving what remains of our national heritage and providing for expansion," said the report, ". . . must remain largely dependent upon the accident of shock tactics in public appeals and supplementary votes [from Parliament] upon special occasions."
NEW ACQUISITION: Boston's Wild-Man Tapestry