Luciana Levinton is an architect whose mode of construction begins in deconstruction. She starts by selecting buildings, furniture, and modern architecture projects, which she approaches with adoration. She collects, studies, and archives them, and then turns them into paintings. Her love of form drives her to raid and chop these giants of architectural history, not to demolish but to save and appropriate her favorite parts.
She has highlighted the names of pioneering women architects within a modernity dominated by men. Yet modernity in architecture, as part of a social project embracing the arts, also carried a promise of freedom. The concept of the “free plan,” popularized by Le Corbusier, exemplified this formal emancipation. The buildings chosen by Levinton, La Casa del Puente in Mar del Plata, or Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House in São Paulo, reflect this spatial liberation where interiors merge with exteriors and light becomes structural.
In her SESC Pompéia series, Levinton isolates architectural beams, depicting them suspended and freed from their functions. By abstracting them, she turns them into connecting presences outside of time, icons she venerates with care.
Unlike the moderns who believed in progress, Levinton romanticizes rationality. Her paintings humanize geometry, balancing fullness and void, opacity and transparency. Her drawings of projects such as Charlotte Perriand’s Les Arcs convey melancholy and a renewed pleasure in form. She constructs from deconstruction—floating façades and interiors like portraits of old friends.
In her Summa Magazine series, Levinton paints over pages of Argentina’s key architectural journal, softening the authority of its text. Her semi-ovoid cartouches contrast with the rigidity of the printed word, transforming the narrative into a visual one, playful parasites feeding on the authority of architectural discourse.
Levinton’s work moves beyond the modern gaze to salvage its spirit of aspiration, while complexifying and exposing its ambiguity.
Text by Josefina Barcia
