Fabiola López-Durán

Fabiola López-Durán is an associate professor of art and architectural history at Rice University. She earned her PhD in history, theory and criticism of architecture from MIT. Adopting a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective, López-Durán’s research and teaching interrogates the cross-pollination of ideas and mediums—science, politics, and aesthetics—that ignited the process of modernization on both sides of the Atlantic, with an emphasis on Latin America. López-Durán’s book, Eugenics in the Garden: Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity, investigates a particular strain of eugenics that, at the turn of the twentieth century, moved from the realms of medicine and law to design, architecture, and urban planning—becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity. This book received a SAH/Mellon Author Award in 2018 and the Robert Motherwell Book Prize in 2019.