Following a series of earlier proposals, Interama was designed in the 1960s, reflecting efforts of the Alliance for Progress to strengthen US and Latin American relations. An impressive team of architects designed the residential and institutional buildings in which representatives of the Americas would reside. Their goal was to design a utopian fairground setting that would produce ideal Pan-Americans. Marcel Breuer, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, Jose Luis Sert, Edward Durrell Stone, Harry Weese, and Minoru Yamasaki gave this mid-century "Midway of Diplomacy" its final form. To date, their final designs—some to the point of construction documents—have remained unpublished and dispersed. New archival evidence offers the possibility to rectify this. This publication allows us to fully evaluate the team's contribution to Pan-Americanism and represents a comprehensive history of the fair.

Robert Alexander González is the director and associate professor of the Texas Tech University, El Paso's Architecture Program. He was recently the 2010–11 Cejas Scholar at Florida International University's School of Architecture, and he has taught at Tulane University, California College of the Arts, and the University of California, Berkeley. A registered architect and architectural historian, he is the founding editor of the international journal AULA: Architecture & Urbanism in Las Américas. González completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and his graduate and doctoral work at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley. He has lectured and published broadly on World's Fairs, Pan-American and Latin American modern architecture, and the US–Mexico borderlands. His recent book, Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere (University of Texas Press, 2011), explores the history of Pan-Americanism's influence on the US building environment.