In 1948 the Argentinian modern architect Amancio Williams designed a ‘ship destined to carry out a social and moralising action in a region that was very neglected in those aspects.’¹ The region, described by Williams as being ‘socially and morally abandoned’, was the Delta del Paraná, a vast isolated wetland landscape with numerous islands formed by the sediments of the Paraná River. To save this supposedly morally corrupt region, Williams designed the ‘Barco Iglesia y Sanidad Preventiva’, which translates as the ‘Church and Preventive Health Ship’. As the name suggests, his design merged a floating health clinic and church together in order to bring ‘culture’ to the inhabitants of the Delta. Although it was never built, the project was designed to civilise that impassable region, to bring the gospel and hygiene to those living there. It is a testament to the era in which it was conceived and a direct product of the legal, political and intellectual framework formed in 19th- and 20th-century Argentina to advocate for the control and regulation of the landscape and the bodies of those inhabiting the Delta del Paraná.

This thesis aims to critically examine the ‘Church and Preventive Health Ship’ as a cultural and architectural artefact. This involves analysing how it reflected – and participated in – ideologies of hygiene, morality, and territorial control within its context. The text will investigate how architectural typologies can become vehicles for state power, especially in those places framed as ‘uncivilised’ by the ruling elite.

However, this critical approach to a lesser-known, unbuilt project stands in contrast to the main currents in Williams’s scholarship. The literature on Amancio Williams reflects both fascination and unevenness, shaped by the difficulty of situating his work within established historiographical categories, since many of his projects remained virtually unchanged over decades and most were never built.

Many of these unbuilt projects remain overlooked, even marginalised, within the literature of Williams work. The project which forms the subject of this thesis, ‘The Church and Preventive Health Ship’, has never been studied in any detail. When mentioned, it is usually grouped into a series of works he produced while advising the Argentinian Ministry of Health, rather than analysed on its own terms. This thesis addresses that absence, situating the ship within the broader context of Williams’ thought and the intersections of religion, medicine, and infrastructure in mid-20th century Argentina. By combining historical, geographical, and theoretical approaches, it examines how architectural interventions like the ‘Church and Preventive Health Ship’ were not merely technical or aesthetic solutions, but instruments through which power, morality, and social order were enacted in the Delta del Paraná.

The questions that sparked and guided this thesis were fivefold. Why did the delta even need to be ‘cured’ by modernity? What role did architecture play in this quest? In what ways were physical and moral health understood as being related? How did the ‘Church and Preventive Health Ship’ reflect Argentinian ideologies of morality, hygiene, and civilisation? What architectural, religious, and medical discourses shaped its design,and how were these translated into spatial terms? While this thesis cannot claim to have the definitive answers, it does suggest paths for thinking about how these factors might relate, intersect, and continue to be reinterpreted.

Because the ‘Church and Preventive Health Ship’ (1948) – as well as its successor project, the ‘Health Registry Ship’ (1949) – were never built, it means that the primary sources for this thesis had to be extracted from archival material. In the manner of Le Corbusier, Amancio Williams’ archive was meticulously recorded and manipulated by keeping hundreds of drawings, correspondence letters, and texts which describe his projects, exhibitions and publications. Precisely because Williams didn’t manage to build that much, it is why architects and academics regard his archive as the most important source to understand his work and ideas.²

Williams’ archive, which is now held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal can be publicly accessed yet is in a location far distant from where the material was created. It was at the CCA, while conducting research for some exhibitions by that organisation, when I encountered the drawings for the ‘Church and Preventive Health Ship’. I was immediately struck by the strangeness of Williams’ concept. But as I delved deeper into the conditions that shaped this project, its unusual combination of church, clinic, and ship revealed an underlying logic. It was clearly an architectural attempt to merge moral, medical, and infrastructural programs within the unique geography of the Delta del Paraná. Williams’ drawings, although small and somewhat schematic, open a window into a rich intersection of historical, geographical, political, and philosophical processes.

This kind of study of unbuilt architecture demonstrates the value of thinking beyond construction. Even in the absence of physical manifestation, drawings allow us to trace how ideas, ambitions, and social imaginaries take form. In the case of Williams’ ship, it acts as a nexus where concepts of care, morality, territorialisation, and biopolitical control converge. By following these conceptual threads, we can understand not only the conditions that produced the design, but also the broader mechanisms through which modernist architecture sought to intervene in marginal or unruly spaces. In this way, unbuilt works are not merely hypothetical: they are analytical tools that reveal the workings of architecture as a social and political practice.

The ‘Church and Preventive Health Ship’ should thus not be treated as just an architectural curiosity. It is a highly charged cultural artefact that reveals the ideological labour that architecture is called upon to perform when it sails into landscapes considered as wild, impure, or uncivilised. By placing the project within a wider framework of environmental control, religious mission, and biopolitical governance, the thesis offers new ways of thinking about architecture’s role in shaping and disciplining peripheral territories.