Modern Brazil Architecture

A riot of orgiastic pleasure

2010-03-02T21:30:00.000-08:00

In this account, Cavalcanti describes most of the significant elements of the building: an extraordinary site, high up above the city in the mata atlantica, with views of the surrounding mountains and sea; a building that plays constantly with ideas of public and private space, collapsing one into the other; a building that still provides areas of intimacy, hidden away from private view; a house that stages and spectacularizes the body, providing a grand terrace on which guests can see each other and be seen to the best effect; a great swimming pool, defining the entrance to the house from the rear – indeed the house, like the later, Californian archetype, seems to emerge from the pool.

Perhaps Cavalcanti could have also mentioned the sculptures littered about the place. In the architect’s usual taste, these curvaceous nudes, all breasts and buttocks, make clear (if there was ever any doubt) that this house was meant to frame a liberated attitude to sex. During Kubitschek’s presidency, the house was a critical part of Rio’s cultural infrastructure, providing a regular setting for cocktails for visiting dignitaries and intellectuals. The erotic charge of the house was no doubt more imaginary than real, but equally, there is little doubt that it helped to contribute – along with the beaches and floorshows of Copacabana, and the genuinely uninhibited revelry of Carnival – to the myth of Brazil as an erotic paradise. That erotic potential is well described by the architect Ernesto Rogers, who recalled a visit to the house in the following terms:
I doubt that I shall ever forget that scene: the sun was just dipping below the horizon, leaving us in a dark sea of orange, violet, green and indigo. The house repeated the themes of that orgiastic countryside (incense and the hum of insects); a vast rhapsody beginning in the roof vibrated down the walls and their niches to finish in the pool, where the water, instead of being neatly dammed up, spread freely along the rocks in a kind of forest pool.
The house in this scenario is far more than the European Modernists ever really envisaged. Far from a ‘machine for living in’, this is a riot of orgiastic pleasure.

The Erotics of the Private Villa

2010-02-28T10:52:00.000-08:00

The erotic programme described by Pampulha became part of fashionable architectural taste. In the private realm, Brazil’s wealthy commissioned an enormous variety of modern houses from the 1930s onwards, many of which have since become iconic. The range, variety and quality of these houses is as high as anywhere in the same period.

There was no systematic programme in Brazil, but the range and quality of the experiments bear comparison with the 34 Case Study Houses, built on the west coast of the United States between 1945 and 1966. As with the Case Study Houses, the best Brazilian houses often experimented with new forms of living, pulling out what were previously private functions – for example, sleeping and cooking – and making them central to the life of the house, rather than hiding them away. In Brazil, experimentation in housing tended to address questions of class. For the Paulista architect Vilanova Artigas, the private house was envisaged as an attack on class boundaries on the family level, by making domestic work a central part of the house’s activity, rather than having it sequestered away somewhere private, as in the Sao Paulo house he built for himself in 1948–9. Joaquim Guedes’s Casa da Cunha Lima (1958) does the same thing. For Lina Bo Bardi, the private house could be a means of developing a new, modern, sexual politics, providing, for example, a comfortable and appropriate frame for a professional woman to live alone. For Niemeyer, the private house is, inevitably, a way to try out a variety of new spaces to frame leisure and pleasure.

The most celebrated example is the architect’s own Casa das Canoas (1952). For Lauro Cavalcanti, this is nothing less than ‘one of the most beautiful modern houses in the world’. He continues:
At the centre of the composition is a great rock, around which is developed the house and the pool . . . the flat roof links interior and exterior spaces, establishing a rich dialogue with the exuberant landscape of the Carioca sea and mountains. In this project Niemeyer resolves two of the great problems of glass houses: the invasion of sunlight and of the sight and sensation of excessive exposure to the night with an illuminated interior and dark exterior . . . bedrooms located in basement, protected from curious eyes, with access by means of a stair carved in the rock.

The unfortunate story of the Pampulha hotel

2010-02-27T22:12:00.000-08:00

The erotic potential of the Casino is reiterated in the much smaller Casa do Baile, a kind of outdoor nightclub. It takes up, in simplified form, the shapes of the hotel terrace, making a combination of a restaurant and a dance-hall, set directly across the lake from the more monumental Casino. Unlike the Casino, it is a calculatedly informal space, which confuses indoors and outdoors, private and public, providing a variety of spaces to frame a number of activities, from the public activity of dancing, to flirting, to (perhaps in the bushes by the lake) something more serious.

The yacht club, a short distance from the Casino, is not legible in the same erotic way as these other spaces – it is a relatively formal building with a reverse-pitch roof that recalls Le Corbusier’s Errazuriz House in Chile. The extraordinary church of Sao Francisco de Assis, however, with its bulging, asymmetrical vaults, and sudden vertical accents, is perhaps the most bodily space of all, a physical building that is much more easily legible as about the exultation of the body rather than the spirit. Niemeyer, an atheist, refused to build a confessional box, feeling that to do so would be to taint the activities his buildings framed around the rest of the lake with guilt. This, combined (perhaps) with the unconventional forms of the church, led to a drawn-out controversy involving the established Church, which refused to consecrate it until 1959, sixteen years after its completion.

The unfortunate story of the church was replicated in almost every other aspect of the development. The Casino was rendered useless almost immediately it was finished after the Federal government in Rio passed a law forbidding gambling. It lay empty until late in the 1950s, when it became a gallery of modern art, a role that it performs – badly – to the present day. Its construction too lacked the sophistication of the design, a problem common to many of Niemeyer’s buildings. Evenson reported a contemporary American architect’s shock at the kitchen on the ground floor, an afterthought budged by incompetent builders. The Casa do Baile never became commercially viable. Designed for a mostly working-class clientele, it was simply in the wrong location, a low-density suburb for the wealthy, with only poor access by public transport. The yacht club was closed for years by an infestation of a water-borne parasite, only becoming safe for leisure use in the 1960s.

These and other negative factors, including cracks in the lake dam and ongoing problems with the water supply, meant that the development entirely failed to become the commercial success that its backers envisaged. For years, its main buildings lay empty and abandoned melancholy harbingers of an age of erotic liberation that never really came. The development looks marvelous now, although built at a low density and, like every other wealthy suburb in Brazil, patrolled by private security guards and almost entirely devoid of human life, so that it carries few, if any, of the erotic connotations it originally did. The original sketches and photographs nevertheless do still represent the original vision, and continue to represent a riposte to the puritanical and rationalist concept of modern architecture represented by the Europeans.

The Pampulha is a space that frames an erotics of modern life.

2010-02-26T18:12:00.000-08:00

The Pampulha hotel is also, unquestionably, a space organized primarily for pleasure. The curves alone suggest organic, bodily forms, but they are filled with spaces for all kinds of physical pleasures: dancing, sleeping, relaxing, and flirting. The furniture is virtually all horizontal. Bar the inevitable Barcelona chairs, the terrace is scattered with chaises lounges and easy chairs. The terrace merges imperceptibly with the beach; one is virtually commanded to lie down. And as Niemeyer draws it, it is a scene that is full of erotic activity.

Le Corbusier’s perspectives were – where they were populated at all – inhabited by tiny individual figures, alone with nature, nursing (as the philosopher Roger Scruton once put it) ‘their inner solitude’. Niemeyer’s scene is inhabited only by couples, dancing, flirting, drinking, and sunbathing. There is some attention to the last – a well sculpted couple represents a new, modern beauty based on the simple enjoyment of the body. This is an image about sex, not calisthenics. Where for the Brazilians, Modernist building (through, for example, the opening up of indoor and outdoor spaces, the production of spaces in which the body might be exulted) opened up a realm of erotic possibilities, for the Europeans, it was, by contrast, often an architecture designed to keep them in check.

Sadly, the hotel was not built, but most of the rest of the scheme was. The Casino, however, completed in 1942, embodies much of the erotic programme of the hotel. Like the hotel it is mainly a linear building, against which there are curving contrasts. It has something to do with Le Cor busier’s Villa Savoye, not so much in outward form (although both are largely rectangular pavilions on pilotis), but for the use of the architectural promenade. The visitor is taken on a defined route through the building, from the marbled exterior, dotted with busty sculptural nudes by August Zamoiski, through a dazzling double-height entrance hall in chrome and mirrors, up a ramp in marble, rising up and across the entrance space. The visitor finds the main hall of the Casino on the first floor. All through the promenade, views inside and outside mingle. One looks across the lake at the same time as one looks at the building inside, while the mirrors encourage one to look at both oneself and the other players. This is a space that frames an erotics of modern life. It puts bodies on display, and through the use of luxurious, unusual or seductive materials, makes the visitor think in terms of the senses of both touch and sight.

The Pampulha hotel

2010-02-24T09:12:00.000-08:00

Inside Brazil, the erotic potential of Modernism is manifest on a grand scale at Pampulha (1940–42), Niemeyer’s first major solo commission. The project was a high-class housing estate built around an artificial lake, in an outer suburb of Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third largest city and the capital of the inland state of Minas Gerais. It was initiated by the governor of the state of Minas Gerais, Juscelino Kubitschek (later president of Brazil, 1957–61), who proposed it as both a significant extension to the city and a piece of real-estate development through a publicly funded scheme to prime a new area with infrastructure. Designed in 1940, the complex was largely completed by 1942, in time for it to be featured prominently in the MOMA exhibition Brazil Builds.

Niemeyer’s design for Pampulha had six principal elements: the lake with the dam, six kilometres or so in perimeter, a casino, a yacht club, a hotel, an open-air night club (the Casa do Baile, or House of Dance) and a church. There was also, close to the yacht club, a house for Kubitschek. All the buildings exploited the possibilities of reinforced concrete: hence the extraordinary asymmetrical double vaults of the church and the undulating form of the Casa do Baile, which echoed the form of the islet on which it was located. The casino too was a formal experiment as much as anything, elaborating the idea of the architectural promenade, and juxtaposing a variety of contrasting forms and surfaces (in the eyes of more than one observer, it also pushed taste to the limit). The result there drew in certain historical models too – all the buildings made use of azulejos – and the boldness of the architecture, with its many decorative or non-functional elements, led to comparisons with the Baroque. The invocation of the Baroque is of itself an invocation of an erotic sensibility: a response to the purity of the classical mode, Baroque art is bodily if nothing else.

The erotics of Pampulha, however, are most clearly represented in an unbuilt part of the scheme, the hotel. Designed along with the rest of the main buildings in 1940, in plan it recalls the two hotels discussed earlier, namely Costa’s Park Hotel in Novo Friburgo and Niemeyer’s own Grande Hotel at Ouro Preto. Like those two buildings, this one is a low, horizontal structure raised on pilotis; two levels of bedrooms rise above. There is, on these upper floors, a slightly inclined glazed facade the width of the building, allowing all the bedrooms to enjoy views of the (spectacular) lake. The view takes in the Casa do Baile, which the hotel formally echoes. Some bedrooms on the eastern side of the building might also have had views across to the church of Sao Francisco. It is, like the earlier hotels, a building designed first and foremost to make as much use as possible of the site, sublimating the view. But it departs from the earlier hotels in the treatment of the ground floor, which is much larger and more elaborate than anything seen in the earlier schemes, a huge area with spectacular views both inside and outside. It is formally complex, a big roof resembling an artist’s palette, holding in play a series of undulating colonnades. There is not a straight line in sight; the palette form is punctuated by holes, out of which sprout great palms, and it is hard to tell if you are inside or outside. It is a highly rhetorical space that makes a case for a decidedly irrational, anti-functional architecture, a departure from the Modernism of the northern Europeans.

The Brazilian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair

2010-02-22T21:08:00.000-08:00

The first large-scale exercise of this erotically charged Modernist architecture materialized outside Brazil, however, in the form of the Brazilian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair of 1939–40. This, the first complete collaboration between Niemeyer and Costa, was located in the section of the fair given over to national pavilions. The two architects arrived in New York in 1938 and took up space in the office of Wallace Harrison, who would later coordinate the work with Niemeyer on the headquarters building for the United Nations.

The building itself, built in just five months, was a small, three-storey structure built on an l-plan, framing a small lake to the rear. Raised partly on pilotis, and with an unusual brise-soleil on the front facade like a miniature version of the system used on the MES, the pavilion was dominated by a wide, curving pedestrian ramp that scooped up visitors to the first floor. From here, they passed through a generous, curving entrance hall with a small bar serving coffee, to a series of stands showing off Brazilian commercial products: coffee, nuts, chocolate, tobacco, cotton and palm oil. Elsewhere, there was a formal exhibition hall with paintings by Portinari, a magnificent curving bar specializing in caipirinhas and a circular dance-hall.

All the pavilions’ purposes were propagandistic, namely the promotion of trade and culture and good relations with the United States. But the Brazilian Pavilion represented this soft diplomacy brief with an exuberant and decidedly erotic building. It was full of curves, up to that point unimaginable in a Modernist building, certainly in New York (the near-contemporary MOMA by Philip Goodwin and Edward Stone was a piece of graph paper by contrast, rectilinear and more or less two-dimensional). It was profoundly conscious of the body of the visitor, leading him or her around the building, and providing invitations to pause or linger. In this regard, it encouraged visitors to look at each other as much as the products on display: the sinuous mezzanine above the main hall provided a voyeuristic pause in the programme for the visitor to look down at others, unseen. And it provided plenty of spaces for simple pleasures – the bar and dance floor were not secondary spaces, but central to the programme. The pavilion defined Brazil, in other words, as a sensuous place above all, responsible for the production of pleasurable goods for world-wide consumption (coffee, cigarettes, chocolate), and populated by a pleasure- seeking population. The pavilion’s starting point may have been the Modernist language defined by Le Corbusier, but the sensuality of the programme as realized helped define a distinctive, and decidedly erotic, Brazilian form of Modernism.

Architecture on the Beach - The act of framing nature.

2010-02-21T17:15:00.000-08:00

The sketch relates closely to a series of slightly later erotic sketches of mulatas, mostly unclothed, by which Le Corbusier was clearly fascinated. They are big women, large-hipped and muscular, buttocks and breasts highly pronounced the opposite in every way from Le Corbusier himself, a pale, angular, awkward-looking European male. Look at these sketches side by side with the Baker sketch and the connection is clear enough, Baker as quasi-mulata, a safe form of exoticism, temporarily within the architect’s orbit.

The second image or more correctly set of images, dates from 1942 (that is, six years after Le Corbusier’s last visit to Rio) and depicts the Sugar Loaf progressively recuperated as image. In the first, a series of lines delineates the mountain, the beach towards Flamenco and the sea;
the second adds a palm tree on the left-hand side of the image, rendering it picturesque; the third places a man in a comfortable chair before the scene; the fourth image finally domesticates it entirely, placing a frame around the scene. Suddenly everything is clear: the Modernist house is a frame for the view; the window, as Beatriz Colomina puts it in her commentary on these images, ‘is a gigantic screen’. The architect makes clear that the relationship between the house and the view is a new and unconventional one. The house is not in the view, but a means of possessing the view. Nature is now a part of the ‘lease’ as Le Corbusier puts it, ‘the pact with nature has been sealed’.

For both the architect and for Colomina in her much later commentary, the act of framing nature in this way is an erotic one. For Le Corbusier, nature’s forms and the forms of the mulatas (and Josephine Baker) were inseparable, and his architectural responses to the scene in Rio de Janeiro were about preserving the erotics of the site as far as possible. So the megastructure that insinuates its way between the port and Copacabana is first and foremost a means of representing the erotic experience of nature. Its sinuous form simultaneously represents the geography of the city’s coastline and the bodies of its female inhabitants. Le Corbusier’s plan was never built, but its representation of the erotics of Rio had important consequences for subsequent modern architecture in Brazil.

Architecture on the Beach - Le Corbusier’s drawings.

2010-02-19T20:41:00.000-08:00

Le Corbusier visited Brazil twice before the Second World War, visits that were of signal importance in the architect’s own career, but also of importance more widely in advancing an erotic conception of modern architecture. Kenneth Frampton wrote of the first visit (1929, organized through contacts of the French poet Blaise Cendrars) in particular as a ‘personal epiphany’ for the architect, and (later) probably the happiest time of his life. It also seems to have been an erotic epiphany, since Le Corbusier seems to have enjoyed a ‘close relationship’ (as Frampton coyly puts it) with the African-American jazz singer Josephine Baker, whom he met en voyage to Rio, and who is the subject of a number of drawings.

The architect sketched incessantly during both these early visits. Architecture in fact makes up only a small fraction of his output, which mostly concerns the natural landscape of Rio and its pneumatic female inhabitants. There are numerous letters and other bits of correspondence, and other, longer accounts of the city and its life that made their way into the public speeches he gave at the time. It is in sum a major body of work.

The impressions gathered in the visit of 1929 inform the major imaginative work of the period, the re-planning of Rio as a sinuous megastructure, curving its way between mountain and sea. But this plan exists in only the sketchiest of forms, and Le Corbusier’s imaginative investment in recording the erotics of the beach as it already exists is, in some ways, greater. The small sketch illustrated here is a piece of ephemera, but seen through an erotic lens, a highly significant image. It was executed in coloured crayon on a card from the steamer Lutetia, on board which Le Corbusier sailed with Josephine Baker from Buenos Aires northwards to Brazil. The text on the card (in French) concerns the formation of a club on board to organize games and other entertainments. Le Corbusier inverts the card so the text reads upside down, and draws himself and Baker on, or close to, the beach at Flamengo, a well-to-do southern suburb of Rio, located between the commercial centre of the city and Copacabana – the architect stayed at the recently built Hotel Gloria, and, it is recorded, swam at least once off the beach outside the hotel (a photograph exists of him standing by the sea wall overlooking the beach, dressed in one of the hotel’s dressing gowns). His drawing places him and Baker on the right-hand side of the image. Dressed in a white suit he stands close behind her. She wears a sleeveless green dress; her chin lifted slightly, her eyes apparently closed as if in ecstasy at the beauty of the situation. In the background the great priapic form of the Sugar Loaf rises, an indicator, perhaps, of the architect’s state of mind.

The eroticism of the beach.

2010-02-18T05:01:00.000-08:00

Both Zweig and Castro are also preoccupied with the eroticism of the beaches. For Zweig, writing in the late 1930s, the beach is the place where dress codes relax, a place ‘devoted exclusively to luxury and sport, to the enjoyment of body and eye’. For contemporary commentators like Castro, the eroticism of the beach has come to subsume everything else. Copacabana (along with its prolongation, Ipanema) is the only place in a metropolitan city where it is entirely acceptable for diners to enter an expensive restaurant almost naked, in ‘bathing costume, no shirt, in sandals or barefoot, with the vestiges of the Atlantic Ocean still on their bodies . . .

Cariocas’ familiarity with their own bodies must have no parallel in any other metropolitan city.’ Castro goes on to describe the casual eroticism of the beach: Carioca women weaving their way in bikinis through crowds of men on their way to the office, the constant and all-pervasive ogling of bodies, a system of visual pleasure (an ‘art form’ in Castro’s words) in which the one doing the looking and the recipient of the gaze are both knowing participants. So, in summary, in myth Rio’s beaches are suffused with the eroticism one might expect: they frame an eroticized social life.

It is a myth that is attractive and useful for both Brazilians and visitors, not least architects. But it is a myth: the eroticism has nothing much natural about it, and is the result of a lot of hard work. For Regina Guerrero, a former editor of both Vogue and Elle in Brazil, the beach is eroticized to the point where any semblance of normality has disappeared. A disillusioned and disenfranchised populace has become fixated on the body to the exclusion of everything else. A beautiful body, regardless of the social or economic cost, has become a matter of survival: ‘our unique motivation is sexuality, beauty, health, form, and depending where one is, eternal youth . . . getting old, fat, or letting oneself go, it’s suicide. All doors close, those of work as well as those of love.

The beach has become central to the country’s urban life.

2010-02-16T19:50:00.000-08:00

Niemeyer’s small architectural office can be found on the Avenida Atlantica, the great boulevard that defines Copacabana’s beach. There is in all probability no better-known beach in the world, its fame a product of such films as Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland, 1932), starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, where Copacabana is represented as the apogee of urban eroticism. In thinking about the erotics of modern architecture, the beach is surely the best place to start. It is a landscape of vital importance, defining an ideal of sociability that architects have frequently tried to emulate or represent.

Until the eighteenth century, beaches were generally perceived – where they were perceived at all – as places of labour. In art they are littered with the debris of fishing, not leisure. But global exploration from the sixteenth century onwards began to produce images of beaches that contain recognizably modern, and particularly erotic, elements. In accounts of first contact with indigenous peoples the beach can become an erotically charged space, a space in which suddenly, after months or years of voyaging, immense sexual possibilities could be released. In relation to Brazil, there are numerous, fascinating accounts of first contact in which the beach is the spatial frame. In one report to the Portuguese king Dom Joao ii in 1500, Vasco da Gama described landfall in Brazil and contact with a deputation of Tupi Indians. The Indians caused a sensation, particularly the girls, who were ‘very young and very pretty, with very dark hair, long over their shoulders and their privy parts, so high, so closed, and so free from hair that we felt no shame in looking at them very well’. The explorers, greatly impressed, compared them favorably with Portuguese women.

It is too much of an intellectual leap to declare da Gama’s encounter with the Tupi as the beginning of the modern conception of the beach. The modern beach, however, embodies something of the mythology of first contact: it remains a place where convention is conventionally) abandoned, and where erotic possibilities open up. Brazil has a particularly strong relationship with the beach. Most of its population is still found on the coast, and the beach has become central to the country’s urban life, providing a space equivalent in symbolic function to the civic squares of European cities. Stefan Zweig said as much in 1942, when describing the life of the poor in Rio. The climate was accommodating, the food was cheap, and above all the spectacular beaches provided a place for them to go. This ‘super-Nice, super Miami, possibly the most beautiful strand in the world’ (as he put it) was therefore also the embodiment of a different kind of civil society. The symbolic centrality of the beach in Brazilian cities marks a significant difference between the western European and North American understanding of the beach. For Europeans, the beach is typically a place of periodic escape and disengagement from the city; for Brazilians, the beach is integral to it. The contemporary Brazilian novelist Ruy Castro provides an up-to-date commentary on the place of the beach in the Brazilian city. Europeans and North Americans, he observes, take a trip to the beach as if they were going to a hotel in the mountains or another country. In Rio people just go to the beach, like going to the cinema, the shops or the bank – because it’s there 24 hours a day, all year round, and with an entire city round it, all its services fully available. . . . It’s a whole culture. You go to the beach to read the paper, meet friends, play foot-volleyball, get to know people, get the latest gossip, and even, sometimes, to talk business. It’s a space as natural as a town square, a restaurant or an office.

The erotic is an integral part of early Modernism in Brazil.

2010-02-14T10:10:00.000-08:00

The desire to assimilate the architectural past into the present described earlier was motivated in no small part by the erotic. One motivation was certainly – as with Costa – the desire for cultural continuity between past and present, as a part of an ultimately conservative worldview. But both Costa, and (particularly) Freyre found an erotic nostalgia in the casa grande, a longing for a slow, sensuous way of living in which nature was beautiful and abundant, as was sex; indeed, for contemporary readers of Casa Grande e Senzala, it is the frankness of Freyre’s account of the sexual life of the fazenda that stands out as most prescient.

While conscious of the power exercised in sexual relations between owners and slaves, he describes a sexual landscape of apparently far greater range and licence than that possible in the world of the urban bourgeois of the early twentieth century. There is in Freyre and his circle nostalgia for an erotic life they knew of by rumour or hearsay, but in all probability had never experienced themselves. This nostalgia has a large amount of fantasy (after all, sex in the fazenda, as Freyre himself acknowledges, could be a vehicle for oppression as much as pleasure), but, nevertheless, it is a vital part of Brazil’s self-perception. Specifically from the point of view of architecture, the erotic is an integral part of early Modernism in Brazil. It is sometimes more explicit than others; sometimes the erotic is manifest in sublimation of the realm of the senses, sometimes in the provision of spaces in which flirtation may be positively encouraged, sometimes by designing buildings that allude specifically to sex. But it is, arguably, always there, above all in Niemeyer’s work. Sex is central to his visual repertoire, from the comparison he has repeatedly made between the female form in his curvaceous architecture, to the women sunbathers who populate his architectural sketches, to the photographs of female nudes that decorate his desk. This blog explores these manifestations of the erotic in Brazil’s Modernist architecture, centered on the architecture and architectural discourse of the 1940s, but also showing how they persist into the present day.

The great influence of the theories of Lucio Costa.

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There are a few other structures built on similar principles. There is a country house for Hildebrando Accioly near Petropolis by Francisco Bolonha from 1950, and a resort complex by the Roberto brothers from 1944, both large-scale exercises in Costa-style Modernism. For Bruand, the latter was a real triumph: ‘a perfect example of the application of the theories of Lucio Costa . . . here the synthesis between local tradition and the modern spirit reaches the high point of perfection’. But the real legacy is perhaps simply in the legitimacy Costa’s theories gave to the use of historic elements in otherwise Modernist buildings.

The best-known examples include the use of azulejos at the MES, and at the buildings in Pampulha, and the traditional Portuguese tiling of pavements in otherwise Modernist urban schemes, such as the Avenida Atlantica in Copacabana. Perhaps the most extensive application of Costa’s ideas can be found in high-class domestic architecture. Many of Niemeyer’s early buildings reference colonial methods and styles: see the monopitch tiled roof and whitewashed walls of his Cavalcanti House in Gavea, Rio (1940), or his own house in the same location (1942). Costa’s houses do much the same: see his Casa Hungria Machado in Leblon (1942) or a very late exercise in the same style, Residencia Helena Costa in Rio (1980–84), which is almost indistinguishable from the colonial vernacular. For the critic Maria Alice Junqueira Bastos, this is a vital building representative of Frampton’s global concept of critical regionalism. In the 1950s and ’60s the Italian-born architect Lina Bo Bardi built numerous houses for wealthy clients that referenced the local vernacular, especially the forms of the rural north-east. Like Costa’s work, her houses could approach the condition of the vernacular to the point at which they are inseparable from it. Her Casa de Valeria P. Cirrel (1958) in Morumbi, Sao Paulo, is a particularly striking example. And at the same time, the Paulista architect Vilanova Artigas built much that referenced the historical past, often in a polemical way. His rather ironic Casa Elza Berquo (1968) in Sao Paulo has a concrete roof held up with an unadorned tree-trunk, a reference to Brazil’s condition of underdevelopment as much as its traditional forms of building.

Much more recently, Paulo Mendes da Rocha has built a chapel that is legibly a reprise of Costa’s Museum of the Missions of 1937. Built for the artist Francisco Brennand on his sprawling estate in Recife, the chapel is a new structure in the ruins of an old building. It is modern while making abundant reference to the past. It uses the forms of colonial buildings to moderate the tropical climate, while, like Costa, Mendes da Rocha is unfazed that this structure reiterates the forms and rituals of colonial Brazil. Brennand’s estate, on the outskirts of one of Brazil’s most unequal cities, is the direct continuation of the colonial fazenda, continuously inhabited by his family since the eighteenth century. Brennand’s income derives from the international art market, in which he has made a substantial career. But everything else about the estate speaks of the persistence of colonial values, with the artist as benign patriarch ruling over what is in effect a mini-state. Mendes da Rocha’s work is simply the latest manifestation of a complex and ambiguous tradition of Modernism in Brazil, in which the past and the future are kept simultaneously in play.

The same attitude towards the past is manifest in the continued activity of IPHAN, an organization that has operated with notable consistency since its foundation as SPHAN. Andrade remained director from 1937 to 1967, to be succeeded by Costa, who had already spent most of his working life with the organization. Continuing the tradition, on his retirement Costa handed over the directorship of the organization to his granddaughter, Maria Elisa Costa. According to IPHAN itself, 20,000 buildings are now protected (tombados, to use the organization’s terminology), along with 83 towns and cities, and more than 12,000 archaeological sites. The emphasis on Portuguese colonial architecture, a peculiarity of Costa, continues. Among the most remarkable of the protected sites is the capital, Brasilia, whose realization had been in large part the responsibility of Costa himself. The act of tombamento preserves the city’s now historic buildings, while the integrity of the plan is looked after by UNESCO: World Heritage Status was awarded in 1987. The Brasilia episode makes clear the curiously close relationship between Modernist and historic architecture. The ferocity of development in Brazil’s large cities suggests a widespread indifference to the past. But this coexists with an anxiety to bring those officially validated kinds of Modernism within the historical frame as soon as possible. Brasilia was barely 30 years old when it was inscribed in the livro de tombo. Its historicization, you might say, has been pursued with the vigour of the true Modernist.

The second derivative of The Grande Hotel - Catetinho (‘little Catete’).

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The second case is Niemeyer’s so-called Catetinho (‘little Catete’), named after the president’s palace in Rio de Janeiro. This house for President Kubitschek was designed and constructed by Niemeyer in ten days in November 1956 from locally available materials. It is celebrated as the ‘first’ building in Brasilia, although that honour should really go to the favela of the Cidade Livre.

Simple and rustic in appearance, it is located 26 kilometres from the city centre at the far end of the south end of the city, just beyond the airport, in what is still virgin forest. At the time of its construction, the plan of the city had yet to be determined; all that existed was a site. Exceedingly simple and rustic in appearance, it consists of two floors, and from a distance seems to reiterate the basic plan of the hotels in Ouro Preto and Novo Friburgo. Situated in a small clearing in the forest, it is two storeys in height, made almost entirely of wood, held up by a series of pilotis, with a projecting balcony along the length of the facade. The principal rooms, including the president’s bedroom and rooms for guests, are found on this floor. Meant originally as a temporary structure, it was declared a national monument in 1960, and has been kept as a museum ever since. It was cheap to build, and the cash to build it was supplied by ten friends of the president. He liked to cultivate an image of simplicity, and the Catetinho supplied an appropriate architectural representation. At the same time, it conformed to Modernist architectural principles. It was a politically expedient compromise, but also an agreeable building.

The Grande Hotel produced several significant derivatives - Park Hotel.

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The work of Costa, Freyre and MOMA amounts to a coherent intellectual attempt to project the past into the present, with the Grande Hotel at Ouro Preto perhaps its most highly developed manifestation. In terms of architecture, the Grande Hotel produced several significant derivatives, two of which are worth describing in detail. First is Costa’s own Park Hotel, in the Parque Sao Clemente at Novo Friburgo, a mountain resort town in the state of Rio de Janeiro (1940–44). In Cavalcanti’s view, this is no less than ‘Costa’s masterpiece’. In appearance, the Park Hotel is at first sight strikingly similar to Niemeyer’s Grande Hotel.

Like the Grande Hotel, it is a horizontal block set into a hillside on a narrow, steeply sloping site. It is relatively small, just ten rooms; it is four storeys in height; it has clearly demarcated public and private sides: the private side is defined by a balcony running the entire length of the structure, and providing access to the private rooms; the more public functions of the hotel are located on the ground floor of the building. From the private side, it is (like the Grande Hotel) a building that fits seamlessly into its context. For the inexpert, it is hard to distinguish from historic buildings. It makes much use of historic materials and techniques. The architect Henrique Mindlin draws attention to its ‘open work panels of hollow tiles or pre-cast concrete . . . trellises or jalousies – sometimes revivals of old designs, like the muxarabis . . . balustrades are used almost in their original form, or occasionally on a more magnified scale for more obvious and emphatic architectural accent’. He praises the ‘fusion with the environment, embodying an emotional relationship with the past yet free of any slavish urge to copy or imitate and hence leaving the way clear for the adoption of characteristic contemporary solutions’. The construction is ‘extremely rustic’; the materials and construction use local techniques. It is an example of the past being evoked in an ‘abstract’ rather than ‘figurative’ way; it is not a copy of an old building, but rather one that evokes comparison with one.

It is worth noting, however, that the construction itself is not primitive, having many similarities with more explicitly modern buildings. It was constructed on pilotis and has a trapezoidal section; the wooden structure, using rough tree-trunks, had certain advantages: cost (the construction materials were practically free), an appearance of rustic simplicity greatly appealing to the hotel’s clientele, and respect for an environmentally sensitive site. Furthermore, formally this is a knowing, learned building, Bruand wrote: there is a ‘sound sense of proportion based on the application of a classical model . . . apparent simplicity an expression of sober refinement’. The historic and modern elements are simultaneously revealed and concealed – the pilotis, for example, are not all exposed; there are walls of unadorned stone. Some elements can only be modern, such as the horizontal windows on the rear facade, but at the same time some elements can only be colonial. It is a superficially simple exercise, but in reality much more knowing and sophisticated than it originally appears.

Brazil Builds and History – Buildings of the fazendas in Rio de Janeiro.

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Brazil Builds presents colonial architecture as a kind of proto-Modernism: austere, site-specific, using local materials and techniques, fit for purpose. Hence-consistent with Costa and Freyre – the enthusiasm for the casa grande, the form most amenable to this Modernist revisionism.
The Fazenda Vassouras, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, is a simple square mass on a huge monumental terrace, barely decorated outside, but housing some spectacularly florid interiors. The Fazenda Colubande, in Sao Goncalo, state of Rio de Janeiro, is an austere, horizontal building, with a grand terrace affording a splendid view – a prototype Grande Hotel.

The Fazenda Garcia, near Petropolis in the mountains in the state of Rio de Janeiro, is a simple house built into a steep forest hillside, almost inseparable from its forest surroundings. Besides the fazendas, there are discussions of forts and industrial buildings, and a great many colonial churches. Lucio Costa’s Museum of the Missions, in Sao Miguel das Missoes in the far southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, built in 1937 from the ruins of an eighteenth-century church, is represented, notably, within the historic part of the catalogue: a ‘simple, glass-walled building’ that ‘provides a pleasantly non-competitive background for the brilliantly arranged sculpture’. In each case, however, historic buildings are selected to represent the Modernist argument; the colonial is powerfully represented as a prototype Modern, austere, simple, logical and sculptural.

However, Brazil’s historic architecture can only be understood as a precursor of Modernism if it is also primitive. Brazil Builds demands that it be primitive in order to be authentic, drawing on by then well-established models in other areas of the visual arts. In painting and sculpture, primitivism was, by 1943, ubiquitous, and MOMA had played a large part in its propagation. MOMA’S landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) was the first large-scale attempt to codify abstraction in art, and it did so by referring to so-called primitive art from sub-Saharan Africa. The exhibition catalogue, written by the museum’s young director, Alfred H. Barr, included a famous diagram that showed a direct lineage to ‘primitive’ work. The cult of primitivism is equally well represented in Brazil Builds. Its historic buildings are those that are easily recuperated into a primitivism paradigm: without exception, they are simple, robust and austere, just like the Modernist buildings they supposedly prefigure.

Goodwin’s view is notably inclusive. But it also clearly excludes much from its understanding of Modernism. It disparages most of the contemporary fabric of Brazil’s big cities. It has little to say about Sao Paulo, for example, then overtaking Rio as the country’s largest commercial and cultural capital. It ignores the gargantuan Edificio Martinelli in that city, a skyscraper the equal of anything in New York, built in 1929 in the style of an over-scaled Renaissance palazzo. In Rio, Goodwin can complain only about the modern development along the Avenida Rio Branco, for example, development that turned a small colonial town into a version of Second Empire Paris, complete with the technological infrastructure (the paved roads, the street lighting, the trams, the elevators) that made such a vision of modernity possible. Neither does he say anything about Belo Horizonte, a new city designed from scratch by the planner Aarao Reis between 1893 and 1897, whose vast grid and ambition already strongly recalled Chicago. The extraordinary and now justly celebrated Teatro Amazonas in Manaus is dismissed as ‘academic correctness’ and ‘sterility’; it is not ‘living, breathing architecture’.

Brazil Builds and History - A Modernist water tower in the colonial city of Olinda in the state of Pernambuco, north-eastern Brazil.

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The Grande Hotel at Ouro Preto was a small building in a remote location. Part of the reason it assumed such importance was its presence in a remarkable exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943: Brazil Builds: Architecture New and Old, 1642–1942. Curated by the museum’s co-director Philip Goodwin, himself an architect, with photographs by G. E. Kidder-Smith, it was vital in reinforcing the idea of Brazil as a modern nation, and the architectural careers of Costa and Niemeyer in particular. Its impact in Brazil was considerable, too, aided by the production of the catalogue in a bilingual edition (the Portuguese title was Construcao Brasileira).

For the Modernist critic Mario de Andrade, writing in 1943, the importance of the exhibition could not be overstated:

I believe it is one of the richest gestures the USA has yet made in relation to us, the Brazilians. It gives us confidence, diminishes the disastrous inferiority complex that we have, gives us consciousness of our normality, and makes us realize that we have modern architecture of the most advanced kind in the world.

In terms of its impact, Brazil Builds was a critical event of the same order as the realization of Brasilia. With good reason, the critics of the exhibition, both at the time of its production and subsequently, have tended to emphasize the remarkable new architecture produced by Niemeyer and his circle. This interpretation has tended to overshadow the fact that the exhibition was as much an argument about the past as the new. Specifically, it juxtaposes Brazilian architecture of the early colonial period with the contemporary, making a series of highly rhetorical comparisons through the medium of photography.

It depicts a Modernist water tower in the colonial city of Olinda in the state of Pernambuco, north-eastern Brazil. Now a de facto suburb of the adjoining, much larger, city of Recife, it is of similar historical importance to Ouro Preto, and is another UNESCO World Heritage Site. Kidder-Smith’s photograph, taken in 1942, depicts the Alto da Se, the town’s central square, which occupies a distinctive site at the highest point of the town. There are spectacular views of Recife and the Atlantic coast from here. The photograph depicts the tower, built in 1937 by the radical young Recife architect Luis Nunes, rising to six storeys above the square. An exceedingly plain building, it is built of camboge or pierced concrete blocks. The ground floor is left open (for dancing, apparently) with the upper storeys raised up on pilotis. Although made of concrete, in image, Kidder-Smith emphasizes its graph-paper-like qualities; its construction notwithstanding, it resembles early Mies buildings in its formal restraint. Kidder-Smith’s photograph has it in bright sunshine, and it has perhaps burnt out slightly too, so any details are removed. The photograph depicts it surrounded by a group of colonial buildings – to the right, the squat, Baroque Igreja da Se, to the left a large house. There is a mature tree on the far right framing the church. The building itself is uncompromising and plain, daringly brutal, as Lauro Cavalcanti has described. It does not seek any ‘structural similarity nor dialectical relation between future and past’. It is a ‘monolith, announcing new times’.

Yet this is not precisely what is communicated by the image. Nunes’s tower is framed picturesquely by the surroundings. It rises above them, but its delicacy and purity mean that it does not dominate them; indeed, the church and the tower have equal billing, more or less. And there is a formal comparison too, the verticals of the church tower emphasized by the water tower, while the white line of the third floor is continued by the projecting cornice of the house. Investigate further and other comparisons begin to suggest themselves. As Goodwin notes – in fact it is the only thing he says about it – the tower is highly illusionistic, its utilitarian appearance disguising the fact that only a part of it is used as a storage tank. And in the image, its scale is quite uncertain. By burning out the details, Kidder-Smith plays up the fact that it could read as a 30-storey slab block. These things suggest a connection with the Baroque, which is illusionistic if nothing else. In other words, the dialectic between past and present is strongly here in the image, whatever the aims of the architect.

The Grande Hotel, Ouro Preto (1940) - A number of crucial differences between Brazilian and other Modernisms.

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However, the emphasis on what might be termed the sculptural aspects of the building is made at the cost of the building’s practicality; in other words, the concern for surface effect overrides the expected Modernist preoccupations of light and space. Bruand wrote of the disastrous quality of the rooms: their ‘total’ discomfort, their claustrophobic form ‘like narrow corridors’, their scale ‘visibly sacrificed’ to the overall visual effect. Access to the upper floors is via a spiral staircase, which is ‘impractical and dangerous’ for the old and children, and robs each apartment of valuable living space.

The relationship to mainstream Modernism is therefore a curious one: as Bruand puts it, Niemeyer’s interest here in the work of Le Corbusier extends only so far as it allows him ‘new possibilities of formal expression’. Functionalism is not a priority here. Bruand’s assessment tallies with the architect’s own views of the project, which are couched in purely aesthetic terms. He is bothered about the quality of the construction (poor), but more about the later additions to the ground floor, which have taken away from the original design, in which the public spaces were imagined as free-flowing; the pilotis are now hemmed in, he complains. But worse, the hotel has been disfigured by the addition of terrible furniture. Niemeyer complained to Israel Pinheiro (director of novacap, the company responsible for the construction of Brasilia) in the mid-1950s about it, offering to waive the fee for a government building in order to pay for restoration work, but to no avail. Niemeyer’s views locate the building in the realm of art, a singular vision that cannot be altered.

The Grande Hotel at Ouro Preto identifies a number of crucial differences between Brazilian and other Modernisms. There is the emphasis on history and historical context – a surprise for those who expect Zweig’s ‘land of the future’ to wish simply to erase the past. There is the use of local materials in order to fit in with a particular context, fourteen years before Le Corbusier tried the same thing in his Maisons Jaoul (1954–6). And in ideological terms there is also the sense that this is not just an isolated project, but a central one. It occurred at a crucial stage in Niemeyer’s career; he was appointed to the job in place of Leao, and what he designed had the blessing of Costa and SPHAN, set up to define for the first time Brazil’s built heritage.

The Grande Hotel, Ouro Preto (1940) - Niemeyer’s building design.

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At this point Costa became involved. Writing to Andrade from New York, where he was busy building the Brazil Pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair, he politely expressed alarm that Leao’s design was a capitulation to neo-classicism, a style that Costa himself had recently abandoned, but which still had numerous influential adherents. Costa wondered if the project marked a ‘rejection’ of the Modernism with which he was himself now increasingly identified. He encouraged Andrade to commission a further study with Oscar Niemeyer as the architect; Andrade agreed.

Niemeyer’s design was an uncompromisingly Modernist horizontal block, whose potentially tense relationship with the site was ameliorated by the use of a flat grass roof. This, Niemeyer argued, would make for a building that when seen from above (thinking of the vertiginous landscape of the town) would be hard to separate from the surroundings. Costa was not so sure, and argued for tiles; Andrade agreed and advocated a pitched roof too. The columns on the new design were also designed to be spaced so as to make a visual connection with the pau-a-pique construction of the surrounding buildings. Costa thus won over the traditionalists. His argument was that Niemeyer’s scheme, whatever its incorporation of historic elements, had ‘beauty and truth’. Good architecture, he argued, would sit well in any combination, ‘regardless of its age or style’; neoclassical buildings were only convincing with a great deal of artifice, and in any case they ran the risk of confusing the visitor to Ouro Preto, who might mistake the neoclassical for the authentic. Better a building that was unambiguously modern. In a rare judgement on taste, Costa stated that only ‘new money’ wanted pseudo-authenticity. Only those with really poor taste would want to hide the modern; one who really likes old furniture has no objection to placing a modern telephone or fan on it. The result, in the Grande Hotel, was a building that refused to confuse past and present, making them distinct and legible, without creating a building that failed to fit in with its surroundings.

As a composition, the building was well regarded. Describing the building in 1981, Bruand wrote:
The inclination of the roof, the repetition of a uniform motif on the main floor integrates itself magnificently with the simplicity and lack of pretension of the old buildings . . . far from being a pastiche, the building maintains its contemporary personality, and offers a play of plastic form, resulting from the use of contemporary technology . . . the solution adopted deserves the greatest praise for preserving the integrity of the monumental city.

The Grande Hotel, Ouro Preto (1940) – a building for a new hotel.

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These ideas of Costa and Freyre, with all their manifest contradictions, were played out with remarkable clarity in a handful of small buildings. Chief among these is the Grande Hotel in Ouro Preto, whose name belies its small scale. It was designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1938–9, with the well-documented involvement of SPHAN, and it was completed in 1940. The government of the state of Minas Gerais, of which the town is the old capital, first looked at building a new hotel on 1938, to capitalize on the city’s touristic potential, and considered a number of designs.

Niemeyer’s eventual design is a four-storey building built into the side of a hill near the Casa dos Contos, the old treasury building. It contains 44 rooms, including 17 curiously shaped duplexes, their two floors linked by a spiral staircase. Offices and kitchens occupy the ground floor, with a restaurant and public rooms on the floor above. It is horizontal in plan, and is defined by a veranda extending the width of the building. Each bedroom looks out onto the terrace, all of which overlook the town. The first two floors are mostly unimpeded public spaces. In common with the surrounding buildings, the building has a red tiled roof, whitewashed walls and stone from the nearby Pico do Itacolomi. There is wooden trellis dividing up the first-floor veranda; there are azulejos in the public rooms. In terms of materials the only outstanding concession to modernity is the use of opaque glass on the terrace. It is nevertheless a modern building, however much the exterior fits in with the surroundings. Its horizontal facade has no equivalent in the town; it has a concrete frame; it has pilotis reaching up to the third floor; its duplex apartments and spiral staircases have no historic precedent here.

The insertion of this modern building into a historic landscape was fraught and SPHAN was involved from the start. Its director, Andrade, approached the architect Carlos Leao to produce a design. Leao’s design, for the same small, sloping, site as that originally built on, was a heavy-handed symmetrical neoclassical building of four storeys, with a grand ceremonial staircase leading up to the main entrance. It employed the same tiles and stone as the neighboring buildings, and its squat window openings alluded to the solidity of the surrounding architecture. In its symmetry, proportions and solidity, it resembled the public buildings of the Praca Tiradentes, the city’s central square. Its location, an awkward, narrow site halfway down the steep Rua Sao Rocha Lagoa, was quite different. Leao’s design seems meant for a more open and central location; its grandeur is misplaced here. Andrade’s initial response, however, seems to have been favorable.

Freyre’s advocacy of the casa grande

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Freyre’s affection for the casa grande was shared by many important Brazilian intellectuals of the 1930s, almost all of whom can be identified with the left. Among them was Costa, who included it among the types of buildings of the historical past that he wished to defend. Like Freyre, he moves into a wistful, nostalgic mode when describing the casa grande.

Quoted by Freyre in the English preface to Casa Grande e Senzala, he declares: ‘How one meets oneself there . . . and how one remembers things one never knew but which were there all the while; I do not know how to put it – it would take a Proust to explain it.’ For both Freyre and Costa it was an ‘honest’ form, a true expression of a national identity, an expression of continuity with the past. It was the exact equivalent of the Georgian townhouse in British architectural discourse at the same time: an acceptable historical building that could be adapted or appropriated for modern design. Neither Costa nor Freyre entirely forgot the fact that the casa grande was the representation of a feudal system based on slavery, which materialized innumerable cruelties. Freyre’s problem was the amelioration of this cruel fact. The solution was the fantasy of racial democracy. Freyre argued that what appeared on the surface to be cruel and unequal was underneath more complex, with means of communication – principally sex – between master and slave that suggest a far more permeable and mobile system than might otherwise be imagined. The frank miscegenation represented by Brazil’s population – in stark contrast to the cult of segregation in the United States – was Freyre’s principal evidence. That this mixing may arise from rape, sexual bondage, prostitution and other forms of non-consensual sex is never fully accounted for. The important thing is the creation of a myth of freedom. Costa admits that the casa grande is dependent on slave labour, but when he refers to the casa grande’s terrace from which the planter with his gaze could take in the entire organism of rural life’, his sympathies are with the planter. Given his patrician views and bourgeois upbringing, however, it is hard to imagine him thinking in any other way.

Freyre’s advocacy of the casa grande remained with him throughout his career. A critique of Brasilia published in 1960 (Brasil, Brasis, Brasilia) complained of the defiantly urban sensibility of the new capital, proposing instead a mode of settlement derived from the plantation.

Now in all of this there is an understanding that traditional Brazilian society was facilitated by slavery. The slave, as Costa noted later, was the antecedent of mechanized labour; the slave was ‘the sewer, running water hot and cold, light switch, the doorbell’. But there is nevertheless a powerful romanticization of the society and life of the casa grande, a romanticization that is made from the point of view of the privileged class. This is seen generally in the nostalgia in Freyre’s writing for a preindustrial society, and the accompanying mythification of class and race relations, and in specifically architectural terms in the forms of certain modern buildings. The architects (in every sense) of the Modern Movement in Brazil therefore came from the privileged classes, and retained – albeit in modified form – much sympathy with the values of the class from which they came. Hence the curious paradox of Modernist buildings being designed for a future classless society, yet deploying the vocabulary and reference points of the elite. It is Brazil’s manifestation of a similar paradox seen in Modernist architecture from the Soviet Union to Britain.

A social system described in The Casa Grande (The Masters and the Slaves) by Freyre.

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One of the crucial intellectual sources for this unusual attitude to the past was the sociologist Gilberto Freyre. As Cavalcanti notes, Freyre’s work was integral to the development of a concept of a modern Brazilian identity. His great idea was racial democracy: that is, Brazil as a racial democracy at a time of ubiquitous racism. Brazil’s race relations, he argued, were uniquely liberal, in spite of, or in some ways because of, its long history of slavery. The crucial work in Freyre’s oeuvre, and the best known outside Brazil, is Casa Grande e Senzala.

Translated as The Masters and the Slaves, the book describes a social system and a mode of development based on a rural plantation economy dedicated to the production of sugar and coffee. The central architectural figure of this way of life is the casa grande (big house). The casa grande is the centre of everything:

an entire economic, social and political system; a system of labour; a system of transport; a system of religion; a system of sexual and family life; a system of bodily and household hygiene; and a system of politics . . . a fortress, a bank, a cemetery, a hospital, a school and a house of charity giving shelter to the aged, the widow and the orphan.

The casa grande was ‘the complete and sincere expression of the absorptive patriarchalism of colonial times’. It had a particular form: a long, low building, often built into the side of a hill to provide shelter from the wind. There was invariably a long veranda at first-floor level, which defines the public face of the building. From here, the planter and his family had a clear and powerful view of the land under their control. Inside there was a clear hierarchy of rooms, with private functions well hidden: unmarried daughters would be kept at the centre of the complex, almost entirely shielded from public view. Meanwhile, public rooms were built on an enormous, and sometimes opulent, scale. There would invariably be vast dining rooms and kitchens, rooms that, in the same way as the dining halls of the English country house, supposed a big passing population, an ever-present crowd beyond the immediate family of the planter and their staff.

The casa grande is in a basic sense Portuguese, but becomes powerfully identified with the new nation, ultimately as ‘Brazilian as a jungle plant’. It is also, as Freyre argues, representative of a powerful and successful form of civilization. It is the image of nothing less than ‘the most stable type of civilization to be found in Hispanic America’. This was (quite unlike the situation found in Spanish-speaking America) a society identified by essentially rural values, a situation that persisted until well into the twentieth century. It was the casa grande presiding over the plantation that represented Brazil, not the church watching over the city. As Freyre notes, in architectural terms, the casa grande in many ways ‘supplants’ the church. Not only was it socially and structurally more important, but it also provided an architectural vocabulary for it; in the north-east, the church takes on the form of the casa grande, appropriating its terraces and verandas, suppressing its more obviously ecclesiastical features. The ‘arrogant solidity of form’ that Freyre describes in the casa grande is the expression of a society profoundly at ease with itself and its hierarchies. This just happens to be a feudal and rural one.

Brazil architecture - Lucio Costa and SPHAN.

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The argument is principally that architectural tradition is not invested in surfaces, but rather in traditions of building, wherever they may be found. He had not realized, he wrote later, that ‘the real tradition was right there, two steps away, with our contemporary master-builders . . . it is enough to make up all that lost time by extending a hand to the master- builders, always so scorned, to the old portuga of 1910 because, say what you like, it was he, alone, who was guarding tradition’. Benzaquen de Araujo uses Costa’s term ‘saude plastica’ to indicate an ideal relation between past and present. This concept, ‘plastic health’ loosely translated, indicates a way of thinking that describes a close, and essentially Modernist, relation between form and function; aesthetics cannot exist alone, but must be accompanied by an interest in the ‘primordial’ activity of construction.

Costa argues therefore that ‘popular’ architecture is more interesting than ‘erudite’; it is not affected or pretentious; it wears no make-up; it is primarily communicated through the skills of craftsmen without formal education. This ‘honest’ and ‘sober’ architecture survived a long time in Brazil, he argues, right up until the middle of the nineteenth century. This architecture describes a ‘saude plastica perfeita’. This perfect historic architecture is manifest in certain specific kinds of construction: pau-a-pique (wattle and daub), whitewashed walls, tiled roofs, azulejos, and local stone, local wood. Costa rejects an architecture of surfaces, an impractical architecture where things will not work: ‘conservatory neo-colonial, with verandas where a chair won’t fit, lanterns that won’t light, roofs won’t cover anything, flower-stands in inaccessible places, props that won’t hold up any floor . . . everything in architecture must have a reason to exist, and exercise a function’.

All this leads Costa to a surprising re-evaluation of Portuguese Baroque, an architecture that by contrast to its Italian or Austrian counterparts is remarkably little concerned with surface. The surprise is not about form, in this case, but the fact that it is a form irrevocably linked with the colonial period. The intellectual context, whether Freyre or Sergio Buarque de Holanda, is preoccupied with post-colonial values. Yet the valuation of the Baroque is a crucial element in Costa’s architectural theory. He drags it into the orbit of the modern, praising some surprising things. It has, he declares, ‘composure, even dignity’, even in its most ‘delirious’ moments.

Costa’s worldview was articulated through the government agency SPHAN. Its creation in 1937 was an act of the minister of culture Gustavo Capanema, who was anxious that Brazil’s history was being lost. He charged Rodrigo Melo de Andrade to set it up at precisely the same moment as he was developing the radical new building to house his department. On SPHAN’S legal creation in November, it was charged with identifying and preserving historic monuments, giving them legal protection by inscribing them in one of four livros de tombo. As Lauro Cavalcanti has described, it was ‘integral to the project of modernization’ and was charged with the ‘construction of symbolic national capital’. Under the directorship of Andrade, the architectural nucleus of SPHAN in the late 1930s was Costa, Niemeyer and Carlos Leao, all of whom were simultaneously involved in the construction of MES. SPHAN became crucial in facilitating, but also controlling, the relationship between modern buildings and historic sites. SPHAN, dominated by Modernists, could establish the relation with the site and the appropriate form of the new building without capitulating to archaic forms of architecture. From the beginning, however, it identified Portuguese colonial as the only historic architecture worth preserving, an attitude that has led to the destruction or abandonment of vast numbers of buildings by Italian, German and other immigrants. SPHAN’S view of the past was therefore highly selective.

Lucio Costa’s contribution.

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But first we should look more closely at the intellectual context that makes possible this sophisticated and nuanced engagement with the past. One figure in particular stands out, Lucio Costa (1902–1998), born in Toulon (France) and educated in Newcastle, Montreux and finally Rio de Janeiro, where he graduated as an architect in 1924 from the Escola de Belas Artes. Costa soon established a partnership with Warchavchik, and in 1930, only six years after graduating, became the director of the Escola de Belas Artes. His reign there was controversial, and he was forced to resign after only a year.

Like Gilberto Freyre, the sociologist whose work was introduced in the last chapter, Costa came from a privileged background, and was both well educated and travelled by the time he began to have influence. Also like Freyre, he combined progressive political views with a fundamentally conservative approach to culture. His future Brazil had a strong connection with the society and architecture of the colonial past, while at the same time being a declaration of a break with it. This curious, even paradoxical, position explains much of the character of Brazilian Modernism.

The year before the foundation of SPHAN, Costa had published what amounted to a manifesto of modern architecture, ‘Razoes da Nova Arquitetura’ (Roots of Modern Architecture) in the journal Revista da Directoria de Engenharia da pdf. It is a long and difficult article, simultaneously high-flown and circumlocutory, with a somewhat solipsistic character, too: as much as he was writing for an audience, Costa was also writing to himself, clarifying his own change of position as regards the modern: from being closely identified with neo-classicism, Costa now positions himself as a Modernist. But his understanding of Modernism is based explicitly on an understanding of what might be useful from the historical past.

The colonial past.

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Charles Henry Driver, Luz railway station, São Paulo, 1897–1900.
Big Ben meets Portuguese Baroque.

The richness of early twentieth-century architecture in Brazil has been consistently devalued in favour of that of the colonial period. This is both a problem and a paradox. Many of the most admired structures of the colonial period were openly a means of maintaining a feudal slave society, yet their advocates were in most other respects politically progressive.

One of the few architects to recognize the difficulty was Henrique Mindlin (1911–1971). For him, colonial architecture was severe, solid, unadorned. It expressed the severe and clear-cut social structure: the supremacy of man, the almost oriental segregation of woman, and the whole system of the exploitation of the Negro and the Indian. Mindlin’s own work, especially the ABI, has something of this colonial character.

Francisco Marcelino de Sousa Aguiar,

Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, 1905–10.

The austerity and whiteness of its facade, the way (unlike its near neighbor, the MES) it affirms the existing street grid, its clearly hierarchical internal organization and its clear demarcation of private and public spaces mark it out as a building that confirms the past rather than wishes to sweep it away. And yet Mindlin’s remarks, made in 1956, twenty years after the completion of the ABI, indicate a residual uneasiness about this relation with the past, a sense that affirming the colonial past in terms of architecture amounted to affirming a way of life that could not and should not persist. Mindlin did not resolve this, and neither did Costa or Niemeyer, the other significant figures in this post. The contradiction did not get addressed properly until the work of the Paulista School – for more on that see the next posts.

Cândido Portinari, tiles on Pampulha church, Belo Horizonte, 1943.

The accommodation of the past is manifest in a wide range of modern buildings in Brazil. It informed the use of such details as azulejos on the MES and Niemeyer’s church at Pampulha by Candido Portinari. It is manifest on the content and imagery of these works, heavy on Old Testament subject matter and informed as much by El Greco as they were by the latest developments in Paris.

Eclectic style villa, Avenida Paulista, São Paulo, c. 1905.
In the background is Ohtake’s Berrini 500 building, under construction.

The techniques used to shade and ventilate such buildings also derive from historical – especially colonial – practice. It informs a huge number of private houses. But most significantly here, it results in some unusually sophisticated Modernist buildings by Costa and his circle that, although small in number and small in scale, were disproportionately important in articulating an idea of what it meant to be modern in Brazil.

Occupying sensitive natural or historical sites, and making use of traditional materials and technologies, they prefigure what Kenneth Frampton would call, half a century later, ‘critical regionalism’: a modern architecture sensitive to place and context, tough, pragmatic and local, resistant to both capital and internationalism. It is by any standards prescient work.

Public buildings built in Rio in the Second Empire style

2010-01-11T00:17:00.000-08:00

Francisco de Paula Ramos de Azevedo, Teatro Municipal, São Paulo, 1903–11.
A Second Empire public building in São Paulo, contemporary with similar exercises
in Rio and Manaus.

This unmistakable piece of Haussmannization was accompanied by some flamboyant public buildings built in Rio in the Second Empire style, including the Biblioteca Nacional (1910) and the Museo Nacional de Belas Artes (1908). However, the Teatro Municipal (Francisco de Oliveira Passos, 1909) stands out, an extraordinary confection of marble, onyx, bronze and mirrors, based on Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera, with all materials imported from Europe.

Its highly ornate main facade has a ceremonial stair leading to a triple porticoes entrance, with Corinthian columns, pilasters, balustrades, stained glass and twin domes, the whole pile topped by figurines representing Comedy and Tragedy, and, at the very summit, a giant sculpted eagle. The excess of Rio’s theatre was matched only by the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, completed by Celestial Sacardim in 1896, again from substantially imported materials.

The Haussmannization of Rio had echoes in most other large Brazilian cities. Rio experimented further with this mode in the years 1926–30 with a megalomaniac scheme under the Frenchman Alfred Agache, which saw little realized apart from the creation of the gargantuan Avenida Presidente Vargas. The first decades of the twentieth century are in some ways better characterized by the internationalization of Brazil’s trade and its representation in increasingly eclectic private buildings.

The Rio suburb of Santa Teresa is (as Norma Evenson has described) an assortment of ‘Gothic Revival, Swiss Cottage Style, Second Empire and Art Nouveau’. Similar eclecticism was clearly visible at the same time in Sao Paulo, especially along the newly created Avenida Paulista. Here it was common to see villas in the English half-timbered style too. English influence was more publicly manifest in the city’s Luz railway station (Charles Henry Driver, 1896–1901), whose clock tower disconcertingly cites the Palace of Westminster. The city’s real innovation in the early twentieth century was, however, the skyscraper, which in the form of the Predio Martinelli (1929), an inflated Renaissance palazzo, was as eclectic as anything found in New York.

A significant period of French influence

2010-01-09T12:13:00.000-08:00

There is a history of pre-colonial indigenous building that is rarely part of any architectural discourse. And there were other European presences besides the Portuguese. In 1816 the Portuguese emperor Joao VI brought a number of significant French artists to Brazil, including the architect Grandjean de Montigny, who designed the first significant French-style building in Brazil, the Escola de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro – thus began a significant period of French influence.

This piece of restrained Neoclassicism was the model for a small number of semi-public buildings in the middle of the nineteenth century: the Imperial Palace in the summer retreat of Petropolis, for example (1845–62). But this influence was limited to the royal sphere. The years immediately after the formation of the republic (1889) saw far more dramatic changes in Brazil’s built environment, especially in the big commercial centers. This period, at least the appearance of the Vargas regime in 1930, is characterized by architectural eclecticism, planning on a grand scale and giganticism in architecture to match a booming economy.

In architectural terms all this signified a literal turning away from Portugal. Rio was the centre of this process, which saw it partially reinvented as a subtropical Paris with vast Second Empire public buildings, formal parks and boulevards. This process was planned as early as 1871, and finally begun in 1903 under Francisco Pereira Passos, Rio’s municipal prefect. The crucial work was the creation of the Avenida Rio Branco, a major boulevard cutting straight and level, north–south across the old centre of the city.

The architecture of the Portuguese colonial period

2010-01-07T23:23:00.000-08:00

However, as at the Architectural Review in England, SPHAN served up a highly idiosyncratic version of the past. SPHAN, much influenced by Costa, has always emphasized the architecture of the Portuguese colonial period, representing it as the one true historical architecture. Its principal sites of the Baroque, now protected under the aegis of IPHAN (Instituto do Patrimonio Historico e Artistico Nacional, the successor to SPHAN) or UNESCO, or both, include the colonial hutches of Rio de Janeiro; most of the former capital of Minas Gerais, Ouro Preto; the historic centre of Salvador da Bahia in the north-east; the eighteenth-century centre of Olinda in the state of Pernambuco; and the missionary towns of the far south-east of Brazil.

Among these, Ouro Preto is probably pre-eminent in that it represents the most intact, and therefore immersive, colonial environment in Brazil. Its hilly landscape is dominated by churches, which are variations on the same theme: they are stone-built with (normally) twin facade towers and an elongated plan; they have highly sculptural stone doorways and occasional blue azulejos, but are otherwise unadorned; they have small window openings; and they are well adapted to a climate with both strong sun and high rainfall.

Domestic colonial Brazilian architecture is similarly plain, with intermittent decoration to give relief. Stone is the most common building material; walls are thick and ceilings are high. Brazilian colonial urbanism follows the Portuguese pattern, and is notably less formal and more picturesque than that found in Spain or Spanish America; its towns were formed for trading and developed organically. This narrative explains most substantive building in Brazil from the moment the Portuguese arrived in 1520 to its constitution as a republic in 1889.

The Politics of the Past – The example of the past

2010-01-05T00:45:00.000-08:00

An early example of this tendency is the house that Gregori Warchav chik built for himself and his wife (1927–8, cited before). As much as this house broke with tradition, it also made explicit reference to the local context: its tiled roof, whitewashed facade and extensive veranda clearly refer to the vernacular architecture of the casa grande, of which more later. But Warchavchik is an isolated case. The crucial ideas in this context come from an institution, SPHAN (Sociedade do Patrimonio Historico e Artistico Nacional, or Society of National Historical and Artistic Heritage), created in 1937, and in which Lucio Costa was closely involved at the same time as designing the sensational MES. SPHAN was an organization that understood the codification and protection of the past as integral to the Modernist project.

In short, Brazil’s Modernism coexists with the desire to preserve the past; not only that, but its processes of modernization and preservation were often to be found in the hands of the same people. Modernization and historic preservation were not ranged against each other like implacable enemies as they so often are in Europe. Rather, in certain crucial contexts, they were regarded (and regard themselves) as coterminous. The shared enemy of both was unrestricted commercial development – hence Costa’s well-known essay of 1951, ‘Muita Construcao, Alguma Arquitetura e um Milagre’ (With so much construction, any architecture is a miracle).

As Lauro Cavalcanti has written, ‘Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer planned the capital of the future at the same time as they remodelled the face of the symbolic capital of our colonial past.’ In the European tradition; this is an unfamiliar conception of the modern, which is generally more ruthless with the past. What it does resemble, however, is the British approach to Modernism seen in the circle around the Architectural Review in the 1930s. In this case, the same advocates of European Modernism – such as Nikolaus Pevsner – were also advocates of the English tradition of the Picturesque. The difference in Brazil is that such a vision was not marginal, in the true sense avant-garde, as it was in Britain. Instead, it was de facto government policy.

The Politics of the Past - ‘the land of the future’

2010-01-02T12:17:00.000-08:00

As I described before, Brazil’s Modernism is polyvalent, plural and often frankly contradictory. Nowhere are these qualities more apparent than in the relationship of Modernism to the past. Brazil’s official view of itself is, to appropriate Stefan Zweig’s description, ‘the land of the future’. It has been the land of the future for the best part of a century, and this idea has become something like an article of faith.

The building of the new capital, Brasilia, is its principal material manifestation, but at first sight almost all the built environment of Brazil seems to be modern. Unlike the United States, or Britain, or even much of continental Europe, there is seemingly little appetite for architecture of historical pastiche; neo-colonial styles are relatively rare. Commenting on this peculiar attitude to the modern, the architectural historian Adrian Forty has described a country in which ‘the old does not exist . . . newness of things is valued, and “oldness” is not easily distinguished from dilapidation’.

Forty’s remarks here recall Claude Levi-Strauss’s account of 1930s Sao Paulo, in which the French anthropologist describes a city maniacally building the future, but leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. Things are either brand new or in a state of ruin. The ‘old’, that category so familiar and so vital in Europe, seemingly has no place.

This is a familiar idea – in fact, in the Anglophone literature about Brazilian architecture, it is more or less the only idea available to describe the country’s relation with its past. However, it is not quite right. The ‘land of the future’ certainly continues to exist, but equally there are, and have always been, vitally important discourses of architecture that stress a remarkable degree of continuity between Modernism and the past. In these discourses, the architectures of the past and of the future are thought to exist in a condition of mutual reinforcement, the past (for example) nourishing the present, or providing it with an agreeable context.

Brazil Now – The second cause of the confirmation of the changed status of Brazilian architecture in the world

2009-12-31T15:10:00.000-08:00

The second cause is less concrete, perhaps. The first great period of interest in Brazil coincided with its emergence in the world as both an economic power and a democracy. The ‘disappearance’ of Brazil from international discourse coincides, arguably, with the period of military rule, when from 1964 onwards Brazil and Brazilian culture became inward-looking and xenophobic. The revival of Brazil in architectural terms is coincident with the return to democracy, but more than that, its entry into a globalized world of trade and the consolidation of its economy, particularly under Cardoso and Lula. But further, we might say that Brazil once again has started to represent a kind of future. It is big, and growing, and it has interests in areas of strategic, but often overlooked importance in the contemporary world. It is, and has long been, the world’s leading producer of bioethanol, and since the 1970s has run much of its private cars on this fuel. It grows soya in immense quantities, most of which it sells to the Chinese. It has lots of oil, most of it recently discovered. It builds more than 2.9 million cars annually, equal to production in France, and comfortably exceeding that of the UK and Spain. Its aerospace industry is the third largest in the world, and dominates the world market for airliners of up to 100 seats. There are few areas of the contemporary world in which Brazil does not have some strategic interest.

On top of this, Brazil’s experience of modernization during the past century has been an unusually self-conscious one; its economy and political life may be relatively undeveloped, but its intellectual culture has in many respects been as advanced as any in the developed world. The production of a new capital city and the explosion of Sao Paulo were accompanied by abundant discussion and analysis in a relatively free and vibrant media; academic life too remained relatively open, even vibrant, even during the most repressive years of the military period. Free and open discussion was for the most part possible and the outlets for discussion abundant. There is an immense amount of material to work with. The revival of the reputation of Brazil’s Modernism has been accompanied by a remarkable growth in the number of architecture schools: there were 42 schools at the end of the 1980s, and more than 120 now, a threefold increase that contrasts sharply with the situation in the developed world where contraction, not expansion, is the more familiar scenario. Brazil and its architecture are of global, not local significance, as this blog aims to make clear.

Its crucial manifestations in (say) the City of London in the early 2000s have been spectacular formal exercises first and foremost. Their emphasis on form, surface and spectacle above all else strongly recalls Niemeyer’s work, and it has been no surprise to find Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid and others cite him as a crucial reference point for their work. Niemeyer, in other words, has legitimized an architecture of formal experiment forty years after his greatest period; he has been a useful precedent. It is instructive, however, that the revival of Niemeyer’s reputation has had no place for the architect’s uncompromising politics. The revived Niemeyer has been stripped of his communism.

Brazil Now – The first cause of the confirmation of the changed status of Brazilian architecture in the world

2009-12-29T16:06:00.000-08:00

If during the years 1930–60 Brazil held a pre-eminent position in the field of architecture, it is equally true that post-1960 it faded. It is a commonplace in international architectural discourse that after Brasilia ‘nothing happened’, in the words of Zein; it is equally a commonplace inside Brazil that architecture post-1960 is clouded by shame and doubt, a function of a political situation that placed many if not most architects under suspicion.

That some of Brazil’s architecture can and should be recovered is one of the projects of this blog. But equally, its disappearance from the international architectural scene was real, and there is no doubt that for much of the second half of the twentieth century in architectural terms Brazil was a peripheral place, largely forgotten. Since the late 1990s, that has undoubtedly changed. As Fernando Luiz Lara, a Brazilian critic, has noted, Brazil has suddenly returned to the pages of international journals.

Citing the Avery Index of journal publications, he describes how there were 404 articles on Brazil during the 1990s, almost as many as during the previous 90 years. The same index would show continued growth and interest through the first decade of the twenty-first century, with such events as Niemeyer’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London in 2003 (his first building in England, and his first in Europe for two decades) and Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s receipt of the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 2006 causing minor sensations.

The choice of Niemeyer, already awarded a RIBA Gold Medal in 1999, to address the annual conference of that organization in 2007 (albeit by a TV link from Rio, and via an interpreter) was further confirmation of the changed status of Brazilian architecture in the world. With the possible exception of Mendes da Rocha, Brazilian architects were not, for the most part, building abroad. But the project of Brazilian Modernism can certainly be said to have been rehabilitated internationally, up to and including the somewhat toxic and controversial project of Brasilia.

Why and how this happened has two likely causes. First is the return of architectural Modernism itself during the 1990s in the developed world after a period of stylistic eclecticism. Modernism is undoubtedly backed in fashion, especially in the Anglophone world, if not as a mode for domestic architecture, then certainly as the mode for public buildings. But its return has seen it stripped of any social project; it is pure style, mostly for privileged clients, a means of connoting fashionableness through slick surfaces.

Brazil Intellectual Contexts - The foreign architectural criticism

2009-12-27T14:00:00.000-08:00

In crude economic terms, Brazil is no more a racial democracy than the United States, with success closely associated with pale skin. But the Freyre myth (Gilberto Freyre, a sociologist) is nevertheless vital in the construction of a modern Brazil, and still widely believed. Most importantly, the concept of a racial democracy underpins the work of the Modernist architects discussed here: at Brasilia, for example, as Niemeyer wrote, the idea was a city of ‘free men’ with access to the best living conditions regardless of racial or social origins – as we shall see, an idea built into the city fabric in the planning of its residential buildings. Freyre’s beliefs were widely shared.

The fact that they can be easily disproved is less relevant here than their importance as a belief system; for someone like Niemeyer, an atheist, they came to stand in for religious belief. The musician Caetano Veloso, himself one of Brazil’s more important contemporary cultural figures, has said – invoking Freyre – that he believes in the ‘myth of Brazil’, a phrasing that leaves open to question the objective truth of Freyre’s ideas, but also allows them a continued presence. A very different generation of intellectuals in the 1960s and ’70s under - writes the later forms of architecture I discuss.

Informed by Marxism, the work of Paulo Freire, a sociologist, or Augusto Boal, a radical playwright, or Glauber Rocha, a film-maker, understands Brazil as an essentially poor society that must be recognized as such. Such writers stood in opposition to the utopianism of the earlier generation and its projects such as Brasilia, which they regarded as facile and self-serving. In place of grand utopian projects erected in the name of those in power, they proposed engagement with the poor and dispossessed in the form of cultural acts that would leave no material monument, but (they hoped) would quietly revolutionize Brazilian culture.

In Boal’s tough and radical work, which has been widely performed outside Brazil, theatre becomes a tool for the resolution of conflict in real-life situations. The ‘theatre of the oppressed’ sets out to empower those without power, and to discover tactics of influencing the world around them. In Boal’s worldview, culture is imagined in terms of processes rather than monuments, and, critically, it identifies with those without power – the poor, the marginalized, he is possessed. As we shall see, this vein of Brazil’s intellectual culture became important for some forms of Modernist architecture in the 1960s.

Brazil Intellectual Contexts – The local contexts

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Brazil’s Modernism exists in two related intellectual contexts, the exceptionally vibrant intellectual life it developed in the first half of the twentieth century – a context that fed directly into architecture – and the foreign architectural criticism produced in response to Brazil’s modern architecture. The local contexts first: the flowering of Modernism that occurred in the 1930s was part of a more general development of an intellectual culture, a scene consisting of a number of well-connected, middle- or upper-class, generally Francophile individuals, whose knowledge of developments in Europe was good. They were also – probably for the first time – committed to Brazil and concerned to explicate it, or represent it in terms of a relationship of equals with the rest of the world.

This is in other words a post-colonial milieu, which regards Brazil not as some second-rate colony, always late to developments in Europe, but as a place under development that in fact in some ways may be culturally in advance of things in the Old World. Among the principal figures in this milieu are the poet Mario de Andrade, the historian Sergio Buarque de Holanda, whose Raizes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil, 1936) was one of the first attempts to write a postcolonial history of Brazil, and Gilberto Freyre, a sociologist.

Freyre’s work on race, sexuality and Brazilian identity is particularly relevant here. His major work, Casa Grande e Senzala (in English, ‘Big House and Slave Hut’, but published as The Masters and the Slaves), describes the origins of urban Brazil and the complex relations between the rural aristocracy and its imported slave labour. Freyre’s thesis, both here and throughout his work on Brazil, appears both archaic and extremely modern: he argues that Brazil, unlike the United States, developed a much more fluid approach to race through its peculiar interpretation of slavery; slaves in Brazil were not simply bodies, but also central to the sexual lives of their masters.

Slavery occupied an intimate place in the lives of the colonists, inseparable from ‘sensuality’ and ‘polygamy’. Slavery was in the special circumstances of Brazil, the ‘complement of the harem’. Such intimate relations were, as Freyre recognized, fundamentally exploitative. But they were characterized by an indifference to colour, and in many cases a preference by the Portuguese for the other, which made for a situation very different from that found in the us. Freyre’s optimistic conclusion was that Brazil was, uniquely, a racial democracy in which differences of skin colour were of little consequence. Freyre’s optimism can be easily criticized.

Brazil’s Geography - Modernist architecture exists in an uneasy relation with the culture of the cities

2009-12-23T23:31:00.000-08:00

Brazil’s geography is important here in a national context, but it is also important at an urban level – at the level of human geography. I understand Brazil as having a certain geographical shape, one dominated by cities in the south-east but imaginatively connected with rural places elsewhere. At the level of urban geography, the cities themselves are often highly distinctive.

These are places that are on the one hand often rather seductive – through climate and physical geography, they may have, like Rio and Recife, outstanding beaches, on which a life of leisure may be played out; or they may, like Brasilia, simply have a pleasant climate that lends itself to a life lived out of doors. The best Modernist buildings, from Niemeyer’s Casa das Canoas to Artigas’s Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, have celebrated these natural facts.

Security measures in Jardins, São Paulo.
Security fence with barbed wire, CCTV, entryphone and concierge.

But the cities can be exceptionally fearful places too. The beach at Copacabana, one of the most successful urban projects of the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, is delightful, but also dangerous, a place of robberies and muggings and prostitution on an epic scale, which one visits only after taking a number of precautions. More seriously perhaps is the effect of the fear of crime on the design of residential buildings, which can resemble prisons, surrounded by security grilles at ground-floor level and with security posts manned by private guards.

The tendency for middle-class Brazilians to live behind walls in condominios fechados (gated communities) is highly developed. As the anthropologist Teresa Caldeira has described, for the middle class, the city is increasingly a ‘city of walls’, defending its residents from everything that is outside. There are good reasons for this: Brazilian cities remain among the world’s most dangerous, with rates of murder and assault that approach or sometimes exceed those found in conditions of war – and the term ‘civil war’ has been often deployed. Armed attacks on tourist buses travelling from Rio’s Tom Jobin international airport in the early 2000s required a federal response involving the army; in May 2006 a series of attacks on police stations coordinated from prison by a criminal gang, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC, or First Capital Command), effectively shut down the entire city of Sao Paulo for two days. Rates of violence in some cities, notably Sao Paulo, had decreased markedly at the time of writing.

But profound cultures of fear persist in urban Brazil, and their effect on the look and inhabitation of the built environment remains strong. Modernist architecture exists in an uneasy relation with this culture, as we shall see throughout the blog. Modernism’s rhetoric invariably includes some notion of freedom played out in architectural space. At the MES, for example, the entire ground level is in effect an urban square, open to all: the use of pilotis sees to that. It is easy to see that this is as much rhetorical as practical, communicating an idea of openness, a useful idea in respect of the identity that the government might wish to promote.

Or Brasilia, whose superb residential areas on the south wing are in effect an urban park, delightfully planted, through which anyone is, in theory at least, free to wander at will. These places, however, are undoubtedly the exception rather than the rule. It is far more normal to see Modernist buildings with security measures fitted retrospectively, negating whatever sense of free space they may once have had.

Modernism’s values consist of free and public space above all; the reality of Brazil is of spaces that are increasingly privatized. It is rare to see examples of Modernist architecture in anything other than some sort of reserve, barricaded from the outside world. Functionally speaking, Brazilian Modernism is almost never now a truly public architecture, whatever its original intentions.

The country’s origins were originally southern European, and it has had continuous immigration from that region and other parts of the Mediterranean, where traditions of public culture are strong. But to assume that Brazil shares these traditions would be misleading, for its own public traditions are weak. This is not a country of the public square; it has a poorly developed sense of civic life. Its traditions much better resemble those of the United States. Any consideration of Modernist architecture needs to recognize that. Modernism’s tendency to invoke the Mediterranean city works well in Brazil in terms of climate. In most other respects it is a fantasy.

Brazil’s Geography - The growth of the main cities

2009-12-21T21:36:00.000-08:00

The modernization of Brazil and the architecture that went along with it were intimately bound up with a continental-scale vision of the country in which the cities and the land were very much part of the same system. Brasilia is a case in point, as you shall see further; the vision of the city was not simply that of a showcase capital built in the Modernist style, but also a means of opening up the interior of the country for development.

A map with Brasília commanding the centre

A famous map was produced at the time of Brasilia’s realization to show the distances between the new capital and other parts of the country. The rhetoric of the map was clear enough: the entire country had been now reorientated around the capital, and goods, information and services were now meant to circulate in new ways. The sketch map was in effect made real by a programme of highway building, connecting the capital with the major cities. During the period of military rule, the growth of Sao Paulo was connected with continuing infrastructural projects, especially hydroelectric schemes to provide power for its industries; to put it another way, the city of Sao Paulo became a representation of the modernity achieved elsewhere in the country. A further point to make here would be the continuing imaginative presence of the rural parts of Brazil within the cities. Unlike the cities of the developed world, which often exist in opposition to the land, in Brazil the extent and recentness of rural migration to the cities, particularly from the north-east, means that rural cultures have a significant presence – see the Feira do Nordeste in Rio de Janeiro, held in the (Modernist) Campo de Sao Cristovao; the cities continue to be poles of migration from rural areas, and are, as a consequence, clearing houses of those cultures.

Brasilia’s extraordinary central bus station is one architectural figure of this developmental progress. Located at the symbolic heart of both the city and of the country, it is not just the centre of the city’s commuter traffic, but also the figuration of the traffic of internal migration. Migrants arrive here from all over the country, and many of them go on to do business in the lively street market that surrounds it. More generally, the remote and undeveloped regions of Brazil, Amazonas and the sertao of the north-east, continue to have an important imaginative presence in the culture of the country. The cities, and the Modernist buildings they contain, therefore exist in an important relation to the land. Their size alone is one indicator of this; their enormous growth, to a size precedented in Europe, is a function of the size of the country and the amount of migration it sustains.

Brazil’s Geography – Cities of Modernism

2009-12-21T21:27:00.000-08:00

The architecture is concentrated in a few places, mainly big cities: Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Brasilia, with the occasional excursion to Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Recife. But by and large this is a history of the metropolitan centers, because this is where the architecture is. It would not be right to attempt another history; the story of Modernism in Brazil is the story of the cities. Among those cities, Brasilia and Sao Paulo are pre-eminent in representing what a modern Brazilian city ought to look like. Both are showcases of Modernism, albeit in different ways. Looking at a map of Brazil, it will become clear too that the triangle described by Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Brasilia is extremely small by comparison with the area of the whole country, which slightly exceeds that of the continental United States. My emphasis might seem to some the equivalent of describing American architecture only in terms of the corridor between Boston and Washington, DC, ignoring everything further west. That argument makes sense up to a point. But the differences between the two cases are greater than their similarities.

The US, despite the pre-eminence of New York and Los Angeles, has a much more even pattern of development, and, as has been well documented, its identity has been only partly constructed in cities or places that resemble them. In Brazil by contrast, a few cities dominate life to a remarkable degree. Chief among these is Sao Paulo, a megalopolis of 17.9 million. The city is pre-eminent in the Brazilian economy, accounting for up to 40 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Rio is the next largest city, with a metropolitan population of around 10 million; Belo Horizonte is third at 5 million; there are then a number of cities with populations in the 1–2 million range, Brasilia included. But my emphasis is based on economic importance, and, flowing from that, the patronage of Modernism, and beyond that the critical discourse around these places or buildings. It is hard to argue against this triangle of wealth in Brazil’s south-east; there is no other history of Modernism other than one focused on these cities.

Modernist architecture. Political Contexts.

2009-12-06T23:05:00.000-08:00

Tanks in Rio de Janeiro, the day after the 1964 coup.

These distinct notions of politics are nevertheless fragments of a broader history. The period 1929 to the present is characterized by a number of major transitions, from dictatorship to democracy and back again, periods of economic despair, and equally periods in which to some – such as Stefan Zweig – Brazil appeared to be on the point of becoming a world power. The crucial ideas are, first, Brazil as a country with a colonial history. The Portuguese lost control of the country in a military coup in 1889, but this came after decades of weakness: for example, a bizarre period from 1808 to 1821 found Rio temporarily as the centre of the Portuguese empire after Portugal itself was lost to Napoleon. All attempts at political and cultural modernization in the twentieth century were in one way or another attempts to establish a post-colonial identity, the chief example of this being Brasília, whose inland location was a figuration of this desire, a turning away from the cities of the coast, founded by Europeans and looking towards Europe, towards the uninhabited interior.

The second context is dictatorship, of one kind or another. During the twentieth century Brazil passed through two periods of dictatorship. The first was the relatively benign, technocratic, modernizing Estado Novo (New State) under Getúlio Vargas (1930–45). Adapting imagery and ideas from Italian fascism, this was a period of nationalism and modernization, but not especially of political repression. The second period was military rule from 1964 to 1985, which had an entirely different character. This was first of all a state of emergency brought about by a coup, which itself occurred because of an unstable economy and a Political Contexts weak democracy. Initially relatively benign, the regime hardened in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the so-called anos de chumbo (years of lead).

During 1969–74, under Emilio Medici, Brazil’s government had much of the same character as the military regimes in Argentina and Chile: political dissent was not tolerated; opposition figures were ‘disappeared’ by the authorities; torture was institutionalized; and Brazil cooperated with other South American military regimes in Operação Condor (Operation Condor), a coordinated attempt to rid the continent of left-wing opposition. The repression in Brazil never reached the same levels as seen in other countries – its ‘disappeared’ numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands, as in Argentina and Chile – but the methods and principles were the same. Architects had particular reasons to fear the military.

After 1964 a number of prominent architects were banned from teaching, while the eminent and successful Vilanova Artigas was imprisoned for his political views in 1967, and his architect pupils Sérgio Ferro and Rodrigo Lefèvre were jailed in 1969 for political activities.

The third political context, vital for the development of Modernist architecture, is the experiment in democracy after the Estado Novo, especially during the presidency of the populist Juscelino Kubitschek. ‘jk’ was an immensely popular and charismatic figure who promised ‘fifty years’ progress in five. The use of the acronym jk is contemporaneous with his period in office, although to an Anglophone readership in retrospect it recalls the convention of referring to the American president John F. Kennedy by (almost identical) initials. And it has to be said that jk’s status in Brazil has something of jfk’s in the us – a youngish, highly attractive figure who spoke a modernizing language, and who was anxious to advance his country’s reputation abroad. There is also in both cases the sense of a career cut short by circumstances – jfk’s by assassination, jk’s by the Brazilian constitution’s then rule that no president serve more than one term. jk’s project was more importantly cut short by the coup of 1964 and his subsequent exile. His influence on Brazilian public life was finally cut short in 1976 by a fatal car crash in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which – like jfk’s assassination – has never been definitively explained.

The fourth context would be the economic liberalization after the abertura (opening) in 1985. Since then, Brazil’s economy has become increasingly open to foreign investment, and as a consequence increasingly resembles the economies of the developed world. After appalling economic instability during the 1970s, with long periods of hyperin - flation, Brazil has achieved over a decade of low inflation, stability and growth, sluggish at first, but increasingly rapid at the time of writing, averaging 5 per cent per year.

The two main political figures of this period have been Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994–2002) and Luís Inácio da Silva, better known as Lula (2002–). The country has been as stable as it has ever been as a democracy, with no likelihood, at the time of writing, of any return to authoritarian government.

Modernism in Brazil remains alive because of its capacity to change.

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By traditional standards, Brazil’s Modernism is of a decidedly impure kind. This has long been recognized, but more usually described as a fault. In architectural discourse, perhaps the best-known statement about it is by the Bauhaus-trained architect Max Bill. We have already seen his opinion of the mes. Even worse was what he had seen in São Paulo. Bill was incandescent. In the city he had found

modern architecture sunk to the depths, a riot of anti-social waste lacking any sense of responsibility towards the business occupant or his customers . . . thick pilotis, thin pilotis, pilotis of whimsical shapes lacking any structural rhyme or reason, disposed all over the place.

It was ‘jungle growth’, he concluded in a curiously neo-colonialist aside, not architecture. Bill’s understanding of Modernism is a fundamentally rational project in which form is ultimately determined by function or need. It has little room for flights of fancy, for decoration, for individualism, for anything, in fact, that cannot be rationally justified. It barely needs to be said that Bill’s formulation rules out not only the street that caused him so much displeasure, but also most of Brazil’s Modernist buildings.

Bill’s Modernism is univalent, and in a curious way apolitical in that it attempts to stand outside worldly affairs. By contrast, Modernism in Brazil is polyvalent and highly politicized, with each strand in effect a representation of a distinct worldview. Not all of these worldviews overlap, either chronologically or ideologically, and for these reasons normative Euro-American understandings of Modernism do not work. In the past this was understood as a problem, or a weakness, inside as well as outside Brazil – there was, as it were, an intellectual conspiracy to keep Brazil provincial. More recently, a revisionist approach has become apparent, not least because the multivalency of the Modernist project in Brazil has provided contemporary architects with models for its continuation in the present. The exhibition Entrar e Sair da Modernidade (Getting In and Out of Modernity), held at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (masp) in 2008, is a good example of the revisionist approach in practice. Its curator, Teixeira Coelho, wrote:

The Modern is not one but several. All of them, plus the reflection on the whole, form Modernity. The artists of the time did not all line up along the same perspective. Some of them decided to enter this Modernity; others, at some moment tried not to get in, or get out of it – at the same time pretending by doing that, in certain cases, to be more modern than the rest or to be really modern.

Coelho was writing with regard to art, but the argument he makes works equally well for architecture and urbanism. For this reason, the book has been organized around a set of distinct politics. There is a broad chronology, but this chronology does not itself describe a coherent narrative because, frankly, there is none to be described. If there is a story here, it is that the mutability of Modernism in Brazil is what has allowed it to persist, in marked contrast to the situation elsewhere, in which it has ossified or died. Modernism in Brazil remains alive because of its capacity to change. Some of this mutability can be seen here in the topics of the chapters: the politics of historical identity, the politics of Eros, the politics of industrial progress, the politics of poverty, the politics of social liberation, the politics of spectacle, the politics of public space, and, finally, the politics around the legacy of Brazil’s Modernist architecture. All these categories have clear representation in architecture, as we shall see. They show that we are not dealing with a single, monolithic Modernism, but multiple, overlapping and often contradictory Modernisms. The traditional view of Brazil’s modern architecture, dominated by the so-called Carioca school around Niemeyer, is therefore just one strand among many.

My extended history of Modernism.

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It became easier to say that, in terms of architecture at least, ‘after Brasília nothing happened’, and this is certainly the impression given by many histories of the topic, both domestic and foreign. It was a process aided by the exile or imprisonment of most of the crucial figures of Brazilian Modernism, from Niemeyer to Mendes da Rocha. But an enormous amount happened after Brasília, not least because under the military Brazil underwent an unprecedented period of economic growth, the so-called economic miracle during which many large infrastructural projects were realized: the br 230 Trans-Amazonian highway (1972), the Ilha Solteira hydroelectric scheme of the Paraná River (1973) and the São Paulo metro (1974) are representative examples.

My extended history of Modernism therefore looks at the 1960s and ’70s in some detail. Crucial moments include the radical architectures of Vilanova Artigas and his disciples, the Grupo Arquitetura Nova; the para-architectural activities of artists such as Hélio Oiticica, and their sublimation of the aesthetics of the favela; the enormous growth of São Paulo and the extraordinary landscape produced by the ‘miracle’; the continued work of Modernists such as Niemeyer and Mendes da Rocha; in recent years, the revised concept of Modernism in the work of Ruy Ohtake and others; and the continuation of the liberal character of Modernist urbanism in the work of Jaime Lerner in Curitiba. This is a history that continues up to the present day and explicitly does not identify familiar points of ‘rupture’ in the discourse about Modernism.

Such ideological rupture is, in any case, hard to find in Brazil. It is significant that one the main sources for the death of Modernism, Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, was not published in Portuguese until 2000. This could be regarded as evidence of a provincial and backward architectural culture. I would argue otherwise – that Modernism was simply more embedded in Brazilian culture than elsewhere.

It was, and many ways still is, the default architectural culture, defining the country much better than the few remaining examples of Portuguese colonial building. The Brazilian architect best-known outside Brazil, Oscar Niemeyer, dominates all existing accounts of Brazilian Modernism, unsurprising given the number and quality of his buildings and his major presence in Brazil as a cultural figure. But his work is concentrated in a few places, and is dominated by a few prestigious building types. A study of Niemeyer has little to say about the explosive growth of Brazil’s cities during the late 1960s and early 1970s, about the vast commercial development of São Paulo, about radical attempts to rethink architecture and the role of architects in the 1960s, or about the astringent, moralizing strand of Brutalism that is still visible in the work of Mendes da Rocha, or the continuing presence of the favela in all big Brazilian cities.

I am not concerned here only with a small number of critically validated Modernist buildings by Niemeyer and a few others, concentrated in a limited historical period, but rather Modernism as a field of action, containing multiple critical ideas, architectures of varying and often degraded quality, and activities (such as art) on the periphery of architecture but still nonetheless important to its understanding of itself. This expanded view of Modernism provides a framework that allows us, as we shall see, to talk about such things as the extraordinary, but critically devalued landscape of São Paulo, the reiteration of Modernism in architecture in recent years and the luxury developments along the oceanfront in such places as Rio de Janeiro. It also provides many opportunities to talk about questions of poverty in architecture, questions that are usually ignored or devalued.

The heroic period of Brazilian Modernism

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In 1942 Niemeyer’s widely reported designs for the luxury housing development at Pampulha and the exhibition Brazil Builds (1943) at moma in New York were again vital in disseminating the developments in Brazil to the wider world. Niemeyer’s conspicuous involvement on the design for the United Nations headquarters building during the years 1947–50, under the leadership of the American architect Wallace K. Harrison, made Brazilian modern architecture in effect the image of world government – indeed modern government in general, thinking of Harrison’s later design for Albany civic centre in upstate New York.

At the same time, the São Paulo Bienal, an event of remarkable bravura founded by the Italian-Brazilian industrialist Ciccillo Matarazzo, turned early 1950s Brazil into a clearing house of global visual culture. In its first manifestation in 1951, the Bienal managed to borrow, quite remarkably, Picasso’s famous Guernica from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Finally, the adventure of Brasília during 1957–60, the biggest single building project in world history up to that point, showed the ambitions of Brazilian Modernism to be unsurpassed.

The heroic period of Brazilian Modernism belongs not just to Brazil, but also to world history. The listing of Brasília as a unesco World Heritage Site in 1987 is important confirmation. Brasília is where many histories of Brazilian Modernism stop. As the Brazilian critic Ruth Verde Zein has put it, because of the military coup in 1964, and the subsequent close identification of the capital with the new regime, Modernism and authoritarian politics became closely linked in the minds of many in the mostly liberal or left-leaning intelligentsia.

The first attempt to introduce Modernist culture to Brazil.

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Gregori Warchavchik, house, São Paulo, 1928.

The house is now badly decayed.

At the other end of the timeframe is February 1922, when a remarkable arts festival, the Semana de Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week), took place in São Paulo’s Municipal Theatre. Organized principally by a painter, Emilio di Cavalcanti, and a poet, Mário de Andrade, it marks the first attempt to introduce Modernist culture to Brazil, and – most importantly – to establish the nature of Brazil’s potential contribution to it. In terms of architecture, the real starting point is 1927, when the Russian émigré architect and polemicist Gregori Warchavchik started work on a Modernist house for himself and his wife in the São Paulo suburb of Vila Mariana. Completed in 1928, the house is a tour de force, integrating the latest European practice with local materials and methods.

Le Corbusier, plan for Rio de Janeiro, 1929.

A year later, 1929, Le Corbusier first visited Rio de Janeiro. The conditions he found were not promising. As fascinating as Brazil was for him, it was also at that moment an isolated and provincial culture, only 17 million in population, mostly rural, and socially backward. What high culture existed was imported from Europe. As Lauro Cavalcanti has noted, the fact that Le Corbusier spoke only French on his Rio visits –apparently without interpretation – meant that his audience was limited to a highly educated, middle class. It seems that the audience for his 1929 talks in Rio numbered as few as ten, mostly the architects (Costa,Niemeyer, et al.) with whom he would go on to collaborate. Even then, Costa recalled dropping in on one of the lectures and leaving again, not really having paid much attention. In the mid-1920s there were only eleven subscriptions in the whole of Brazil to L’Esprit nouveau, edited by Le Corbusier and Amedée Ozenfant, a journal usually considered vital for the development of Modernism. The great Brazilian historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda complained that Brazil’s culture was just ‘grafted’ from elsewhere: ‘this means that a false tradition has arisen which doesn’t stop short of prolonging foreign traditions . . . what we need to is to find our own way’.

Le Corbusier’s visit is nevertheless important in developing a dialogue between Brazil and Europe on the topic of modern architecture, and, moreover, providing Le Corbusier with a great deal of imaginative material. The crucial design output of this visit is perhaps the plan for Rio de Janeiro. Here a series of sketches re-imagine the city as a serpentine mega structure, curving along the coast, providing its citizens with both beach and mountain scenery and a new transport infrastructure. It is pure fantasy, and never worked up into anything concrete, but has echoes in housing projects done later by Affonso Reidy, including the iconic Pedregulho (1947).

Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, Brazilian Pavilion, New York World’s Fair, 1939, sketch.

From this point on, a series of significant moments can be delineated, in which Brazil became progressively more central to a global history of Modernism. The most important of these is the sensational mes, already mentioned. But before the mes’s completion there had already been the equally sensational Brazilian pavilion for the New York World’s Fair by Costa and Niemeyer in 1939.

This brought Brazilian design to an American audience for the first time, and created for that public a profoundly erotic image of leisure, luxury and natural abundance that was hard to resist. The pavilion also made clear the country’s immense scale; by means of a giant map of Brazil on which the us was super - imposed, Brazil was shown to be rather bigger in land area than the main part of the host nation.

The history of Modernism in Brazil

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Marcelo and Milton Roberto, ABI building, Rio de Janeiro, 1936–39.

In standard architectural histories, Modernism is a set of precise values, with clearly defined historical limits. For Kenneth Frampton, Modernism’s origins lay in the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the various flourishings of Art Nouveau, for example, and the work of William Morris. Modernism came into being in the first two decades of the twentieth century through Le Corbusier and his followers, and the Bauhaus, then passed through the polarized sensibilities of Brutalism and Miesian neo-classicism. It is underpinned throughout by the certainty that architecture and human behavior are linked, and the resultant belief that architecture can and should change human society. It often declares itself to be inevitable, the logical result of developments in the human and natural sciences. Most importantly, the historians of Modernism write, it is over.

In Anglophone histories of Modernism, the date of the end is often astonishingly precise. Charles Jencks’s notorious statement that it ended with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St Louis on 16 March 1972 is clearly rhetorical. But for others, Modernism’s end is not much less precise; few writers in English assume it persisted any longer than the early 1970s.

Such a history is misleading when applied to Brazil, a country that has never had any popular reaction against Modernism. In Brazil, Modernism is, and has been since the 1930s, the default style for buildings of any size. In terms of brute output, the moment at which in the international journals Modernism was passing through its greatest crisis – 1968 to 1972 – was in Brazil probably its apogee, when its great cities became megalopolis, built up in the Modernist style, albeit a loosely interpreted version of it. If we are to take Brazilian Modernism seriously, we need therefore a different historical structure, crucially one that understands it not as a tendency of the historical past, but as something that continues into the present. This has not only to do with the particular critical understanding of Modernism in Brazil, but also – perhaps uniquely – at the time of writing the living presence of architects of the Modernist generation who have continued to work in the same idiom into the twenty-first century, principally Oscar Niemeyer and Paulo Mendes da Rocha. The book’s time frame therefore extends into the present.

The Ministry of Education and Health

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Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and others,
MES building, Rio de Janeiro, 1936–43.

The architectural emblem of this process is unquestionably the mes. The result of an architectural competition initiated by the energetic 36-year-old minister of culture, Gustavo Capanema, it marked the beginning of the Brazilian state’s long-standing engagement with Modernism. Designed in 1936 by a team consisting of Lúcio Costa, Carlos Leão, Jorge Moreira, Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Reidy and Ernani Vasconcelos, with the involvement of a painter, Cândido Portinari, and a landscape architect, Roberto Burle Marx, on the exterior, the building indexed the best young architectural talent available in Rio. But it was the involvement of Le Corbusier that attracted particular comment outside Brazil. Invited by the team, Le Corbusier arrived in June 1936, and spent four weeks on the project, during which he worked most closely with Niemeyer. Niemeyer became Le Corbusier’s de facto interpreter, translating the Swiss architect’s ideas for the rest of the team, and it was his involvement on this project that kick-started his remarkable seventy-year career.

Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and others,
MES building, Rio de Janeiro, 1936–43.

Formally, the mes was an eleven-storey slab on pilotis, set back from the busy Rua da Imprensa in the centre of Rio. Its north-eastern face was marked by a deeply sculptural use of brises-soleil, the south-western face by plate glass. The small park at ground level, landscaped by Roberto Burle Marx, was dotted with Modernist sculptures, while the walls in the shady area under the pilotis sported a cubist design in blue Portuguesestyle tiles (azulejos) by Cândido Portinari. It was not just a building therefore, but a showcase of Modernist visual culture, all the more remark - able for Rio, a city then still making itself in the image of Second Empire Paris. The biggest, boldest exercise yet in architectural Modernism, as word seeped out, it became a worldwide architectural sensation. The initial reaction was uncertain, the architectural historian Yves Bruand has written, with the American journal Architectural Record giving it a somewhat uncomprehending treatment in 1943. But the same year Philip Goodwin provided a rave review in the catalogue Brazil Builds.

Cândido Portinari, azulejos on the MES building.

It was, he wrote, ‘no merely skin-deep beauty’, but a ‘fresh and careful study of the complicated needs of the modern office building’. The system of brises-soleil was ‘startling’, the first of its kind in the world.9 In 1943 the New York Times declared the mes ‘the most advanced architectural structure in the world’. In 1947 the French journal L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui devoted six pages to the mes in a special issue on new architecture in Brazil. By this stage, as Bruand has escribed, the mes had been published in all the major journals worldwide, and had been almost universally praised. Furthermore, it had come to embody a new national sentiment: everything the Brazilian government wished to communicate about its modernizing intentions was materialized in this building. The only discordant note in the early years was provided by the Swiss architect-critic Max Bill, who in 1953 complained about the mes’s highly decorative façade, its azulejos in particular: a ‘dangerously academic’ building, he thought. But it is his puritanical brand of Modernism, not the mes, that now seems out of step.

Modern Brazil Architecture

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Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and others,
MES building, Rio de Janeiro, 1936–43.

Ever since its discovery by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil has been a mythic as well as a real place. Its empty centre in particular has been an imaginative space as much as a real one, filled with all manner of fantasies. For Brazilians themselves in the 1950s, it was the site of the construction of a new capital – a central episode in this book – an act that realized a long-held desire to unify the nation and open up commercial development of the country’s supposed vast mineral wealth.

For the foreign visitor, Brazil was for centuries an emptiness that was known to exist, but about which almost nothing could be verified. It could be imaginatively filled with the fears and desires repressed from bourgeois European civilization: sexual licence, nudity, violence, lawlessness, tropical disease, shamanist magic and dangerous animals. Arthur Conan Doyle provided the popular blueprint for this imagination of Brazil in The Lost World (1912), which describes an expedition to a plateau so remote from evolutionary processes that it is still populated by dinosaurs. Something of this exoticism persists when it comes to architecture. Brazil always seems to represent the exotic or the erotic; things are invariably possible there that are not elsewhere; the normal rules and conventions are suspended, at least discursively; it is the perennial exception. However, for the middle part of the twentieth century (usually1930–60, for reasons that will become clear), Brazil was an exemplar of modern development. During this period, it would be no exaggeration to say that Brazil was the most modern country in the world. That is not to say the most developed (it was not) or the most socially advanced (it was in most respects little changed from the colonial period), but that it was the country that had bought into the idea of modernity most comprehensively, and it wished to remake itself in that image.

The place of architecture in this scheme was crucial. For many outside the country, Brazil represented the pinnacle of what could be achieved with modern architecture given enthusiasm and the absence of the restraints of the Old World. When the Austrian poet Stefan Zweig arrived there in 1941, he dashed off a memoir of his stay called The Land of the Future. It was Introduction written, probably, as part of a bargain with the regime of President Vargas to let him stay, and is a eulogy from start to finish: everything about the place is energetic, exotic, exciting – but not enough to restore the poet’s mental equilibrium, it should be said. He and his wife committed suicide in Petropolis in 1942, apparently in despair at the state of the Europe they had left behind.

Zweig may have been under pressure from the Vargas regime to say good things, but equally, by 1942, there was plenty to say. As Zweig found, much about the country was self-consciously modern. It had an unusually well-developed air transport network. Foreign visitors increasingly flew around it by aeroplane rather than travel by land or water. It had a wealth of new infrastructural projects. It had (as we would call it now) a booming leisure industry centred on the developing resort-cityof Copacabana, the equal in sophistication to anything found in Europe.

And it had, above all, a remarkably modern architectural culture that had appeared out of nowhere, and was now doing things with concrete and plate glass that were as advanced as anything anywhere. One of the principal motivations for representatives of the Museum of Modern Art in New York to visit Brazil the year after Zweig’s book was published was to see for themselves the new technology of the brisesoleil of which they had heard in respect of the new building of the Ministry of Education and Health (Ministério de Educação e Saúde, or mes) in Rio de Janeiro. As moma’s Philip Goodwin made clear in the catalogue Brazil Builds, the treatment of the façade on modern buildings such as the mes and its near neighbour, the Associação Brasileira da Imprensa (abi), was unusual, and far in advance of anything they had encountered in the United States. They went to observe and learn.

Similarly, when the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss visited Brazil for the first time in 1936, he found in São Paulo a city as self-consciously modern as any in the world. Indeed, up until the inauguration of Brasília in April 1960, Brazil was understood as a country that, whatever its limitations, was modernizing fast, and could leapfrog development in more advanced nations.