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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.