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.

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. 

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 . . . 

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. 

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.

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.