Brazil's Modern Architecture

by Pedro Fiori Arantes, Elisabetta Andreoli (Editor)

Now available in paperback, this book is the most comprehensive survey and analysis of Brazilian modern architecture to date, written by a young generation of Brazilian architects and historians for an international audience. Examining the works from the 'inside', and with different critical perspectives, they offer new and compelling readings of the country's architecture. Discussing the works of Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, as well as those by less known but equally respected architects such as Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Vilanova Artigas and Jorge Machado Moreira, they show how modernist ideals were incorporated into a country with a legacy of contrasts and contradictions.

Genres: Architecture

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2005

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

200614: fascinating. beautiful. heartbreaking. sort of what the idea and contemporary actuality of Brazil means to me. chapter essay on São Paulo is clearest explanation of how this huge, disconnected, slightly horrific, maybe world-future, city came to be- and why this is not likely to change. and there is more to brazil than Brasilia, than modernism tropicale, than such a violently segregated economy and society...

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of some of the Brazilian aspects of architecture.

[Michael Kerjman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 2004, it's still a good source of information about architectural achievements, to professionals especially.

[Tom M (London) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Ministry of Education and Health building in Rio (Lucio Costa and Le Corbusier, 1936) “is the true origin of Brazil’s modern architecture”, writes Luiz Recamán in one of seven essays comprising this major book. The Corbusier/Costa dialectic is illustrated in a sequence of sketches; Costa’s preliminary concept looks stiff, as though afraid to relax; Le Corbusier rearranges it to create an asymmetrical, equilibrated yet dynamic layout. Costa develops this, and then Le Corbusier works on it again, until eventually Costa finds his own creative spark. Although the completed building was a triumph that appears in every book on the modernist canon, Costa introduced a great many elements that disregarded Le Corbusier’s axiomatic “Five Principles”. As Adrian Forty and Elisabetta Andreoli explain in their introduction, this departure from norms, assimilating modernism into local circumstances, is Brazilian architecture's characterising feature. João Masão Kamita’s chapter on the modern Brazilian house develops the theme, recounting how the early “casa grande” typology influenced modern domestic space and how in the 1940s, Costa developed his concept of “Nativism”, in which traditional elements such as courtyards, trellises, wooden slatted sun blinds, pitched roofs and other local references were incorporated into ever more creative deviations from strict modernist principles. A series of houses by Costa and others (Jorge Machado Moreira, Álvaro Vital Brazil, Alfonso Eduardo Reidy, Lina Bo Bardi, and Joaquim Guedes) illustrate how in Brazil’s subtropical climate, opulent modernist interiors were allowed to flow uninterruptedly out into lush gardens and forest landscapes. Today’s practitioners, such as Una Arquitetos, continue to make explicit references to tradition, whilst the elegant glass and concrete modernist buildings of MMBB seem to ignore it entirely.

The creative richness of Brazilian architecture, and the very high critical level of some writing in this book (notably by Recamán) suggest that far from worrying about Brazil being provincial, as the authors fear, it is we in Europe who need to learn from their experience, not least from the fearless stance of politically-aware scholars like Recamán and Roberto Conduro, who speak out about the nefarious connections in Brazil between architecture, exploitation, social injustice, democracy, totalitarianism, global capitalism, and greed. Andreoli and Forty wonder why people don’t talk much about Brazilian architecture, perhaps not noticing that some of these beautiful buildings are constructed entirely from tropical rain forest hardwoods - including their structural frames. Conduro’s shocking revelations about the working conditions of construction workers take the gloss off the seductive beauty, and Recamán’s merciless observations on Niemeyer’s supposedly community-friendly project at Belo Horizonte (1940) might be extended to cover many beautiful houses in the book: ”exotic, useless architectural novelties [...] for the dolce vita of the bourgeoisie.” Maybe this is why we find it awkward to embrace Brazilian architecture wholeheartedly. Recamán’s denunciation of Costa’s inhuman and idiotic Brasilia plan (1960) is surely the definitive liquidation of the entire modernist approach to urbanism. Conduro’s site photographs show the poor workers in Brasilia struggling to build Niemeyer’s complex inverted domes and curving forms, only to be “excluded from the city they built”; Costa’s plan made no provision for low-cost housing, and has no pavements for pedestrians. Recamán’s brilliant but horrifying essay on São Paolo, an urban disaster of 16 million lost souls, describes a place so dangerous that the rich can only travel around the city by helicopter. In its filthy favelas, “self construction” (writes Pedro Arantes) “is the only architecture experienced by the vast majority of Brazil’s population”. Yet the book is filled with the most beautiful, adventurous modern architecture one has seen anywhere; from masterpieces like Affonso Eduardo Reidy’s 1953 Museum of Modern Art in Rio to the recent (2000) São Paolo dental surgery by MMBB. By combining immense beauty with deep tragedy, perhaps this book exactly captures the spirit of Brazilian architecture, as in the samba by Cazuza, its beauty making everything “por um segundo mais feliz” (a little happier, just for a moment).