Brazil: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion Books - Modern Architectures in History)

290 Pages·2009·11.63 MB·English

by  Richard J. Williams

Brazil
Richard J. Williams
modern architectures in history

Brazil
modern architectures in history
This international series examines the forms and consequences of modern
architecture. Modernist visions and revisions are explored in their national
context against a backdrop of aesthetic currents, economic developments,
political trends and social movements. Written by experts in the architectures
of the respective countries, the series provides a fresh, critical reassessment of
Modernism's positive and negative effects, as well as the place of architectural
design in twentieth-century history and culture.
Series editor: Vivian Constantinopoulos
Already published:
Britain
Alan Powers
Finland
Roger Connah
USA
Gwendolyn Wright
Forthcoming:
Austria Japan
Liane Lefaivre Botond Bognar
France Netherlands
Jean-Louis Cohen Nancy Stieber
Germany Spain
Iain Boyd Whyte David Cohn
Greece Switzerland
Alexander Tzonis and Alkistis Rodi Stanislaus Von Moos
India Turkey
Peter Scriver Sibel Bozdogan and Esra Akcan
Italy
Diane Ghirardo
Brazil
modern architectures in history
Richard J. Williams
REAKTION BOOKS
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2009
Copyright © Richard J. Williams 2009
The publishers gratefully acknowledge support for the publication of this book by the
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Williams, Richard J., 1967–
Brazil. – (Modern architectures in history)
1. Architecture – Brazil – 20th century
I. Title
720.9’81’09045
isbn: 978 1 86189 400 7
Contents
7 Introduction
one
33 The Politics of the Past
two
63 The Politics of Eros
three
95 Brasília, or the Politics of Progress
four
133 The Aesthetics of Poverty
five
161 The Politics of Liberation
six
185 The Politics of Spectacle
seven
217 The Politics of Public Space
eight
243 Brazil’s Legacies
262 References
275 Select Bibliography
281 Acknowledgements
282 Photo Acknowledgements
283 Index

Introduction
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 develop-
ment of the country’s supposed vast mineral wealth.1 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 civi-
lization: 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 evolu-
tionary processes that it is still populated by dinosaurs.2Something of this
exoticism persists when it comes to architecture. Brazil always seems to
represent the exotic or the erotic;3things 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 (usually
1930–60, 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 com-
prehensively, 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
Lúcio Costa, Oscar architecture given enthusiasm and the absence of the restraints of the
Niemeyer and others,
Old World. When the Austrian poet Stefan Zweig arrived there in 1941, he
MESbuilding, Rio de
Janeiro, 1936–43. dashed off a memoir of his stay called The Land of the Future.4 It was
7 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 unusu-
ally 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-city
of 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 brise-
soleil 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.5 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.6 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.
The Ministry of Education and Health
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 begin-
Lucio Costa, Oscar ning of the Brazilian state’s long-standing engagement with Modernism.
Niemeyer and others,
Designed in 1936 by a team consisting of Lúcio Costa, Carlos Leão,
MESbuilding, Rio de
Janeiro, 1936–43. Jorge Moreira, Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Reidy and Ernani Vasconcelos,
8