The Rise of Popular Modernist Architecture in Brazil

Foreword

Foreword Modernist architecture is on display in Brazilian cities. It is not a corporate modernism that catches the eye, though the sort of formulaic architecture of glass towers with capital flourishes that dominates American skylines is now a staple of new business zones in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and many other cities. Rather, the modernism that beckons in Brazil’s streets is classic avant-garde, one that transforms the globalized lexicon of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) architecture into brilliant Brazilian performances. Among the various renditions, one is internationally renowned. I refer to the gems of this avant-garde that Brazil’s world-famous architects continue to produce—the buildings of the Ministry of Education and Culture, Pampulha, Copan, and Brasília to note a few. Although their types and functions vary, they are designed by architects who maintain through them a highly competitive dialogue not only with each other but also with the ambitions of design professionals globally. Another performance of this modernism is not well known outside of Brazil. Yet examples are found by the thousands in modest residential neighborhoods throughout the country: single-family homes that are designed and built by their owners, an “autoconstruction” as it is called, produced by both the middle and the working classes without architects. Often labeled “popular modernism,” its designer/builders are no less concerned with using modernist architecture to narrate, to say something about being modern Brazilians . However, their modernist means are routinely dismissed by both native and foreign architects, critics, and historians as kitsch, degenerative, vulgar, and worthless imitations precisely because they are vernacular. Foreword xii Fernando Lara’s study brings these two performances of Brazilian modernism into critical relation. His work shows that modernism both “high” and “low” is popular in Brazil, popular in the sense of being desired, demanded , and consumed widely. He does so primarily by demonstrating its dissemination among middle-class residents of the city of Belo Horizonte —though we also find it on display in all other major Brazilian cities and abundantly presented by the working classes on the façades of their homes in the poor urban peripheries. Yet Lara’s sample of middle-class modernist homes in Belo Horizonte is sufficient to demonstrate that the “new architecture” that developed in Brazil especially between the 1940s and the 1960s appealed generally to the national aspirations of Brazilians to invent a new Brazil, to leap over an old-fashioned rustic past into a radiant industrial urban future constructed symbolically and concretely with the columns, canopies, and brise-soleils of modernist architecture. Lara shows, in short, how building modern indicates being modern. His study of a national investment in avant-garde modernism reveals how it spread far beyond a small circle of architects. His book is grounded inadetailedexaminationofthehousesthemselves.Laraconductedtwentyone in-depth interviews with their original resident/builders, examined fifty plans retrieved from city archives, and analyzed approximately five hundred photographs of façades. To bring this popular modernism into relation with the high modernism of Brazil’s star architects, moreover, he researched two crucial sources of dissemination: modernism’s propagation by the state—that is, its sponsorship in projects built by various local and national administrations of government—and its appearance in print media, especially in “coffee-table” magazines and magazines serving the building professions. Both sources, Lara shows, exposed massive numbers of Brazilians to modernist architecture, turning this architecture into a widely legible, compelling, and innovative paradigm of communication about the modern and its prospects for producing new personal, social, and national identities in Brazil. Lara’s investigation shows, however, that intense controversy also marked this exposure, no doubt making the use of modernism all the more exciting but, nevertheless, creating a persistent bias against the popular. Debates swirled around both the cosmopolitan and the popular performances of modernism. The root issue for both is the same. It is the problem of the copy, that is, the judgment that the copy is inferior and that xiii Foreword copying is inauthentic, if not degenerative. There is a double iteration of this problem in Brazilian modernism. On the one hand, the importation of European avant-garde modernism to the “periphery” of Brazil is deemed artificial and false because it is exogenous; on the other, the Brazilian masters of the high modern “made in Brazil” dismiss its translation into an unarchitected vernacular as mimetic kitsch. The problem of the foreign copy...