The Rise of Popular Modernist Architecture in Brazil

Introduction

Introduction My motivation to research and write about the dissemination of modernist vocabulary and spatiality in mid-twentieth-century Brazil was born from a misunderstanding. When I first arrived in the United States in 1996, I walked the streets looking for a modern residential architecture that I never found. Where, I wondered, were the modern and postmodern houses I had seen in magazines? Instead, the new residential suburbs had a nineteenth-century look. How could this be when the United States was supposedly the paradigm of twentieth-century modernization? Having lived in Brazil for the first twenty-five years of my life and having grown accustomed to the overwhelming presence of modern architecture there, I thought the whole world had gone through the same modernist frenzy after World War II. Modernism was very familiar to me. It was present on all the streets I used to walk along on a daily basis. I was used to a variety of canopies, thin metallic columns, void ceramic blocks, inverted roofs. And beyond the façades, a modernist spatiality constituted most of my experience of space. My grandparents’ house, the first apartment building I lived in as a child, my kindergarten, many of my friends’ houses, and of course, the building that housed the school of architecture at my university—all were modernist. The fact that in the United States modernity flourished everywhere except in residential architecture puzzled me, for in my native Brazil the opposite was true. Modernity in Brazil was manifested in the built environment more than in any other facet of society. My realization of the very different built environment in the United States provided me with a Introduction 2 hint that something was unique about Brazil. This experience proved one of alterity, in which this “other” land helped define my own self, or in this case, my native built environment. Such alterity prompted me to write about the phenomenon (Lara 2001) and to continue researching and writing about the extensive, unique, and quite unknown dissemination of modernism in Brazil (Lara 2002, 2006a, 2006b). The fact that a phenomenon so extensive had gone unnoticed gave me extra encouragement to write about it. In the early stages of my research , I was frustrated at the absence of architectural literature about the dissemination of modernist vocabulary. Worse, in the few instances where I was able to find any mention of it, the popular appropriation of modernism was portrayed as degenerative, imitative, or volatile. In contrast, in this book I make the case that daily life and ordinary buildings shape our relationship to the built environment as much as the paradigmatic buildings traditionally considered by architectural historiography do. I enlarge the scope of what is considered worthy of architectural scholarship by investigating the acceptance of modern architecture in Brazil, as manifested in its middle-class housing of the 1950s. The first chapter presents the phenomenon of popular modernism in architecture as I define it, introducing some of its characteristics and discussing its place and time. The high point of modernism in Brazil occurred in the 1950s, and I present the highlights of this decade. Although modernist architecture was disseminated throughout Brazil, I focus on the city of Belo Horizonte for reasons I discuss later. The second chapter starts with a documentation of popular modernism and a description of the methods I used to collect case study data. I then describe the physical characteristics of modernist buildings, based on an analysis of five hundred photographs of façades and about fifty plans retrieved from city archives. This analysis constitutes the bulk of the original research in this book. In addition, in-depth interviews with the original inhabitants of the houses—who were also the builders—reveal their motivations for building as they did. Chapter 2 concludes with a discussion of how the architectural information disseminated through different media actually reached the Brazilian middle class. Another purpose of this book is to locate popular modernism within the context of modernist architecture and of the current challenges faced by architecture. Therefore, in chapter 3, I analyze the meanings of moder- 3 Introduction nity, modernization, and modernism, as well as how these were manifested in Brazil. Habermas’s conception of modernity as an ongoing development is used to illuminate the often contradictory relationships among modernity , modernization, and modernism. Moreover, the concept of an ongoing modernity (Habermas 1987) seems more applicable than the idea of postmodernity...