ARCHITECTURAL CRITICISM AND RADICALISM IN BRAZIL
Introduction
Architectural criticism in Brazil has been deeply rooted in the quest for cultural identity as well as in the various responses to the calls for development and emancipating causes. Since the mid-twentieth century, many Brazilian critics have raised radical agendas to understand the emergence, decline, or persistence of architectural modernism in view of modernization. In the 1950s Mario Pedrosa and in the 1970s Sergio Ferro were two important exponents of a radical strand in contemporary architectural criticism in Brazil. Advancing the limits of revolutionary discourse, each in their own way, they seem to have extracted from the dramatic local experience some productive results for the re-evaluation of architecture, modernity, and criticism.
Background
In 1957, while Brasilia was being built, architect Silvio de Vasconcelos (1916–79) published an article entitled “Art and Architectural Criticism” in the magazine AD Arquitetura e Decoração. The lack of a critical approach to architecture in Brazil concerned him. Such lack derived from several sources, including the autodidactic origins of local architectural critics, their perplexity in the face of a sudden burst of modern architecture in Brazil, and their immediate affiliation to its strong demands for legitimacy. For Vasconcelos, a certain consensus among critics and practitioners seemed to have been achieved, but in such a narrow way that “any unbiased or dispassionate analysis, any attempt to specify bright or less favorable results, became reckless, an offense, a position against art itself, a proof of mental or emotional disability” (Vasconcelos 1957). This attitude had supposedly played an important role in the early rejection of both architectural styles and harsh functionalism. But it was time then – he thought – to move away from such a dogmatic viewpoint, which deprived Brazilian contemporary architecture of a more thorough examination. Criticism should neither mean self-justification, nor limit itself to merely visual kinds of appreciation. To Vasconcelos, architecture was not merely concerned with visible aspects but with experiences and spatial organizations that enhance lifestyles.
The 1950s also coincided with the first substantial restrictions to Brazilian architectural formalism, initially affecting local self-esteem, and eventually stimulating new responses. In Rio de Janeiro, which emerged as the epicenter of Brazil’s modern architecture, such attitudes reflected a relative intellectual and institutional drive for rationalization, following the critique launched in 1953 by Max Bill against its baroque and frivolous aspects (Nobre 2008). In São Paulo, a number of periodicals – like AD itself, which espoused Concrete Art after 1955; Habitat, directed from 1950 to 1954 by Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi; and Acrópole, which increasingly assumed a local avant-garde slant on techno-social discourses – took a rather different perspective on the national debate, later christened São Paulo’s School of Brutalism (Zein 2005; Junqueira 2009; Dedecca 2012). Even Oscar Niemeyer, who in 1958 acknowledged his skepticism about the social role of architecture, admitted “to have taken to adopt an excessive tendency for originality” in many of his early projects despite the sense of economy and logic they required (Niemeyer 1958), a position which, in spite of his own will, would tend to stimulate self-critical attitudes among younger generations.
A critical bias
In spite of Vasconcelos’s evaluation (1957), and an undeniable hegemony of pro-modern and national representations, it does seem that a new critical milieu was emerging in the country by that time. And it was neither always unbiased, nor dispassionate. It was partly composed of an early generation of professional art critics, such as Mario Pedrosa (1900–81), Geraldo Ferraz (1905–79), Mario Barata (1921–2007), and Flavio Motta (1923–), attracted to the architectural debate, which had acquired recent importance in the Brazilian cultural landscape. In other parts, it was formed by practitioners, of whom some were strongly rooted in the field as major players such as Lucio Costa (1902–98), Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012), Lina Bo Bardi (1914–92), and João Vilanova Artigas (1915–85); others were younger or less renowned architects, who had shifted into more specialized careers as architectural theorists, historians, or preservationists, like Vasconcelos himself, Edgar Graeff (1921–90), Carlos Lemos (1925–), and Sergio Ferro (1938–).
To review the entire history of architectural criticism in Brazil would be an impossible task in this chapter. Its various theoretical foundations and diverse poetic, cultural, and political agendas, the productive networks, and the unique individual itineraries it relied upon are multifaceted. My objective, through an outline of a couple of exemplary individual perspectives, is simply to address a certain bias which seems to have played a creative role in Brazilian architectural criticism throughout the twentieth century: its trend toward radicalism. I hope that reconnecting some local critical challenges to Brazil’s modern architecture debate from the 1950s onwards may help illuminate a few new ways to address the international contemporary milieu of architectural criticism.
By a radical bias I refer to a general set of ideas and attitudes that reject the conservative mentality and political behavior prevailing in Brazil. Such radicalism would eventually shape a peculiar tradition, intensely responsive to the pressing socio-cultural problems and their corresponding aesthetic dilemmas, tending to view them as a whole at the scale of the nation or even at a larger global scale of modernity. Strongly rooted in the urban enlightened middle classes, this radical tradition in criticism has often endeavored to identify with the issues raised by the working class, and at times has assumed a revolutionary stance. But if the radical critic is mainly an insurgent, and “his thought can advance to really transformative levels, it may also retreat to conservative ones” (Candido 1995). For it is usually aimed at feasible changes in the underdeveloped Brazilian society, which is full of oligarchic remains and has often experienced military interference. It is important to highlight this touch of ambiguity that permeates the radical sense of commitment because it is potentially open to accommodating contradicting narratives in Brazil.
Abstraction and revolution
In his article, Silvio de Vasconcelos refers to Mario Pedrosa’s approach to the topic of architectural criticism. Different from Vasconcelos, though, Pedrosa – as an art critic – had reiterated his dislike for functionalism in architecture, praising the maverick virtues of Brazilian modern architects who had “sent the functional diet to hell.” For Pedrosa, it was time to overcome the established “narrow kind of architectural criticism” in order to reach “its specific task, which is aesthetic appreciation” (Pedrosa 1957a).
Since 1944, when Pedrosa published his first articles on Alexander Calder’s (1898–1976) solo retrospective held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) the year before, he had embarked on a radical path toward abstract art and aesthetic criticism (Pedrosa 1944). From then on, the main issues of the period began to emerge in his writings: the autonomy of art, relations between art and technology and art and utopia, links between visuality and perception, debates on abstraction versus realism, integration or synthesis of the arts, etc. It is telling that he started his career as a critic in 1933 with an essay on “Käthe Kollwitz and the Social Tendencies in Art,” where he proposed a kind of “proletarian art” able to convert the emotional and collective life of the proletariat into a subject of visual perception (Pedrosa 1933).
Indeed, Pedrosa’s prolific collaboration in several newspapers throughout his life wavered between art and politics. In 1942, in the face of Candido Portinari’s (1903–62) murals for the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, recently painted with themes drawn from Brazilian history, Pedrosa disregarded their gravely nationalist representations. Absorbed in a sophisticated visual analysis of the series, he advocated for aesthetic categories of judgment in clear reaction to the approach of Socialist Realism (Pedrosa 1947). “Through processes immune to any recipe, he [Portinari] tends to what one might call de-mythologizing of icons, images and landscapes. Evading external contingencies of time and place, national or not, he multiplies the geometric signals in a sort of anxiety for abstraction” (Pedrosa 1943) (Figures 5.1 and 5.2).
Aesthetic value and social commitment could thus be reconciled “in the field of artistic ‘procedures’” (Arantes 1991). The problems then posed to the concept of art by Calder also seemed to respond to his specific platform on abstraction: the idea of the unfinished work, the issues of suspension, surprise, and of spatial stimuli, the problems of organizing movement and contrast, of variable relations of forms in space. “Disembodied of any convention or external function,” Calder’s works avoided any realistic suggestion (Pedrosa 1944). Nevertheless they were intimately integrated into collective life. Their prosaic character did not avoid the direct contact of the people, supposed to move, touch, and push the artist’s Estabiles and Mobiles. They occupied public squares and gardens with “unseen things, of suggested worlds and unknown animals, of new fables, dreams, and imaginations, of reanimating silences.” They evoked “motifs of remote geological eras or omens of things yet to exist” in such a way that one could label it “a democratic art because it can be made of anything, fit anywhere, in the service of any condition, noble, rare or unusual,” for it revitalized and transformed “the everyday lives and the sad environment in which the large brutalized masses vegetate” (Pedrosa 1944).
FIGURE 5.1 Candido Portinari, Desbravamento da Mata (Entry Into the Forest), mural painting, 316 × 431 cm, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA, 1941
Source: Projeto Portinari.