history
The modernisation of early twentieth-century Brazil involved political
compromise rather than the radical promotion of social programmes
the architecture of the period is similarly compromised.
Incomplete utopias: embedded
inequalities in Brazilian modern
architecture
Fernando Luiz Lara
Modern architecture has always had a complex
relationship with its own utopian roots. From
Marinetti proclaiming that war is the most beautiful
choreography in 1918 to Le Corbusiers famous
concluding sentence from 1923, architecture can
1
avoid revolution, the attempt to build a better
world through architecture has constantly been
tainted by skewed definitions of what exactly this
new world should be. The case of Brazil is not much
different. The architecture of the 1930s and 40s was
much more successful in promoting a national
image of modernisation than in addressing
modernisation as such. Traditional gender roles
abide in modern housing design, which sadly has
also absorbed class (and racial) inequalities in its
spatial organisation. This paper departs from the
discussion of the origins of modern architecture in
Brazil to discuss the extent to which certain
inequalities were so thoroughly embedded in
Brazilian society that they were even incorporated
into a utopian discourse about modernity a
discourse that is still very much present.
Architecture for a new society
Beginning in the final decades of the nineteenth
century, one can perceive transformations in
architecture that announced the emergence of
Modernism. The ciam (Congrs International
dArchitecture Moderne) was the main forum in
which Modernist architects shared their experiences,
beliefs and hopes. Initially restricted to some
European architects, the ciam quickly spread
overseas and acquired participants from the entire
Western world. Despite their geographical and
cultural diversity, the aspirations and hopes of such
participants were to a large extent shared as a set of
architectural ideas. The demand for such ideas was
so large, that it became the generative paradigm in
architecture, just after the First World War,
exporting its social mission, stature and identity, to
whomever demanded it. The conditions that
underlie the generation of these ideas can be
synthesised into four main factors: new clients, new
programmes, new technology and a growing
discomfort with traditional styles. These
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transformations are intimately related to the idea of
modernity. The important issue to be investigated in
this paper is how ideologically different
architectural Modernisms in general and the
Brazilian case in particular were developed out of
modernity. It is important to understand the plural
and paradoxical nature of such Modernisms as
different responses to the forces of modernity.
While modern architecture was supposed to
resolve such conflicts, could it be as Luiz Recaman
proposes that the modern and the backward
2
Brazils were simply juxtaposed? Roberto Conduru
argues that most designs either ignored or
concealed the inherent contradictions of modern
3
architecture in Brazil. Recaman would answer that
the distortions of modern architecture in Brazil
should be understood from the perspective of the
4
original conditions of Brazilian modernism.
Nevertheless, the hegemonic narratives of Brazilian
5
Modernism have no doubt emphasised one set of
conditions exuberant forms to express the
countrys modernisation and downplayed the
social struggles that were happening at that time
throughout the nation. In fact, you need only look at
any photograph of the canonical buildings under
construction to understand that an army of workers
put together such magnificent forms, pouring tons
of concrete with bare hands and backs, twenty
kilograms at a time. The same modern architecture
that promised a better future for the masses was
erected taking advantage of their low wages and lack
of formal training. Could it be that in the process of
being Brazilianised, modern architecture absorbed
also Brazils dark side?
The modernisation of Brazil
Before analysing the Brazilianisation of modern
architecture, it is necessary briefly to state the
complexities and paradoxes of the countrys
modernisation process. By the end of the eighteenth
century, Brazil was by far the most important
Portuguese colony, and achieved the status of
metropolis when D. Joo VIs court (ten to fifteen
thousand people) moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1808
fleeing from Napoleons invasion. Following the
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132 arq . vol 15 . no 2 . 2011 history
return of D. Joo VI to Portugal in 1821, his son Pedro
declared Brazilian independence (7 September 1822),
in his own words, before someone else does it. As a
result, Brazil became an independent empire which
retained close ties to both Portugal and England.
Around 1850, the economy based on a slave labour
force started to move towards free labour under
British pressure. The transatlantic slave trade was
prohibited and after 1871 every child born of a slave
was free, but slavery itself would only be abolished at
the dawn of the empire in 1888. With the advent of
the republic in 1889, the idea of Brazilian
modernisation shifted a little towards the positivist
motto of Ordem e Progresso (order and progress) as
stated on the national flag to this day. For the
dominant urban commercial elite and the military,
modernisation had arrived, bringing improvements
in technology, industrial production and
communication Progresso. But the social reforms
that would bring the benefits of these improvements
to the general population had to wait a
restructuring of Ordem was deferred. Around the first
decades of the twentieth century, Brazilian
modernisation was like a scene in a play enacted by
very few members of the elite trying to look like
6
Europeans in the tropics.
After the emergence of a new Modernist
intelligentsia whose arrival is marked by the Semana
de Arte Moderna in 1922, and especially after 1930 with
the revolution that took Getlio Vargas to power, the
main idea behind modernisation became the
adjustment between modern ideas and the Brazilian
reality. The task was the construction of a native
modernity based on racial mix as the main reference,
and the unification of the nations image through
the search for Brazilianness. Robert Levine points
out that modernism, in some way, fit neatly into
Brazils intellectual transformation from the
experimentation and soul-searching of the 1920s and
Fernando Luiz Lara Incomplete utopias
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early 1930s, to the Estado Novo notion of celebrating
7
the nation as a fusion.
Threatened by regionalist disputes and
inequalities, the old republic (18891930) fell
to a military coup in 1930. Getlio Vargas, the
revolutionary commander who rose to the
presidency, began a rigorous effort in both
industrial and educational modernisation, at the
same time that he centralised power under the
federal government. The result is what Boris
8
Fausto calls conservative modernization or Nstor
9
Garca Canclini calls incomplete modernization.
Recamans idea of juxtaposition (instead of blending)
is indeed much closer to reality. The industrial
and economic transformations were carefully
controlled to assure that the progress would
never threaten the established order. I would
argue that the fusion only happened in discourse
never in reality.
Regarding industrialisation, Vargas attempted to
reduce the dependence on imported manufactured
goods while diversifying Brazilian exports. Based
primarily on agricultural products, the export
revenues dropped violently after the stock market
crash of 1929. At that time, up to seventy per cent of
the Brazilian population lived in rural areas, a
percentage that would change dramatically in the
following decades. Modernisation attempted to
reduce illiteracy by providing access to elementary
education for the masses and a search for the roots of
Brazilianness. One of Vargas governments most
intriguing characteristics was the paradoxical
presence of Modernist intellectuals co-opted into the
state apparatus of an authoritarian regime and its
intensive repression of the opposition.
It is worth noting that while searching for
Brazilianness, the Brazilian avant-garde discarded
other Modernisms that were not aligned to their
11
ideas. While in the 1920s there were many
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competing Modernisms manoeuvering around the
quest of Brazilian identity, the following decade
would witness the incorporation of one prevailing
identity into the official goals and discourse of the
12
state. It becomes clear, as I will develop further in
the case of the apartments buildings, that fragments
of a more conservative ideology prevailed in the
so-called avant-garde architectural movement.
Regarding the modernising practices of the 1930s
generation, more than searching for Brazilian
heritage, they were gradually constructing one
specific collective memory. Such was done by
selecting from among its many ancestors those who
13
better fulfilled their future plans. The paradigm of
modernity chosen by the Brazilian elite of the 1930s
had to be anchored in the colonial past to overcome
the competition with other concepts of modernity,
and this was done through manipulating the
educational system and materialising a desired
14
architectural image. One issue still not fully
answered is how much of the colonial past was
absorbed into this constructed heritage. Were the
old inequalities also a component of such avant-
garde articulation, side by side with whitewashed
walls, Portuguese tiles and Baroque exuberance?
Modern architecture in Brazil
To frame the description of Brazilian modern
architecture, I will again return to the beginning of
the nineteenth century and the process of Brazilian
independence. When the Portuguese court moved to
Rio de Janeiro in 1808 fleeing from Napoleons rule, a
group of anti-Napoleonic French artists hired by the
king of Portugal followed. Once in Rio, they founded
1 Pedregulho 2 Guinle apartments,
complex, Affonso Lcio Costa
Eduardo Reidy architect, Rio de
architect, Rio de Janeiro, 194852
Janeiro, 194658
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history arq . vol 15 . no 2 . 2011 133
the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes, later Escola
Nacional de Belas Artes enba (National School of
Beaux-Arts). Before 1808, as a Portuguese colony,
Brazil was prohibited from having institutions of
higher education. The enba, modelled on the French
Beaux-Arts Academy, formed the first generation of
Brazilian school-trained artists and left a huge
academicist influence that endured until the first
decades of the twentieth century. Among its
strongest legacies, the enba devalued the eighteenth-
century Baroque because it was perceived, as in
France, as a worthless degeneration of Classical
architecture credited to the excesses of Iberian and
South-American exuberance.
By the end of the nineteenth century, ideas of
modernisation arose in Brazil with the development
of railways, communication lines, incipient
industrialisation and growing urbanisation. But the
buildings for those projects remained Neo-Classical
or academic, as did the governmental buildings of
the recently designed and constructed city of Belo
Horizonte, inaugurated in 1897. And although some
Modernist houses were built in the late 1920s, the
reform of the architecture curriculum at the ENBA
(1930) is considered the starting point of Brazilian
15
modern architecture. In 1930, Lcio Costa was
named Director of enba. Costa, educated in France
and at the enba years before, started his career
designing neo-colonial buildings but became one of
Modernisms first advocates after espousing Le
Corbusiers ideas. As soon as he was named, Costa
began to radically reform the art and architecture
curriculum following the Bauhaus pedagogy and
Le Corbusiers ideas in architecture. At first, the
designation of Costa fit into Vargas strategy for
maintaining a delicate balance of progressive and
conservative forces, and his overt goal was to
influence the production of a new Brazilianist and
modern architecture image that would fit the ideals
Incomplete utopias Fernando Luiz Lara
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134 arq . vol 15 . no 2 . 2011 history
of the new Vargas government. But the resistance to
Costas reformation was so strong that the polemic
electrified everyone. Modernists and conservative
academics battled for every competition and major
commission through the 1930s, Vargas playing the
role of balancing the sides until the Modernists
16
prevailed in the early 1940s. However, while the
traditional historiography emphasises the victory
of modernity and the defeat of the conservative neo-
colonial movement, it becomes important to
question to what extent this so-called victory was not,
17
in reality, a compromise. The official support of the
Vargas regime surely means that such avant-garde
architecture should not disrupt the social order.
In the conceptual realm, the blending of the
Modernist European avant-garde project and the
traditional Baroque legacy served as a conceptual
basis for designers such as Oscar Niemeyer, Luis
Nunes, Carlos Leo, Mauricio and Marcelo Roberto,
Affonso Reidy and others. The designs produced by
this generation sought to solve the conflict of
nationalism vs internationalism, and Modernist
avant-garde vs traditional heritage. As noted by Lauro
Cavalcanti, the Brazilian modernists achieved the
dream of every revolutionary, controlling the
erudite and popular edges, as well as having
recognized their knowledge about the past and the
18
future. But just how revolutionary were they? By
focusing on the issue of national image vis--vis the
international context, were the Modernists ignoring
a much more complex conflict the conflicts of
social inequalities that defines the history of
Brazil? Or was such conflict obliterated from the
official narrative despite the efforts of many
architects working on public housing since the
early 1930s?
Supported by the State and adopted by the
emerging sectors of the urban society as the
desirable image, Modernist architecture was spread
all around Brazil. In Belo Horizonte, mayor Juscelino
Kubitschek commissioned Oscar Niemeyer to design
four municipal buildings around the artificial lake
of Pampulha. It is interesting to note that the
Pampulha buildings are a casino, a church, a dance
hall and a yacht club, programmes for the
bourgeoisie built to anchor a large suburban
development. Nevertheless, the Pampulha buildings,
as they would be known worldwide, became the
paradigm of Brazilian Modernism. At the same time,
as Nabil Bonduki reminds us, the federal government
built 142,000 housing units between 1937 and 1954,
housing 800,000 people which is close to ten per cent
of the urban population of the country in the
19
1950s. This is no small figure and when we add the
fact that many of those housing complexes were
designed by accomplished architects of the same
generation (Paulo Antunes Ribeiro, m. m. m. Roberto,
Eduardo Knesse de Melo, Hlio Uchoa Cavalcanti and
Marcos Fleury de Oliveira), I cant help but ask why
those buildings were never mentioned in the
traditional narrative of Brazilian Modernism.
However, housing 800,000 people was not enough
when the process of urbanisation was pushing the
working poor out of small towns and rural areas and
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into the major cities which were quite unprepared
for such unprecedented growth. The same building
industry that erected thousands of Modernist
buildings attracted hundreds of thousands of
unskilled workers from rural areas to the cities. The
role of the construction industry as an engine of
economic growth is clear, but its ambiguous social
role needs to be further investigated. It is not the
focus of this paper but it is worth noting that the
instability of the early 1960s that culminated in the
military coup of 1964 was very much a result of the
exhaustion of the old model of development, unable
to provide much for the urban poor.
Urbanisation equals verticalisation
As a consequence of rapid urbanisation, the major
Brazilian cities experienced a radical process of
verticalisation. As stated by Silvio Macedo, by the
1960s verticalisation has become a dominant factor
20
influencing urban form in many Brazilian cities. A
fierce process of land speculation combined with the
concentration of the infrastructure in the urban
cores created one of the fastest densifications in the
western hemisphere, something parallel to what is
happening nowadays in East Asia but on a smaller
scale. This process prompted a radical change in the
ideal housing schemes in Brazil. In the second half of
the twentieth century, apartment living or what we
call multi-family vertical dwellings became the
21
desired arrangement in Brazil. Similar to the rise of
multi-story structures throughout the world, in
Brazil this typology started as a solution for the very
wealthy and the very poor. The singularity of the
Brazilian phenomenon is the fact that the middle
class adopted the high-rise as its preferred solution.
As I will try to demonstrate in this article, such
process is intimately linked to the hegemony of
Modernism and its Brazilianisation.
While it is common to hear in Brazil that housing
high-rises are a response to urban violence, scholars
have long demonstrated that, first, the verticalisation
process started long before urban violence became
22
an issue, and, second, there was no real demand for
densification in the 1950s and therefore speculative
forces were driving verticalisation, not lack of
23 24
available land. We are reminded by Macedo and
25
Guimares, that this process started as early as the
1930s in Rio de Janeiro and So Paulo, following the
European pattern of building on the perimeter of
the block. However, relaxed regulation (high floor
area ratio allowing more than ten storeys with very
small patios) resulted in extremely high densities,
with insufficient ventilation and sunlight.
Copacabana in Rio is perhaps the best example from
those times. In the 1960s, increasing governmental
control induced a new typology that still prevails
today, almost always with one hundred per cent
occupation on the first few floors with commercial
at ground level, parking below and/or above, pilotis
at the third or fourth slab and a slim residential
tower over the next ten to fifteen storeys. This
typology is clearly an adaptation for dense urban
areas of the Modernist tower-in-the-park. Its survival
is now guaranteed by building codes in all major
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3 Typological changes
in Brazil. The
diagram shows the
confluence of two
strikingly different
typologies from the
1930s being
combined into the
prevailing scheme of
a tower
(apartments) on top
of a podium
(commerce and
parking). Drawing by
the author

4 Plan of Pedregulho
units

Brazilian cities which induce a typology of tower-in-

the-park with significant front, back and side
setbacks, even in lots as small as twelve metres wide
[3]. In any case, what we have nowadays in any of the
largest Brazilian cities So Paulo, Rio de Janeiro,
Salvador, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Recife,
Campinas, Brasilia, Curitiba and Fortaleza is the
ubiquity and dominance of the apartment as the
main housing typology for the middle and upper-
middle class, with the very poor condemned to the
outskirts of the city or the favelas and the very rich
moving towards gated communities.

The pioneers: Parque Guinle and Pedregulho

As a typology that was born out of the early
twentieth-century avant-garde, the apartment has a
lot to say about how Modern Architecture envisioned
the future. For if the Bauhaus was trying to optimise
the kitchen to minimise the burden of housework on
women, the Soviets were trying to abolish housework
altogether with communal kitchens and daycare
centres in each apartment block. In contrast, when
organising the first exhibition of Modern
Architecture in the US (MoMA, 1932), Philip Johnson
and Alfred Barr explicitly left out buildings that
advanced communal living for they would not be
well regarded by American families. In Brazil, Lcio
Costa built workers housing in 1929 (Gamboa
complex) and later in Brasilia (Economic Quadras
1985), with minimal space and minimal cost as a
priority. However, the volume of buildings
constructed for the lower classes was not enough to
answer the looming housing crisis.
A notable example of working-class housing from
this period is the Pedregulho complex designed by
Affonso Eduardo Reidy for the city of Rio de Janeiro
in 1946. When completed in the late 1950s,
Pedregulho won many awards and was published in
all major architectural magazines round the world.
As stated by Carmen Portinho, head of the city
building department at that time, Pedregulho was
built to call the attention of the entire world, only
then would Brazilians accept the idea of public
26
housing. The spatial solution was a long slab of
apartments meandering around a curvy hill, four
4
storeys above and two other storeys below open
pilotis at street level. The complex also included an
elementary school, gymnasium, swimming pool, a
daycare and a health centre. The apartments,
organised along a long corridor, were based on the
idea of maximum integration and flexibility of the
spaces, allowing spaces to be as open and connected
as possible. The floor area was between sixty and
ninety square metres and the apartments had one or
two bedrooms, a small kitchen and one bathroom
[4]. This typology became the norm for affordable
minimal units such as the JK building in Belo
Horizonte or the Copam building in So Paulo, in
both cases without the support service spaces of a
daycare or a health centre. Richard Williams reminds
us that Pedregulho was designed as a total
environment, a miniature welfare state in which all
27
reasonable needs were cared for. At the time,
Brazilian architects were fiercely debating whether
public housing should be owned (the US model) or
rented (European model). Pedregulho followed the
rent model, being owned by the city government
which would be responsible for its maintenance,

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136 arq . vol 15 . no 2 . 2011 history
renting the units to city employees. With the rents
fixed at thirty per cent of the inhabitants wages, the
model collapsed in the 1960s as inflation eroded the
budget and a conservative government backed by the
military refused to invest any more money in such
socialist housing complexes. On top of that, the city
of Rio saw its budget and its political influence
diminish drastically after the federal government
was transferred to Brasilia. As a result, Pedregulho
suffered a process of favelisation with decaying
infrastructure and the rupture of the social fabric.
Meanwhile, another typology was being developed
and Lcio Costa seems to be again the pioneer
behind it. In the late 1940s, he designed a group of six
buildings in the Guinle estate in Rio, of which three
were constructed.
The Guinle apartments were not intended to be for
the working class but rather for a new urban upper-
middle-class market. On each floor there would be
four apartments only (two single-storeys, two
duplexes) and the floor area varied between 170 and
220 square metres. Avoiding the long access corridor
gave each apartment the possibility of having two
external facades or two verandas as Costa himself
proudly pointed out in reference to the traditional
Brazilian house. What is interesting for us at this
point is precisely the persistence of such traditional
ways of living into the new apartment typology. The
two verandas immediately became differentiated:
one used as a social space and connected to the living
rooms, while the other was used as service space
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connected to the kitchen and service quarters. The
verandas and their differentiated function point in
the direction of my question earlier in this article.
When the Brazilian Modernists brought the colonial
past into the articulation of their new architecture,
they inevitably also brought undesirable parts of
such past. To have a double veranda on each main
facade surely relates to the Brazilian colonial house.
The fact that that colonial houses were run by slave
labour is an integral part of their architecture. When
applied to an elite apartment building the same
function took over the spaces: one veranda for the
owners, the other for the servants [5].
The presentation of such contradictions is at the
core of Guilherme Wisniks seminal essay on Lcio
Costa. According to Wisnik, Costa defined an
ambiguous place for himself, given his take on the
profession and his view of the country, unfolding
into a fatal non-identification with the proletariat,
sometimes sympathetic, sometimes
28
uncomfortable. Also intriguing is Ana Luiza
Nobres defence that given the drama inherent in a
precarious Brazilian modernity, and the unstable
notion of citizenship that had always impeded the
constitution of a public sphere in Brazil, Costas
residential buildings announce a possible
29
collectivity. But what kind of collectivity? A
5 Plan of Guinle 6 Aerial photos of
apartments. Note Guinle apartments
the service quarters (left) and
(10), service Pedregulho (right)
verandas (9), and
service lifts
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possible collectivity surely reads as a compromise,
progress yes, but only if orderly. Service lifts and
servants quarters are the visible parts of this
compromise [5]. In Brazilian architecture, social
inequalities were never resolved nor addressed, being
merely juxtaposed. The solution to the problem of
inequality is always delayed, utopia is left incomplete.
The permanence of spatialised inequalities
When we revisit the two most celebrated multi-
family buildings of the 1940s, Pedregulho and
Guinle, it is sad to realise that while the working-class
solutions of Pedregulho were gradually abandoned,
the middle class embraced the more conservative
features of the Guinle apartments and gradually
abandoned the transformative intentions of
Modernism. The contemporary housing scenario is
not only mediocre, it manifests in spatial
arrangements many of the inequalities that may
have seemed natural seventy years ago but should
have been tackled long ago. Take, for instance, the
gender roles inside the domestic realm. Pedregulhos
plan included a daycare centre and a communal
laundry that were supposed to free the women from
some (if not all) of the burdens of household chores.
Not surprisingly, the head of the City of Rio de
Janeiro construction office at the time, Carmen
Portinho, was one of the first female engineers in the
nation and a pioneer of the Brazilian suffragist
movement. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the
Guinle apartments for the wealthy had not only one,
but two servants bedrooms. The quartos de empregada
(Brazilian for servants quarters) have since become a
sad trademark of the Brazilian inequality embedded
in architecture. The idea that a woman will live a
large part of her life in a two by two square metre
room inside some other familys house sounds
shocking but is considered normal by a large part of
the Brazilian elite. More recently, with labour
becoming gradually (but slowly) more expensive,
other solutions have been substituted for the quartos
de empregada. Since the 1980s, middle-class three-
bedroom apartments, the most common type, have
been built with the so-called terceiro reversvel. The
terceiro reversvel is the third bedroom in the
apartment which usually has two doors, one opening
to the social quarters and another opening to the
service/laundry area, allowing the families to use it as
a bedroom, a home office or a servant room.
Pedregulhos proposal has been long abandoned as
a government investment and as a typology in itself.
Instead, the working poor are left to build their own
housing, be it in the illegal favelas or in the extensive
peripheries of the cities where conditions are often
worse than in the slums despite legal ownership of
the land. Since re-democratisation in the mid 1980s,
local governments have struggled to provide those
same services of daycare, schools and health clinics
but they always come many years after an area is
occupied, making them costly due to scarcity of
space and not so effective due to a process of
30
exclusion already in place. Meanwhile, the middle
class have become used to paying very little for house
services and the same forces that take teenage boys
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history arq . vol 15 . no 2 . 2011 137
and girls out of middle school to help support their
families condemn them to low-paid jobs for life.
Another physical manifestation of inequality
slowly dwindling is the elevador de servio which has
not changed much physically but has symbolically.
Once viewed as a natural separation between patrons
and servants, it has been contested in the last two
decades since re-democratisation as a striking
symbol of racial and class boundary. There have been
innumerable cases in which a guest has been
directed to the service lift based on his or her skin
colour or overall appearance. The most famous case
involved the mother of soccer world star Ronaldo
who sued his condominium for being pointed to
the other lift. Strong habits die hard and most
middle-class apartments are still built with two
doors to the very same lift hallway: one finished in
shiny wood veneer opening to the living room and
another painted in dull grey or beige opening to the
kitchen. When challenged about why they need two
doors side by side, people give all kinds of excuses
but do not acknowledge that they are signs of
persisting prejudices.
Perhaps the most important factor in defining the
incompletion of the Modernist utopias proposed in
the Pedregulho and Guinle apartments is the
relationship of both structures to the city. As visible
even today, neither apartment complex is well
connected to the rest of the city [6]. Both are sited as
individual structures in very large lots, oriented on
to themselves and in defiance of the city around.
They are in fact urban islands. Not surprisingly, when
Lcio Costa sketched the complex, he drew the
luxurious Guinle estate and ignored the city that
31
surrounds it. There is no question that Rios elite
wanted a secluded place, separated from the so-called
chaotic city around. But the fact that Pedregulho is
also disconnected from the city fabric calls our
attention to its totalitarian nature as noted by
Williams. The same government that paid their
employees very little, provided cheap housing by
anchoring the rent to the tenants wages. But to have
any real impact in Brazilian society, this strategy
should be extended to everybody. The biggest
problem with Pedregulho is not its own favelisation
since we can credit that to a change in government
policies that lies beyond architecture. The failure lies
in the fact that it had no power of dissemination.
While other elements of modern architecture were
being adopted by the middle class everywhere in
Brazil, Pedregulho remained an isolated case study
and contributed little to the exploding urban growth
32
beyond its boundaries.
As pioneering examples of a typology that would
become pervasive in Brazilian cities in the following
decades, both complexes negate the street, turning
their back on the city. Despite the best intentions of
their designers, the paradigmatic buildings show a
refusal to engage the existing urban fabric and by
doing so reveal the dark sides of modernity. Both
Costa and Reidy surely thought the status quo was far
from ideal, but their responses to this challenge, as
much as they are polar opposites, speak about the
incompletion of such utopias. In Costas Guinle
Incomplete utopias Fernando Luiz Lara
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138 arq . vol 15 . no 2 . 2011 history

apartments the tradition of servants and patrons was
brought inside a modern icon almost untouched. In
Reidys Pedregulho, the tabula rasa solution was
contaminated by the world around it, not the other
way around as the architects wanted. In a way, the
contemporary residential towers with private
swimming pools, sports courts, gym, sauna and
barbecue sheds are not that different in their
abandonment of the street and their insular
arrangement. They are indeed inelegant adaptations
of the Modernist paradigms squeezed into small
urban properties. Brazilian architects have not yet
been able to develop an urban typology that is better
adapted to their cities. It might be because building
codes are outdated or because market forces resist
change. One way or another, the transformative
moment of the mid-twentieth century needs to be
revisited, its qualities separated from its sins.

Notes Brazil (Gainesville: University Press Squatter Settlements into City

1. Le Corbusier, Towards a New
Architecture (New York: Dover
Publications, 1986).
2. Luiz Recaman, High-Speed
Urbanization, in: Brazils Modern
Architecture, A. Forty and E.
Andreoli, eds (London: Phaidon,
2004), p. 121.
3. Roberto Conduru, Tropical
Tectonics, in Brazils Modern
Architecture, A. Forty and E.
Andreoli, eds (London: Phaidon,
2004), p. 62.
4. Luiz Recaman, op. cit., p. 123.
5. For the canonical texts on Brazilian
Modernism see Yves Bruand,
Arquitetura Contempornea no Brasil
(So Paulo: Perspectiva, 1981); Lcio
Costa, Registro de uma Vivncia (So
Paulo: Empresa das Artes, 1995);
Henrique Mindlin, Modern
Architecture in Brazil (New York:
Reinhold, 1956).
6. Boris Fausto, Histria do Brasil (So
Paulo: Edusp, 1998), p. 246.
7. Robert Levine, Father of the Poor?
Vargas and his Era (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998),
p. 38.
8. Boris Fausto, op. cit.
9. Nstor Garca Canclini, Hybrid
Cultures: Strategies for Entering and
Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press,
1995).
10. Elizabeth Harris, Le Corbusier
Riscos Brasileiros (So Paulo: Nobel,
1987).
11. Hugo Segawa, The Essentials of
Brazilian Modernism, Design Book
Review v. 32/33 (1994), pp. 6468.
12. Fernando Lara, One Step Back, Two
Steps Forward: The Maneuvering of
Brazilian Avant-Garde, in Journal of
Architectural Education, v. 55/4 (May
2002), pp. 21119.
13. Fernando Lara, op. cit., p. 215.
14. Boris Fausto, op. cit., p. 251.
15. For the importance of the ENBA
curricular reform see: Lcio Costa,
Registro de uma Vivncia (So Paulo:
Empresa das Artes, 1995);
Guilherme Wisnik, Doomed to
Modernity in Brazils Modern
Architecture, A. Forty and E.
Andreoli, eds (London: Phaidon,
2004); and Fernando Lara, The Rise
of Popular Modernist Architecture in
of Florida, 2008).
16. Hugo Segawa, Arquiteturas no Brasil
19001990 (So Paulo: Edusp, 1998);
and Lauro Cavalcanti, As
Preocupaes do Belo: A arquitetura
Moderna Brasileira dos anos 30/40
(Rio de Janeiro: Taurus, 1995).
17. Yves Bruand, op. cit.; Lcio Costa,
op. cit.; and Henrique Mindlin,
op. cit.
18. Lauro Cavalcanti, op. cit., p. 23.
19. Nabil Bonduki, Habitao Social
na vanguarda do movimento
moderno no Brasil, in Textos
Fundamentais sobre Histria da
Arquitetura Moderna Brasileira, vol. 2,
Ablio Guerra (org), (So Paulo:
Romano Guerra, 2010), p. 92.
20. Silvio Macedo, The Vertical
Cityscape in So Paulo: The
Influence of Modernism in Urban
Design, in Beyond Brasilia:
Contemporary Urbanism in Brazil,
Del Rio and Siembieda, eds
(Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2009), p. 82.
21. Luis Amorim and Claudia Loureiro,
Alices Mirror: Marketing
Strategies and the Creation of the
Ideal Home, in Proceedings of the 4th
International Space Syntax Symposium
(London: UCL, 2003).
22. Lilian Vaz, Modernidade e moradia
habitao coletiva no Rio de Janeiro
sculos XIX e XX (Rio de Janeiro: 7
letras / FAPERJ, 2002).
23. Nabil Bonduki, Origens da Habitao
Social no Brasil (So Paulo: Estao
liberdade: FAPESP, 1988).
24. Silvio Macedo, op. cit.
25. Cea Guimares, Paradoxos
Entrelaados, as torres para o futuro e a
tradio nacional (Rio de Janeiro:
Editora UFRJ, 2002).
26. Carmen Portinho quoted by Nabil
Bonduki, op. cit. (2010), p. 92.
27. Richard Williams, Brazil Modern
Architectures in History (London:
Reaktion Books, 2009).
28. Guilherme Wisnik, Lcio Costa (So
Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2001), p. 12.
29. Ana Luiza Nobre, Guinle Park, a
Proto-Superquadra, in Brasilias
Superquadras, Fares el Dahdah, ed.
(Munich: Prestel, 2005) p. 39.
30. For more on recent favela
infrastructure projects see
Cristiane Duarte, Upgrading
Neighborhoods: The Favela-Bairro
Program in Rio de Janeiro, in
Contemporary Urbanism in Brazil:
Beyond Brasilia, Del Rio and
Siembieda, eds (Gainesville:
University of Florida Press, 2009),
pp. 26690; and Fernando Lara,
Beyond Curitiba: The Rise of a
Participatory Model for Urban
Intervention in Brazil, Urban
Design International, 2/15 (Summer
2010), pp. 11928.
31. Unfortunately the Casa de Lcio
Costa did not authorise the
reproduction of the referenced
Costa sketch. It can be seen in
Wisnik (2001) op. cit., p. 87 or
online at <http://www.jobim.org/
lucio/handle/123456789/1240>
accessed 3 October 2010; or at
<http://www.vitruvius.com.br/
revistas/read/arquitextos/03.028/
754> accessed 3 October 2010.
32. Fernando Lara, The Rise of Popular
Modernist Architecture in Brazil
(Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2008).
Illustration credits
arq gratefully acknowledges:
Author, 3, 4
Google Earth, 6
Cosac Naify, 5
Flavia Oliveira, 2
Paulo Afonso Reigahntz, 1
Biography
Fernando Luiz Lara is Assistant
Professor at the University of Texas at
Austin. Professor Laras interests
revolve around twentieth-century
architecture with emphasis on the
dissemination of its values beyond
the traditional disciplinary
boundaries. His current work
discusses modern and contemporary
Brazilian architecture, its meaning,
context and social-economic
insertion.
Authors address
Fernando Luiz Lara
University of Texas at Austin
School of Architecture
1 University Station b7500
Austin, tx 78712
usa
fernandolara@mail.utexas.edu

Fernando Luiz Lara Incomplete utopias

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