AR Reading List 046: building Brazil

Catherine Seavitt Nordensen’s Reputations on Roberto Burle Marx, printed in the AR February 2021 issue on Gardens, was published online this week. It marked yet another return to Brazil for the AR: from a special issue published in March 1944, to the AR October 2019 issue on Brazil, we have kept coming back.

As with much of the older material from our archive, some of these texts are, in places, painful ‘products of their time’, reflecting the colonial gaze of the European writers who wrote them – take, for instance, the airs of authority and apparent surprise expressed by the Smithsons, as they recount the level of architectural ‘literacy’ they encountered. Some architects, Lina Bo Bardi for instance, have also been woefully under-represented in the AR’s archive. In these respects we hope, gradually, to shift the balance.

Reputations: Roberto Burle Marx, AR February 2021, Catherine Seavitt Nordensen
‘The dictatorship itself was his client. Throughout his professional career, Burle Marx developed and maintained close ties with those in political power, proving himself to be adept at leveraging those connections in order to make a significant contribution to the greater project of the cultural construction of a rapidly modernising country’

The Brazilian Style, AR March 1944, Sacheverell Sitwell
‘The link between new and old in Brazil, as everywhere else, lies in the climate and the landscape, and this mutual harmony is governed by a rule, that so long as what is new is good it will go together, perfectly, with the old’

A stitch in time: the legacy of colonialism in the Americas, AR October 2019, Fernando Luiz Lara
‘In what became widely known as ‘modern/colonial stitching’, Costa anchored the architecture of his Carioca group in Brazil’s colonial past to deflect the criticism that Modernism was foreign. Modern/colonial stitching goes much further, and uglier, than that’

Revisit: Rashid Karami fairground by Oscar Niemeyer, AR February 2019, Manon Mollard
‘The scale and scope of this ambitious foreign commission recalls the influential work of Le Corbusier in Chandigarh or Louis Kahn in Dhaka – or even Niemeyer’s own Modernist contribution to Algiers. But with its initial optimism abruptly dampened, the unanticipated fate of the Rashid Karami Fairground has turned the project into a perceived failure’

The forgotten master of Brazilian Modernism, AR June 2015, Jack Self
‘Reidy led a group of radical architects comprising Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa. If he has fallen in prominence against his peers, it is for perhaps three unfortunate twists of history. The first concerns his refusal to be involved with the planning for the new capital, Brasília’

Unbuilt in Brasilia, AR October 1975, Alison and Peter Smithson
‘What we had not fully realised was that Brazil had a more complete Baroque style than those of Germany, Austria Yugoslavia, Italy and Switzerland: it not only seemed to flow off the altar and round the church and down from the ceiling into the plan and all over the outside’

Retrospective: Lina Bo Bardi, AR December 2019/January 2020, Sol Camacho
‘Bo Bardi’s vision for MAMB as a cultural centre was an openly political stance: she wanted it to become a centre that would both invite and diffuse popular Brazilian culture, emboldening it against Eurocentric metropolitan aesthetics, as well as populism and commodification of local culture’