Architecture Brazilian Style

Architecture Brazilian Style

In a book about architecture Brazilian style, Mr. Philip L. Goodwin has pointed out that "characteristic of old Brazilian houses is the fine contrast between the broad veranda with its sweeping view and the secluded court."

It is as if he thus sensed the Roman element in the same houses, as represented by "the broad veranda with its sweeping view" -- in other words, a sort of public expression of the patriarchal system -- as complementary to the Moorish element represented by the inner, secluded court, where privacy was assured against too much contact with the outside world.

For the typically "architecture brazilian" Brazilian architecture -- the one developed during the colonial centuries and recently modernized by architects who, not being colonial in their spirit, know that they have to add to a bold attitude of experiment one of respect for what their predecessors have done in Brazil for the adaptation of European values to a tropical space -- this architecture wisely harmonizes contacts, especially the two here simplified, for purposes of sociological classification or characterization, as the Roman and the Moorish elements, as they have been perceived or sensed in architecture Brazilian style in particular and in Brazilian culture in general by a number of national and foreign observers.

Architecture Brazilian Style

Mr. Goodwin noticed in the modern apartment buildings of Rio which face the sea that hardly one is "without some form of partly sheltered outdoor space," continuous winds seeming to make screens (absolutely essential in most of the United States, according to the same specialist in architecture) unnecessary in Brazilian coast towns. "This encourages," Mr. Goodwin remarks, "a pleasantly open relationship between indoors and outdoors. The openness extends to the shops, which are often entirely without glass and protected by falling iron grills during the night."

Here is an evidence of the fact that the old Moorish and Roman elements, the one making for privacy and intimacy, the other for open relationship between indoors and outdoors, continue to be characteristic of the most genuine domestic architecture Brazilian style.

Architecture Brazilian Style

As the same author writes, privacy and domestic exclusiveness have always appealed strongly to Latins, being "one of the conspicuous differences between North and Latin America."

Hence his conclusion that one reason for "the enthusiastic acceptance of the sunshade, from the simple rotula to the most complicated type, is that they give the privacy which Brazilians have enjoyed for centuries."

Therefore, when a modern architect built in São Paulo two houses, one for Senhor Frontini, another for Senhor Arnstein, combining what Mr. Goodwin calls "the most complete and satisfactory use of a small ground area with all the privacy, yet all the openness that could be desired," it may be said that this architect built within the most genuine tradition in domestic architecture Brazilian style.

It was the value of this combination -- perhaps an ideal combination-that many foreign critics, intolerant of rotulas in Brazilian houses, failed to perceive as a Brazilian solution for the problem of building in the tropics: a solution that Brazilians, preceded by the Portuguese who colonized Brazil after and during a fruitful experience in other tropical areas, reached through this permanent, not nomadic or transitory residence in tropical America, less as individuals or expatriates from Europe, than as the founders of a patriarchal society, men who decided to stay and to grow and to multiply in sons and grandsons in the tropics.

Decided to stay and grow in a tropical space, as part of a patriarchal family system that had to safeguard its privacy but not to the extreme of closing itself off entirely from the outside world of sun, open air, trees, and human beings.

Modern foreign observers are showing a better comprehension of modern expressions of this really old Brazilian achievement in domestic architecture Brazilian style. One of them, Mr. Goodwin, remarks that, though it was Le Corbusier who, as early as 1933, used movable outside sunshades in his unexecuted project for Barcelona, "it was the Brazilians who first put theory into practice."

He refers of course to movable external blinds that the French call brise-soleil and the Portuguese quebra-sol, and he praises not only the ones at the Ministry of Education in Rio, but also the horizontal blind in Correa Lima's Coastal Boat Passenger Station, also in Rio, the vertical, adjustable type of sunshade used by Senhor Oscar Niemeyer at the Pampulha Yacht Club in Belo Horizonte and at the Obra do Berço in Rio, and the equally vertical blind -- different from the Niemeyer one -- used by the brothers Roberto in the A. B. I. Building (Rio).

These modernistic versions of sunshade come within an old Portuguese or Brazilian tradition -the tradition of colonial rotulas -- still to be found, under a modern form, in the new hotel at Ouro Preto, and as fixed grilles of wood or cement and as Venetian blinds of various kinds, in a number of new Brazilian buildings, especially residential buildings.

Because of the value being given by modern Brazilian architects and foreign students of architecture Brazilian style to elements in the same architecture which were created during the days of patriarchal plantations, when rustic vegetation fulfilled the role of parks, a new importance is being taken by the landscape gardener.

He is the one to give to the typically Brazilian architecture now that private plantations and even private chacaras or suburban "big houses" are practically gone -- its place in the tropical vegetation of the country by an intelligent adjustment of building to vegetation.

This is the work that is being done by an artist of superior talent, Senhor Robert BurleMarx, not only for private residences in their relation to landscape, but also for hotels and casinos in their relation to public parks and public roads.

Like the architects -- the brothers Roberto, Lucio Costa, Henrique Mindlin -- he is an artist whose boldness as an experimentalist is moderated by his conviction that the patriarchal past of Brazil was creative and not negative.

If Professor V. Ogden Vogt is right when he says that one of the characteristics of modern architecture is that it has "connected inner and outer spaces," Then Brazilian modern architecture must be considered characteristically modern.

Through buildings Brazilians are beginning to say, architecturally, something that comes from their past, their experience, their American development in a tropical area, and which is, at the same time, what Professor Vogt would call their "total faith and practice" or -- to come to the persistence of the two elements that have been always characteristic of the Brazilian cultural and social development -- their "wholeness of private spirit and social culture."

Which, being true, seems to indicate that despite slavery, latifundium, and monoculture, that development favored wholeness, a wholeness that has found perhaps its best expression in an architecture that places Brazil, in this particular, among the most creative nations of our time.

Architecture Brazilian style is creative

Brazilian creativeness has its roots in a family system that has been, for four centuries, the center of Brazilian development as a new type of civilization. It was this family system that created Brazilian cookery, Brazilian music, Brazilian literature, Brazilian statesmanship and diplomacy.

Brazilian re-interpretation of Roman law through the gigantic work of Augusto Teixeira de Freitas, a jurist who was an authentic product of Brazilian patriarchalism and its ethical realism. It was also this family system that laid the foundations of modern Brazilian architecture, perhaps the greatest Brazilian contribution to human welfare in the tropics.

A United States sociologist specialized in the study of the relationship of family to civilization, Professor Carle C. Zimmerman, has written that "the creative periods in civilization have been based upon the domestic type." Brazilian culture in general, and Brazilian architecture, in particular, as a creation of a family system peculiar to Brazil and as an expression of what may be considered a Brazilian civilization -- the part of a larger complex, a Lusotropical civilization -- seems to confirm this sociologist's or anthropologist's generalization.

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