Programmatic Modernism 1917–1932

Abstract

This chapter is dedicated to the study of certain modernity in Brazil in the second decade of the twentieth century. Preliminarily, it would be convenient to make the reader aware of the fact that this modernism—mainly in the literature, but with branches in the arts and in architecture—is different from the modernist manifestations—of literary roots—that came about in Latin American throughout the second half of the nineteenth century (Franco 1985).

Architecture in Brazil is positively located outside both antagonistic lines into which modern architecture is artistically divided. It does not belong to the revolutionary reformers that look for a game of primary geometric shapes ordered in a virtual space and of a marked social character, or to the traditionalists, who see architecture under a local light, including all of its environmental settings. Brazilian architecture does not advocate, either, a worldly art, in which the regional differences can be erased and whose aesthetics results from a new building technique and from the solving of purely utilitarian problems. Brazilian architecture does not attempt to link art to local traditions or to the spirit of the race. In short, it is neither traditionalist nor anti-traditionalist. It is neither national nor “supranational”. Monteiro Lobato defined it with this mocking expression: “an international game of nonsense…”

Fernando de Azevedo (1926a)