Healing Modern Architecture’s Break with the Past: Musings around Brazilian Fenestration

This paper focuses on the role of Brazilian architects in emancipating Modern Architecture from overly limiting orthodoxies. In particular, this study follows direct, if weak influences across the Pacific to Australia and stronger ones across the South Atlantic to Southern Africa, where Brazilian ideas found fertile ground without being filtered through Northern Hemisphere mediations. Official delegations of architects from Australia and South Africa went to Brazil seeking inspiration and transferable ideas achieved mixed success. Central to the theme of this essay is a recently discovered and unpublished manuscript. It is the work of Barrie Biermann who, upon graduation from the University of Cape Town sailed across to Brazil in 1946 to gain first-hand knowledge of the architecture that had achieved worldwide renown through the 1943 Brazil Builds exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA). Biermann’s close observations and discussions with several of Brazil’s leading architects helped him develop a fresh narrative that placed recent developments in a continuum linked to Portuguese colonial architecture that had taken lessons from the ‘East’. Published in a very abridged form in a professional journal in 1950, it lost much of the charm of the original, which, in addition to imaginative theoretical speculation, is enriched by evocative, atmospheric sketches, water colours and photographs. This study shows that South-South connections were quite independent and predated the influence of ‘scientific’ manuals of ‘how-to build in the tropics’ that proliferated from metropolitan centres in the mid-1950s, preparing for decolonization but perhaps also motivated by ambitions of engendering other forms of dependence. Brazilian ideas and examples of built work played an important role in bringing vitality to some of the architectures of Africa. They also engaged with crucial issues of identity and the production of buildings celebrating values beyond the utilitarian.