Questions on space and intersections in the historiography of modern Brazilian architecture

Abstract

This text proposes a spatial approach to a particular historiographical analysis: the deconstruction of the Brazilian modern architecture narrative as advanced by its main proponent architect, Lúcio Costa. The analysis is advanced from three different perspectives. The first concerns the place from within the Brazilian modern architecture narrative occupied by Lúcio Costa during the 1930s, a period of major cultural unrest under the Estado Novo dictatorship (1937-1945). The second invokes the field of cultural geography, scrutinising Costa’s understanding of the concept of history and the way he understood and used the notions of transferences, exchanges and dialogues both in the cultural space of the time and between the past and the historical present. Costa’s commitments to the assertion of a national identity emerge in contrast to the supranational character of North American scholars George Kubler and Robert Chester Smith’s formulations on Latin American art and architecture. The third and last perspective introduces the idea of cultural dialogue, following the tradition of the spatial theoretical formulations developed by Georg Simmel and Martin Buber during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Keywords

• historiography
• cultural transfer
• cross-cultural history