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=Brazilian Modern Architecture=

In the 1940s and 1950s Brazil acquired unprecedented prestige in the world of Modern Architecture. Brazil was regarded as the country which had inherited the progressive Modernism of the pre-war period in Europe, and which, furthermore, had initiated a new phase of the assimilation of cultural and environmental considerations. The major buildings – the Ministry of Education, the Brazilian Pavilion at the New York World’s fair 1939, the Brazilian Press Association, Santos Dumont Airport, the Pampulha complex – became widely know and highly influential, launched by the exhibition ‘Brazil Builds’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1943 and the publication of Brazil Builds.

History and Influences
The modernist style came to Brazil as it did to other New World countries: through European visitors and immigrants and through Brazilians who returned after studying in Europe. Some enormous difference, however distinguished Brazilian modernism from its European ancestor; the country’s prosperity, the government’s desire to put a new face on its capital, and a brilliant generation of architects and intellectual with ties to the cultural apparatus of the state transformed the style into a new language, unmistakably Brazilian and, at the same time, universal.

On an international level and even in Brazil, although it is acknowledged that Brazilian modernist production was important, the works themselves are little know and the conditions that gave rise to them are poorly understood. In fact, only after New York’s Moma exhibition of ‘Brazil Builds’ and its book publication was that its architecture started being discovered both by foreigners and Brazilians themselves. In senses, it even helped to dismiss the ‘colonial complex’ of the population, as they were surprised, and even astonished, by the book which proved to them that they had a modern architecture of international status.

However, what really first attracted particular comment outside Brazil was the involvement of Le Corbusier in the design of the Ministry of Education and Health Building, together with a great team of Brazilian architects including Oscar Niemeyer. He was able to work closely with them during his period in Brazil, especially with Niemeyer who later became his greatest protégé. Learning the main elements of Corbusier’s architecture style, this generation was able to take over it, and implant it with a Brazilian approach to it.

Brazilian Pavilion 1939
One great example of how the modernist architecture was put into Brazilian language and style was the Brazilian Pavilion in the New York World’s fair of 1939-40 designed by Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa (another well-respected Brazilian architect). The nation’s pavilion was able to stand out from that of the other countries, as it took over a completely different and unseen before construction elements. Despite borrowing from Le Corbusier’s basic vocabulary, their pavilion anticipated many future trends in Brazilian modernism in the freedom of its ramp, the flexibility of its volume, the use of the brise-soleil and of fixed elements to protect the structure from solar heat gain, the use of the curves as an expressive element, and the rejection of all formal distinction between inner and outer space.

Brazilian Architects
Beyond Doubt, Oscar Niemeyer was the person most responsible for the creation of a national language that would supply fresh alternatives to the exhausted rational functionalism of several decades later. However, many others great architects of this generation that took hold of his aspiration is worth mentioning: Many more, such as Carlos Ferreira, Lina Bardi, Jorge Moreira, Vilanova Artigas, and Roberto Burle Marx, are worth simply mentioning for the contribution and revolutionary aspiration put in form of architecture to the development of a new and modern nation that was emerging.
 * Lucio Costa was an excellent architect and planner and a brilliant theoretician. He was responsible for that dialectical marriage of old and new that gave such a singular character to Brazilian architecture.
 * Affonso Reidy was one of Brazil’s most important architects, master of a concise language, exact and unmistakable. He combined a mastery of structural questions with a humanistic vision of art and society.
 * The Roberto brothers, too, can be credited with a decisive, pioneering, and original contribution in the first two decades of the movement in Brazil.
 * Sergio Bernardes achieved a happy concentration of structural daring with a drier, more concise treatment of forms.
 * Rino Levi created intimate, welcoming spaces that stood in contrast with the prevailing urban chaos.

End of Period
The inauguration of the new capital “Brasilia” in 1960 marks the apex and end of the “classic” modernist epoch. From that point on, the emergence of architectural, special, and structural concepts distinct from modernism is clearly perceptible. However, nothing was as revolutionary as the modernism period in Brazil. That Brazilian modern architecture turned into Brazilian style was partly due to the unifying dominance of Le Corbusier over the imagination of the new generation of Brazilian architects and partly due to the importance of local tradition and conditions.