TO
BRUTALISM THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRAZIL
A brotherhood of Africans brought to Brazil as slaves received funds and permission to begin building the church in 1704 as a place in which they could worship freely. Construction took decades and the flamboyant towers and facade weren’t added until 1780.
Anyone planning to explore the Amazon might well stop off at Manaus on the banks of the Rio Negro. Dominating a central plaza is the improba ble Amazon Theatre, inaugurated in 1897 as an opera house built to rival those of Belle Epoque Paris, a monumental flight of design fancy that combines Renaissance, art nouveau and classical references. It was built with the soaring profits from Manaus’s rubber plantations, but fell into disrepair until it was rediscovered in the early 1980s by director Werner Herzog who was filming Fitzcarraldo. Since 1997, the theatre has been fully reopened with a regular concert programme.
A visit to São Paulo offers a chance to see the Teatro Municipal, based in large part on the Palais Garnier in Paris and completed in 1911. It was a collaboration between Brazilian engineer and architect Ramos de Azevedo and Italian architects Claudio Rossi and Domiziano Rossi and combines neo-classical and baroque references to grandiose effect.
Yet its debt to European architecture was soon at odds with the ambitions of Brazil’s artists and thinkers. Ironically perhaps, in 1922 the theatre hosted the Modern Art Week, which sealed the fate of colonialist art and, subsequently, architecture, by bringing together artists, poets, dramatists and musicians who would become the founder members of Brazil’s modernist movement. Around the city, buildings from the 1950s onwards by architects including Vilanova Artigas, Rino Levi, Hans Broos and Oswaldo Bratke show an energetic city embracing a brutalist, minimal and dynamic architectural future.
Architectural Traveller | Page 15
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