BRASILIDADE, ARCHITECTURE AND MODERNITY: OSCAR NIEMEYER IN PAMPULHA.
(Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brasil, 1942-43)

"To recognize the great importance of European immigration-both Mediterranean and Nordic- as well as the East one, next and far.To accept the result of this mixture as legitimate and fecund, but judging, in this contribution, the absorption of our peculiar, unmistakable - Brazilian - way of being essential".Lucio Costa, Registro de una vivência, Rio de Janeiro, Empresa das Artes, 1994

Pampulha is a suburb of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais federal state, in Brazil.
It takes a short time to go from Belo Horizonte to Pampulha, however it is possible to have a quick outlook about the urbanization visible appearences of the Mineira capital city, since the end of the Nineteenth Century - when it was created as a foundation town with the typical North American city outline - until today.
Starting from the centre, you firstly follow the city main street, the Avenida Afonso Pena , a kind of spine of the original foundation orthogonal system. It leads throughout the Parque Municipal (the town park), whose tropical plant variety often biwilders European visitors. Here you are the real heart of Belo Horizonte, near the Estação Central (the Central Station), its background is the continuous moving of the travellers coming from the hinterland of Minas Gerais and the commuters who works in the mineira capital city.
Once you cross the winding track line of Rodoviária (the region bus station) you leave the defined centre. So a capillary diffusion of suburbs begins, the bairros, it is a Portuguese word which doesn't embody the west idea of "suburbs" at all, referring to a more neutral concept of suburban district.
Leaving the centre, landscape changes, attenction is captured by the great infrastructures especially by the traffic ones. These traffic places are not solely crossed by cars. Depending on time during the day, and even on many other incomprehensible (in my opinion) events, more or less great crowds walk throughout the streets, sospension pedestrian crossings, meanwhile traffic flows clash with the slow walking of people.
The way to Pampulha is stud with bairros with different names, all of which suggest Brasilidade spirit: Lagoinha, Bonfim, Concordia, Prado Lopes, São Cristovão, Parque Rachuelo, Cachoeirinha, São Francisco. Here you can find the great Federal University College of Minas Gerais (UFMG), which ends with the stadium, Mineirão. Moreover there is Pampulha, the great lake at first created (1938) for the city water supplies, now it extends for about 18 Km perimeter, stud with tourist and pastime activities. At the beginning of 40's, the Town Council thought to create a new bairro to go along with the city north urban development, trying to settle there the ranks of the upper-middle class and moving the lower class towards the new district planned in the Cidade Industrial (industrial city) in Contagem, west of Belo Horizonte.
Throughout the path, just the red land of Minas Gerais iron ground, the smooth sky and the clouds low above the tropical horizon.

It was during the erliest years of Getúlio Vargas régime, the Estado Novo, complicated mixture of tradition and modernity, both social and political, authoritarianism and populism, which will be reflected into the urban development of Brazilian cities of the Age, and on the architectural language (as well as Fascism did in Italy, playing a defined role among last century debates upon architecture and city, between 20's and 40's.)
At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, according to North American city tradition, architects and urbanists, well known all over the world, mostly of whom coming from Europe, were invited to think about urban centres reorganization and increasing. In Rio de Janeiro it was French's turn: firstly Alfred Agache1 (in 1927), than Le Corbusier (1). Agache's visit in Pampulha in 1940, wanted by Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, Prefect of Belo Horizonte from 1940 until 1945, later President of the Republic, gave rise to a not so positive reaction by the french urbanist himself, whom was asked to express about the idea of transforming Pampulha in the new upper class residential area of the Mineira Capital City. Agache considered Pampulha as a perfect "satellite town", according to the European "cultural" urbanism trend, during the first 40 years of the Twientieth Century.
Nevertheless Agache's directions were not accepted by Kubitschek, not even forty-year-old young doctor, who dreamed of a modern renovation of Minas Gerais main city. The idea of modernity support the Prefect's plan. Modernization interventions were not limited to the city centre, although they were really innovating. Following an organic program of trasformation and adjustment, Kubitschek started by opening the Avenida do Contorno to road traffic, a perimetric boulevard to the foundation city, which joint together city centre and bairros.
The new Pampulha district takeoff started with the opening of the Avenida Pampulha (actually Av. Presidente Antônio Carlos), along which urban development was directed towards North. In Pampulha the construction of a breakwater introduced to the creation of a new tourist and pastime centre sourrounded by nature, which was missing in the Federal capital city. This work was later extended to create an artificial lake, with residential lotting on its borders. So the opening of the Avenida Presidente Antônio Carlos ensured the connection between the new bairro and the city of Belo Horizonte, permitting direct access to the new loisir centre (2).

The project of the complex of Pampulha is wrapped up in a legend, which is symbolic of the situation in South America during 40's, particularly of the Brazilian one; moreover it represents the typical modern (and modernist) myth of the absolute relationship among architect and power, both intendet in a demiurgic way (according to the everlasting searching of the "prince" by Le Corbusier during 20's and 30's).
Oscar Niemeyer was invited by Kubitschek, who had already been fascinated by the work of a Carioca architect, the Hotel Ouro Preto, projected for the baroque city in 1938.
When Niemeyer is asked to go to Belo Horizonte, he is thirty three yars old. In this situation everything seems to stress the myth of Modernity; there are all the elements: a young architect into a new "young" city, in the "young" country of Brazil, during the "new" régime of Vargas. All seems to confirm the deep sense of the term "modernity", which is substantially the result of "value", "new" and contemporary.
The legend also says that Kubitschek, after having visited pampulha with Niemeyer, asked the architect to give him the complete project of the new bairro for the day after. And Niemeyer seemed to have worked all night long in his room to the Grand Hotel of Belo Horizonte, ending the all project that night. Maybe, that night, Niemeyer was driven by a two-faced pole star: Pampulha lake bend, which recalled him the bends of Rio, and his teacher's "patient" logic, Le Corbusier.
Niemeyer surely shocked the Prefect, who later remembered that historic night at the hotel by saying: "He surprised me with new ideas, rising from that paper sheets sea. I'd never seen a building with a slop inspite of a stairs, neither I saw glass walls inspite of brick ones. I immediately accepted the sketch (3).

Niemeyer came to Pampulha with a respectable curriculum. Among the representatives, together with Lucio Costa, of the Brazilian modernist architecture, we can find Affonso Reidy, M.M.M Roberto, Rino Levi, Joã Villanova Artigas, Jorge Moreira, Sérgio Bernardes, Carlos Ferreira, Lina Bo Bardi, Roberto Burle Marx, a few representatives of the group of architects, urbanists and landscape designers who gave a great contribution to the creation of a new language which imposes Brazil to the caution of international criticism (4).
At least we must consider three projects in Niemeyer's activity during his time in Pampulha.
First of all the Obra do Berço, a nursery in Rio de Janeiro, carried out in 1937. It is a kind of practical based on Le Corbusier "five points". As a matter of fact there are all of them: "pilotis", free plan, free front, tape window, garden roof. Moreover it is a practical about "modern language"- as Bruno Zevi will define it - according to a brazilian point of view, which could be better understood with Niemeyer's work future outcomes. For the first time brise-soleil are used in Brazil as vertical modules which design the front both plastically and substantially, thanks to the changing nuances of tropical light. Here international modernist lexicon (already established through the International Style by Philip Johnson) mixes with Niemeyer's own contribution, in a "wise game" made of volumes both independents and united, pure forms, lightness.
We cannot ignore a project of 1938, never carried out: the one for the Osvald de Andrade House, one of the most important Brazilian modernist writers, and for the painter Tarsilia do Amaral. Niemeyer's search, in spite of the small scale project, follows another path, insisting on the residential continuous space and on the use of elements, later revived in other projects, like for example glass walls, concrete slabs, reinforced-concrete vaults (San Francisco Church in Pampulha), spiral stairs.
The project for the Grand Hotel de Ouro Preto dates back to 1940, it reveals another different dimension of the Brazilian architect's work: the dialogue with the context. It may be shocking this young rationalist architect's attitude, between the 30's and the 40's, moreover we can be surprised because of his lively interest towards pre-existent elements about the urban projects in Como by Terragni, an extremely rationalist architect. The extended rectangular block, based on pilotis, in Ouro Preto, is an urban work, related to the XVIII century buildings, as well as a deep exploration of all the potentialities (and the implicit strategics) of architecture replacement onto an original ground (this is what Niemeyer will consider in the element arrangements of Pampulha plan).
During the period included between 30's and 40's, Niemeyer is engaged with two projects that we can consider as paradigmatic about the creation of a modern Brazilian lenguage: the Ministry of Health and Education in Rio de Janeiro (1937-43) and the Brazil Pavillon at the New York Exhibition (1938-39). The first one is considered the founder of modern architecture in Brazil. It was worked out by a team headed by Lucio Costa (group leader), Niemeyer, Affonso Reidy, Jorge Moreira, Carlos Leão, Ernani Vasconcelos, under Le Corbusier's supervision. There were all the pioneers of the Brazilian architectural revival together with the recognized master (who was invited in Brazil in 1936, by Gustavo Capanema, Minister of Education, as project consulting for the new place of Ministry in Rio de Janeiro). The Brazilian Pavillon to the Exhibition of New York,planned by Costa and Niemeyer - two of the main representatives of the international architecture during 30's - is an example of the ripe "Brazilian way" to modern. Here rationalist lexicon combines, as will never succeed, with the logical and poetical plasticity, typically Brazilian - this is what Le Corbusier means saying to Niemeyer: "Oscar, you've got Rio mountains in your eyes" - sometimes misinterpretated as formalism (firstly by Max Bill, later by Zevi)

"I'm attracted neither by right angle, nor by the harsh, inflexible, right line created by man. The thing that attracts me is the free and sensual curve, the bend I see in my country mountains, in its winding rivers, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the beloved woman. All universe is made of curves, Einstein curve universe"Oscar Niemeyer, "Poem on the right angle" in Minha arquitectura, Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Revan, 2000

So Niemeyer comes to Pampulha with a great experience heritage.
Moreover during his dazzling rise towards the leadership in the Brazilian architectural field, together with Lucio Costa, who will look after urban projects, for example the Piano Piloto of the new capital town Brazilia.
The Grand Hotel de Ouro Preto gave Niemeyer fame all over Minas Gerais. So Juscelino Kubitschek, dynamic and modern prefect of Belo Horizonte, entrusts Niemeyer with the project of the tourist and pastime centre of Pampulha.
The program was ambitious as well as simple. It provided five buildings: a casino (Cassino), a nautical club (late Clube), a dance-hall (Casa do Baile), a church (Igreja de São Francisco), a hotel. The last one, with the prefect's own residence, which was intended to represents an example for the upper classes, were never built, remaining just projects. Pampulha establishment strategics first aimed at the construction of buildings to draw many different users, as an essential condition for the creation of residential lots in the bairro. Niemeyer's project for future development, reminded - according to Mário Pedrosa (5) - to the loucuras, the suburban "folies" of noblemen during the Eighteenth Century (6), moreover it represented the drawing element of a modern (and modernizing) strategics towards urban development.
The program and the particular site shape, that of an artificial lake - in which Niemeyer's architectures reflect - with its winding outline, plunged in the luxuriant vegetation of tropics, obliged the architect to compare himself to different ties and detailed demands. He succeeded in catching the creative appearances, using the context as integrating part of the project.

The Cassino, actually Museu de Arte Moderna, strongly shows Le Corbusier's influence and his solutions, through the employment of elements and materials of Brazilian and Mineira inspiration.
The casino is made by three joined blocks, employed for the main functions (card-room, restaurant, bar, dance-floor and stage). The three blocks are clearly distinct: the greater rectangular one with the main functions, the smaller rectangular one with the services, the cylindrical one within the restaurant and the dance-hall. While block separation seems to be functionalist, their connections create a deep distributive and formal continuity.
Chromate steel-clad columns - maybe an allusion to the cross-shaped pillars in the Barcellona Pavillon by Mies - reflects, together with the sourrounding lake landscape, into the glass covered walls. Everything reverberates, with marble, (another unconscious reference, together with the use of chromate steel, to Mies' work). In this work Niemeyer tests out the dialectic between different and opposite elements, one of the main characters of its architectures: perpendicularuty/windingness, full/emty, opaque/transparent, material/lightness, real image/reflected image. Zamoiski sculpture, put at the casino's entrance stresses this conflicting dialectic, gaining another Mies' invention in the pavillon of Barcellona: Kolbe sculpture.
Pilotis, flights, spiral staircases, were elements derived by Le Corbusier. This work is Niemeyer's bill- work, it's neither just a high practical about Le Corbusier "five elements", nor on the European rationalist and pure language, it is rather a clear and poetical introduction to his particular understanding of modernism as a kind of architecture made of "free and plastic forms" (7).
The project for the Brazilian pavillon for New York exhibition, under construction with Lucio Costa , is used as point of reference for the dance-hall, which is a kind of glass box with flights, alabaster covered walls, metal plate columns, mirrors which unmaterialize the walls, bringing inside space out, and viceversa.
Before the Brazilian Pavillon of New York's Exhibition there is Le Corbusier's Ville Savoy, the model Niemeyer choosed planning the casino. The work's Brazilian inner way of beeing - brasilidade - lays not only in the majolica external coverings ("azulejos") on the wall of the ground floor in the small building used for services, but it is also in the fusion of the other two blocks, the rectangular and the oval one, joined by a staircase, which shows all the influence of Minas Gerais baroque churches. The theme of connection represents a real virtuosity in an otherwise quite pure, contained project.
According to Kenneth Frampton, the casino is absolutely Niemeyer's masterpiece, based on Le Corbusier concept of promenade architecturale at all. There's no doubt that it is Pampulha's main work (8).
The casino lasted no longer as gaming house. Because of the gaming prohibition, during Dutra's government in Brazil, the structure, reopened in 1957, became the seat of the Museum of Modern Art.

The Casa do Baile is Pampulha's building more strictly in touch with landscape. Here the relation with the place - especially with the bend outline of the small island where the dance-hall is set - seems to establish architecture's own reasons, where everything is based on circumferences and bends, starting from the main block within the restaurant and the dance-hall, to the second one for the services, with the covered walk which join both of them, re-echoing the lake's bend outline. This joining element best expresses Niemeyer's idea of the relationship with landscape: like a frame which encloses landascape, as Yves Bruand sayed. A material and metaphorical frame, architectural metaphor which becames instrument "to read", that is to explain and to recreate landscape. The relationship with landscape is defined by the setting of the general lines of the relation inside/out. The walk covering wavy plate in the Casa do Baile - which is, according to Underwood, Pampulha's masterpiece together with S. Francisco Church - will become one of the typical references for Brazilian modernism, it will be later used by Niemeyer in his own house in Rio de Janeiro (1952), to confirm the importance of "free-form", that is the architectural form as " a scene for a multiple sensorial experience" (9).

The Igreja de São Francisco (San Francisco Church) is surely the most famous in Pampulha (the masterpiece of all the establishment according Bruand).
The use of load bearing concrete vaults is the central theme: for the first time the material is used with plastic and structural certainty. Many elements stresses Le Corbusier's influence anymore, first of all the spiral staircase. Project logic is extremely Le Corbusier's. Each block has got a well defined function, which ends into a specific "plastic" creation; the set unity is anyway strong. Niemeyer absorbes the difference between structure (load bearing vaults) and perimetric walls (with pottery covered tiles) from the functionalist logic.
However Niemeyer opposes material vitality and traditional Brazilian colours to Le Corbusier's purism: great representations of glazing pottery (typical of colonial churches) by Cândido Portinari, cover the all external wall in front of the entrance, inside his painted panel surrounds the baptistry. According to Underwood San Francisco Church is "the most innovating and both baroque, among Pampulha's monuments". We can add so innovating that Belo Horizonte clerical authorities refused to celebrate mass for many years, so it was bereft of its own function because of its "modernity".
Visiting it you think not only to Le Corbusier, but also to Mies van der Rohe, in a apparently impossible dialogue between European rationalism and the Mineira baroque church tradition, which were studied by Lucio Costa in the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (SPHAN) since 1937 (10). This dialogue does not neglect contemporary references, for example, the hangar of the Orly Airport by Freyssinet, the parabolic arc of the Soviet Building in Moscov by Le Corbusier of 1931, Maillart Pavillon for the Zurich Exhibition of 1939. The dialogue is not only played with the inner architectural elements, but also with Brazilian landscape , from Minas Gerais mountains to those ones in Rio de Janeiro (11).
Thanks to its freedom of expression, San Francisco Church was a key-work in the international modern movement, as well as "an antidote to functionalism and a lighthouse for architect's freedom of creation" (12).

The Iate Club (Yacht Club) shows many other Niemeyer's interests. Henrique Mindlin - who wrote his modern architecture history in Brazil in 1956, during the late "International Style", so that he could appreciate this work inspired to Le Corbusier (at the beginning of 30's) - considered the yacht club Pampulha's first monument.
The establishment is made by two rectangular spaces (two rectangular trapeziums in front view) it recalls Le Corbusier's Errazuris House in Chile, 1930. As in the dance-hall's covering, Niemeyer introduces an icon which will become a rule in Brazilian architecture between 40's and 50's: front defined by two rectangular trapeziums with different hights, called "telhado bortoleta" (butterfly frame) particularly used in tropical environment, in opposition to flat ceiling strongly conforming to modern movement.

Thinking to the hard Niemeyer's mixtures - his attempt to put together modern radicalism in architecture with the symbolic richness, not just figurative, of baroque tradition, and generally of materials from the Brazilian art history - we can better understood the idea of "modernity" which is the centre of Brazilian architecture between 30's and 50's. An idea which always keeps itself on an unsteady balance, in a continuous contraddiction among utopia and transgression, between the attempt of finding the right solutions for "modern living" and the Brazilian society's difficulty to achieve "modern" way of living through a deep change in frame of mind and values (13).
Attachement to traditions, as well as history removal seem to be, in a country like Brazil - for ever modern, from an ideological point of view, thing that join Brazil to America - the necessary conditions to give rise an architecture which could summarize tradition and modernity. From this point of view, it's not shocking if Brazilian architectural modernity had given a great contribution to orthodoxy breaking, as Ignasi de Solà-Morales called it : "the end of epistemology" (14).
Luigi Manzione
march 2003

italian text

NOTE

1 Catherine BRUANT, "Donat Alfred Agache (1875-1959). L'urbanisme, une sociologie appliqueé", in Vincent BERDOULAY, Paul CLAVAL (edit by), Au débuts de l'urbanisme français. Regards croisés de scientifiques et de professionnels (fin XIX - début XX siècle), Paris, L'Harmattan, 2001, pp. 133-150.

2 Yannis TSIOMIS (edit by), Le Corbusier - Rio de Janeiro 1929-1936, Secretaria Municipal de urbanismo/Centro de Arquitetura eUrbanismo de Rio de Janeiro, 1998.

3 About urban and architectural history in the Mineira capital city during the rising of Pampulha centre:
Renato José DE SOUZA, "A arquitetura em Belo Horizonte nas décadas de 40 e 50: utopia e transgressão", in Leonardo BARCI CASTRIOTA (edit by), Arquitetura da modernidade, Belo Horizonte, Ed. UFMG-Instituto de Arquitetos di Brasil-Dep. MG, 1998, pp. 183-229.

4Juscelino KUBITSCHEK, Meu canminho para Brasília, Rio de Janeiro, Bloch Editores S. A., 1974, v. II.

5 About Brazilian architectural modernity:
Lauro CAVALCANTI, "Moderno e brasileiro: uma introdução ao guia de arquitetura", in Quando o Brasil era moderno. Guia de arquitetura 1928-1960, Rio de Janeiro, Aeroplano Editoria, 2001, pp. 8-25. Among the general History of Brazilian contemporary architecture: Yves BRUAND, Arquitetura contemporânea no Brasil, São Paulo, Editoria Perspectiva, 1999, 3° ed. a deep outlook over the end of 60's, with a large bibliography. Other important references: Philip GOODWIN, Brazil Builds: Architecture Old and New 1652-1942, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1943 ( catalogue of the Exhibition in New York, 1943); Enrique E. MINDLIN, Arquitetura moderna do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Aeroplano Editoria, 1997 ( second edition of Modern Architecture in Brazil, Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1956); the special number of French revue "L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui", n° 13-14, 1947, which will be the first source for knowing of Brazilian modern architecture in Europa; indeed in Italy the first monographic revue number about Brazil is "Zodiac" n° 6 "Rapporto Brasile", 1960; while "Domus" deals with Brazilian architecture since 1951, followed by "Casabella-Continuità" in 1958.

6 "Architecture d'aujourd'hui", n° 13-14, 1947, p. XXI

7 About Brazilian social history and establishments: Sergio BUARQUE DE HOLLANDA, Raizes do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, José Olímpio, 1955 (1936) (Italian translation: Radici del Brasile, Firenze, Giunti, 2000.

8About Niemeyer's "free-form modernism" : David UNDERWOOD, Oscar Niemeyer and Brazilian Free-form Modernism, New York, G. Braziller, 1994 (Portuguese translation: Oscar Niemeyer e o modernismo de formas livres no Brasil, São Paulo, Cosac&Naify, 2002)

9 Kenneth FRAMPTON, Modern Architecture: a critical History, Londra, Times and Hudson, 1992 (1980).

10D. UNDERWOOD, op.cit., p.56

11 Lucio COSTA, Com a palava, Rio de Janeiro, Aeroplano Editoria, 2000;
Oscar NIEMEYER, Minha arquitetura, Rio de Janeiro, Editoria Revan, 2000.

12 "Il Pão de Açucar " ( "sugar bread ") - as Inderwood says, re-echoing what Le Corbusier said about mountains in Niemeyer's eyes - was to Niemeyer like the montaigne Sainte-Victoire to Cézanne: an image of permanent nature, an haunting formal and spiritual presence which will ispire his art, sometimes unconsciously." (D. UNDERWOOD, op. Cit., p. 69.

13 Lauro CAVALCANTI, (edit by) Quando o Brasil era moderno, Guia de arquitetura 1928-1960, cit., p. 404.

14 Renato César José DE SOUZA, 'A arquitetura em Belo Horizonte nas décadas de 40 e 50: utopia e transgressão ", cit., p. 183.

15 Ignasi DE SOLÀ-MORALES, "Pratiche teoriche, pratiche storiche, pratiche architettoniche", in Decifrare l'architettura. "Inscrictiones del XX secolo", Milano, Allemandi, p. 148.

©copyright archphoto 2003-Luigi Manzione