Questions on space and intersections in the historiography of modern Brazilian architecture
Résumés
Cet article propose une approche de type spatial pour une analyse historiographique particulière : la déconstruction de la narration de l’architecture moderne brésilienne, telle qu’elle est représentée par son chef de file, l’architecte Lúcio Costa. L’analyse se nourrit de trois perspectives distinctes : la première concerne le contexte dans lequel cette narration de l’architecture moderne brésilienne a évolué, ou la position de Lúcio Costa pendant les années 1930, une période de grande agitation culturelle sous la dictature de l'Estado Novo (1937-1945). La deuxième perspective se tourne vers le champ de la géographie culturelle et étudie scrupuleusement la conception de l’histoire de Costa et sa façon d’employer les notions de transmission, d’échange et de dialogue, d’un côté dans l’espace culturel contemporain, de l’autre côté entre le passé et le présent historique. L’engagement de Costa qui affirme une identité nationale apparaît face au caractère supranational des énoncés de penseurs américains comme George Kubler ou Robert Chester Smith sur l’art et l’architecture de l’Amérique latine. La troisième et dernière perspective introduit l’idée d’un dialogue culturel selon la tradition de réflexions théoriques sur les espaces de Georg Simmel et Martin Buber au premier quart du xx e siècle.
Texte intégral
1A version of this article was published in Portuguese with the title “Espaço e Interações na Historiografia da Arquitetura Moderna Brasileira,” Pós. Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Fauusp, vol. 18, no. 29, 2011, p. 34-52.
- 1 Erwin Panofsky, “Reflections on Historical Time,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 4, 2004, p. 691–7 (...)
2In the 1920s Erwin Panofsky questioned whether art could be assimilated into a temporal course of events1 and challenged the old concept of a historical time that traversed space in a unique and established direction. In particular, the multiplication of spatial references in modern culture and thought since the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the current recognition of a spatial turn conforms to Ernst Cassirer’s observation that “there is no function and no creation of the spirit that is not somehow related to the world of space […].”
- 2 Nicola Abbagnano, Dicionário de Filosofia, São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1998, p. 349.
3This text follows philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz’s assertion that, “unlike time which is an order of successions, space is an order of coexistences,”2 which implies that space is at the same time mobility and encounter, the latter understood in a dialogical form as the possibility of communication between civilisations. It thus takes a spatial approach to a particular historiographical analysis: the deconstruction of the narrative of Brazilian modern architecture as advanced by its main proponent, the architect, urbanist, as well as historian, Lúcio Costa. Costa is known internationally for his project for Brasilia, the country’s modern capital, which was inaugurated in 1960. The analysis is advanced from three different perspectives. The first concerns the place from which the narrative of Brazilian modern architecture evolved, and the position occupied by Lúcio Costa during the 1930s, a period of major cultural unrest coloured by the authoritarian, nationalistic and populist bias that permeated the cultural initiatives of the Estado Novo (1937–1945). The second invokes the field of cultural geography to scrutinise 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. In this context, 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. These were permeated by the European humanism that accompanied exiled European intellectuals to America during the 1930s. 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.
4The epistemological importance of the place occupied by the historian in the analysis of his historiographical construction is largely recognised. Lúcio Costa was eager to identify the significance of the interplay of tradition and modernity in the construction of a national narrative as well as his own role in the framing of modern Brazilian architecture. In one of his last writings he described his individual contribution alongside that of two other colleagues engaged in the Brasilia undertaking as follows:
- 3 Lúcio Costa, Lúcio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência, São Paulo: Editora UnB; Empresa das Artes, 199 (...)
“Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares, architect artist: master of plastics, of spaces, and of structural flights […]—the creator. João da Gama Filgueiras Lima, the architect who brought […] together art and technology–the builder. And I, Lúcio Marçal Ferreira Ribeiro de Lima e Costa, carrying a bit of both of them […] I am after all the link with our past, the foundation,—the tradition.”3
- 4 Regarding Lúcio Costa’s involvement with the neocolonial, the historian testified that “the so-cal (...)
- 5 Otavio Leonidio, Carradas de Razões Lúcio Costa e a Arquitetura Moderna Brasileira (1924–1951), Ri (...)
- 6 Since the 1980s a consistent number of researches has been conducted dedicated to the creation of (...)
- 7 Margaret Olin, “From Bezal’lel to Max Lieberman: Jewish Art in Nineteenth-Century Art-Historical T (...)
5In 1924, as a student influenced by the discourse of supporters of Brazilian neocolonialism—an engagement disclosed by the eclectic vocabulary of his architectural production until the end of the 1920s4—Costa visited the city of Diamantina, in Minas Gerais. Nevertheless, in 1930, shortly after the military coup, he joined the body of Brazilian intellectuals who defined the cultural perspective of the Estado Novo [New State], inserting himself into the “broader and complex Brazilian modernity debate.”5 The first steps in the construction of a historiographical narrative of modern Brazilian architecture were taken by the architect, as its chief apostle, at the beginning of Getulio Vargas’s dictatorship. Costa’s involvement in the creation of the National Bureau of Historical and Artistic Heritage (Sphan), in 1937, directed by Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, also contributed greatly to the establishment of his narrative.6 Nevertheless, in the context of the nationalist atmosphere that enveloped the country, the intellectual affiliations of Costa’s account merit comparison with the art-history constructions that had since the nineteenth century been seeking to chronicle the emergence of a national consciousness based on its manifestations in cultural forms.7
- 8 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, Le style international, Marseille: Éditions Parenthèse (...)
- 9 Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Maurice (...)
6In effect, if the European avant-garde represented the universalism and the breaking down of national boundaries, during the interwar period Latin American intellectuals defined a national identity based on binomial nationalism and modernity. The result was a modernity divested of its original contents, as could be seen in Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s introduction to the book that resulted from the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s 1932 “International Style” exhibition, in which the authors declared that “this new style is not international in the sense that the production of one country is similar to that of another…”8 Against the backdrop of the universalist representation that attributed to each individual an ethnic identity, the “fictive identity”—using Étienne Balibar’s elaboration—idealised by the Brazilian intellectuals, including Lúcio Costa, was to be achieved through race and language understood as the main manifestations of a national character, with the latter also defined as the national soul or spirit.9
- 10 Henri Focillon, The Life of forms in Art, [1rst published as: Vie des formes, Paris : E. Leroux, 1 (...)
- 11 Lúcio Costa, “O Aleijadinho e a arquitetura tradicional,” in Alberto Xavier (ed.), Lúcio Costa: Sô (...)
- 12 “Assume and respect the original bedrock–Portuguese, African, indigenous. / Recognize the great im (...)
- 13 Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Maurice (...)
- 14 Margaret Olin, “From Bezal’lel to Max Lieberman. Jewish Art in Nineteenth- Century Art-Historical (...)
- 15 Lúcio Costa, “Tradição local,” in Lúcio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência, op. cit. (note 4), p. 454
7Bearing in mind, as proposed by the French art historian Henri Focillon, that human consciousness is perpetually searching for a language, and that to assume consciousness is to assume form,10 the notion of a “fictive ethnicity” manifesting itself through race and language is clearly recognised in Lúcio Costa’s architectural narrative, which seeks to disclose within the language of arts and architecture “the true spirit of our folk. The spirit that shaped this kind of nationality […]”.11 The historian established a two-front strategy based on the concept of character. The first front, represented by the issue of race, was addressed considering the Brazilian people as an independent unit: “our unique, unmistakable, Brazilian way of being…”12 Thereby the historian nationalised—or ethnicised—the original bedrock made up of Portuguese, Africans and the indigenous element, suggesting the existence of a natural community13 that maintained its continuity and distinctiveness despite later waves of European and Asian immigrants. Costa’s second strategic front focused on the origins of the national architecture language. He sought the immutable element responsible for historical coherence.14 He claimed that a “legitimate” Brazilian language had emerged during the colonial period in the works of the early Portuguese settlers. The argument was ambiguous but continuously reiterated: the architectural production in the colony could not be considered an imitation of the works of the mother country; instead it was as legitimate “as those from there, because the colonist, par droit de conquête, was at home […] just as in speaking Portuguese he was not imitating anyone, but speaking, whether with or without an accent, in his own language […].”15
- 16 Madalena Cunha Matos and Tania Beisl Ramos, “Um encontro, um desencontro. Lúcio Costa, Raul Lino e (...)
- 17 The hypothesis that considers the Baroque expression in Minas Gerais as the first evidence of a na (...)
- 18 José Francisco Oliveira Viana, Populações meridionais do Brasil: história, organização, psicologia(...)
- 19 Gilberto de Mello Freyre, Casa-Grande e Senzala, [1rst published in 1933], Rio de Janeiro: Editora (...)
- 20 Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Raízes do Brasil, [1rst published in 1936], São Paulo: Companhia das Le (...)
- 21 Alberto Luiz Scheider, Sílvio Romero Hermeneuta do Brasil, São Paulo: Annablume, 2005.
- 22 Gilberto Freyre, “Brazilian National Character in the Twentieth Century,” Annals of the American A (...)
- 23 Lúcio Costa, Lúcio Costa, op. cit. (note 3), p. 198‒199. Anat Falbel, Arquitetos imigrantes no Bra (...)
8Hence, even before his more systematic studies on vernacular Portuguese architecture developed during his 1948, 1952 and 1961 journeys to Europe,16 Lúcio Costa identified Portuguese architecture culture, and particularly the vernacular language, including its regional variables, as the first and only source of Brazilian architecture. Not by chance, he located the emergence of a national character during the second half of the eighteenth century, in Minas Gerais, whence the first ideas of independence had spread.17 In fact, Costa’s arguments echoed the formulations concerning the Portuguese Brazilian dimension of colonial origins shared by Brazilian intellectuals of the early decades of the twentieth century, who included the historians Oliveira Viana,18 Gilberto Freyre19 and Sergio Buarque de Holanda,20 as well as the writer and critic Sílvio Romero, who—influenced by German and French thought—was one of the first Brazilian nationalist intellectuals to recover the Portuguese element (1902). Romero pointed to Portuguese language, customs and national character as key to the formation and evolution of the Brazilian nation. His writings on literature and folklore influenced the subsequent generation of modern intellectuals like Mario de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre and most probably Costa himself.21 In this respect, it is worth noting that, in 1967, the sociologist Freyre repeated Romero’s argument concerning the distinctively Iberian Brazilian national character to justify the Brazilian architecture of the twentieth century and especially Brasilia, its most accomplished initiative, as “boldly” combining tradition and modernity.22 And, if the emphasis on the Iberian particularity of the national character echoed Romero, the relationship pointed out by Freyre between modern Brazilian architecture and tradition had, undoubtedly, Costa’s by now well-established relationship between the colonial past and modern architecture—the latter understood as the completeness of the former and justified by its vernacular roots—as reference. Indeed, in his “Depoimento” (1948), Costa had gone even further, identifying the architect sculptor Antonio Francisco Lisboa, o Aleijadinho, with the figure of Oscar Niemeyer. He described Niemeyer as “our own national genius that was expressed through the elected personality of this artist, in the same way it has been in the 18th century, under very similar circumstances, through the individuality of Antonio Francisco Lisboa, o Aleijadinho […].”23
- 24 Thomas F. Reese, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Thomas F. Reese (ed.), Studies in Ancient American an (...)
- 25 George Kubler, “Non-Iberian European Contributions to Latin American Colonial Architecture,” in Th (...)
- 26 Ibid., p. 85. See also Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, op. cit. (note 25), p. (...)
9However, as suggested by the American historian George Kubler (1912-96), also during the 1960s, the historiographical argument used by the Brazilian nationalist intellectuals constrained the understanding of the complex processes of transfer, exchange and development of forms in colonial art history. Kubler pointed out that “the striking peculiarity among writers of history in Spain and Portugal, and American countries of Iberian affiliation, to regard the culture of the Peninsula and its American extensions as a complex of forms and institutions distinctly different from those of the rest of the world […].”24 He noted that the Peninsula and Latin America were commonly represented as an imperial configuration, owing less to the rest of Europe than to an indigenous and autonomous power of self-realisation, sometimes designated as “invariance” or alma Latina, which presupposes an unchangeable cultural configuration, which in turn “inhibits any exact historical analysis of the derivations of forms […].”25 In this respect, Kubler, Focillon’s former student, considered as urgent the task of restoring the empires to their proper status as part of European history, especially in the case of Latin American architecture, which, despite having been well catalogued and classified, was silent or incomplete in relation to its debts to the rest of Europe.26
10Hence, even without being able to openly point to the existence of an ideological element behind the historiographical bias, Kubler’s geographical argument was sensitive concerning the arguments and theoretical tools handled by the first generations of Brazilian architecture historians gathered around SPHAN, and particularly Lúcio Costa, who rarely acknowledged other sources beyond the Iberian Peninsula.
- 27 George Kubler, “Indianism, Mestizaje, and Indigenismo as Classical, Medieval, and Modern Tradition (...)
- 28 Henri Focillon, The Art of the West. I: Romanesque Art, [1rst published as: Art d'Occident. 1. Le (...)
- 29 See Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America 1542–1773, Toron (...)
11Using Focillon as a reference, Kubler proposed an American periodisation that associated the Preconquest, colonial and modern layers of American history with European classical antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernism respectively.27 His instrumental formulation provided a theoretical correlation between the enormous extent of interchanges and clashes of traditions that took place during the European Middle Ages and the colonial period in America. In this respect, if, as was demonstrated by Focillon, the constant flow of movement across commercial and pilgrimage routes led to the encounters and the intermingling of cultures previously distant in time and space, including the transformation and enrichment of Europeans, and supporting as well the universality of the medieval art and architecture,28 the colonial era initiated by foreign invasions and the disruption of ancient American peoples and nations29 was also characterised by intense transatlantic cultural movements that, in turn, extended far beyond the Iberian Peninsula.
- 30 See Hanno-Walter Kruft, “The Theory of fortification,” in A History of Architectural Theory. From (...)
- 31 Benedito Lima de Toledo, O Real Corpo de Engenheiros na Capitania de São Paulo: destacando-se a ob (...)
- 32 Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “Asia in the Arts of Colonial Latin America,” in Joseph J. Rishel and Suz (...)
12In fact, as demonstrated by the archival investigations conducted during the last two decades, it was through religious orders, like the Jesuits or Franciscans, that the architectural treatises of Serlio, Alberti, Vitruvius and Vredeman de Vries, as well as building manuals and all kinds of iconographic documentation, reached Latin America and Brazil in particular. That same process of cultural transference continued during the eighteenth century, through either architectural writings or Italian, French and German ornamental engravings that crossed the Atlantic, ending up on Brazilian shores. The Portuguese military engineers working in the country also contributed to the transference of a technical culture, matured at the Portuguese Aulas Militares, in which their knowledge was enriched through the use of a technical literature that included not only Italian and German architectural treatises, but more specific writings on the art of war, fortifications and mechanical equipment.30 And if sometimes Portuguese professionals developed their professional careers in Italy, other Italian, German, French and Swiss professionals were engaged in the colony’s royal projects, as at the time of the Treaty of Madrid (1750), when a number of Europeans undertook mapping missions in Brazil.31 Due to the intense exchanges between Europe and America, Brazilian coast towns like Salvador and Rio de Janeiro became, beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, obligatory ports of call for the Portuguese East India Company’s ships on their journeys between Lisbon and the colonies in India (Goa), Malaysia (Malacca) and China (Macao). From these ports, Chinese porcelain, ivory statues, Indian and Chinese textiles, and even Japanese and Indo-Portuguese furniture were introduced into colonial Brazilian culture. Therefore recent studies and surveys that contribute to exposing the multicultural nature of the Brazilian colonial society32 simultaneously challenge Lúcio Costa’s culturally self-centred narrative.
- 33 A.J.R. Russell-Wood, “Robert Chester Smith research scholar and historian,” in Dalton Sala (ed.), (...)
- 34 In 1941, Robert Chester Smith published his article “O Codice do Frei Cristovão de Lisboa,” in whi (...)
- 35 Robert C. Smith Jr, “João Frederico Ludovice: an Eighteenth Century Architect in Portugal,” The Ar (...)
- 36 Ibid., p. 370.
13Indeed, Costa’s construction was questioned as early as the mid-1930s by the American historian Robert Chester Smith (1912-1975), who, even while assuming the notion of a greater Luso-Brazilian matrix formed by Brazil and Portugal,33 proposed a broader historiographical approach for the colonial architecture and arts studies in both countries.34 This began with his article “João Frederico Ludovice: an Eighteenth Century Architect in Portugal” (1936),35 dedicated to the architect responsible for the building of the convent and palace of Mafra in Portugal, whose real name was Johann Friederich Ludwig (1670-1752). Born in Germany, Ludovice went to Rome, where he worked for the Jesuits in the Church of Gesù, and most likely came into contact with Andrea Pozzo and Carlo Fontana before arriving in Portugal around 1700. Smith’s sensitive analysis, written during the nationalist effervescence of the interwar period, recognised Ludovice’s hybrid style. Smith considered that “his work shows the influence of a triply changed milieu. Had he remained in Italy, he would probably have become the peer of Vanvitelli, Salvi, and Fuga. As it is, his work is a phenomenon in the eighteenth century […].”36
- 37 Thomas F. Reese, op. cit. (note 25), p. xix. See also Malcolm Campbell, “Robert Chester Smith and (...)
- 38 Robert C. Smith, “Jesuit Buildings in Brazil,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 30, no.3, September 1948, p. (...)
14Like Kubler, Smith was also interested in the process of the dissemination of form in space and time, and in issues of boundaries, limits and interfaces, treated, as expressed by Thomas F. Reese, like planes of innovation, cultural interaction, or just critical transfer points in history.37 In a later essay, “Jesuit Buildings in Brazil” (1948), Smith continued to surmount national boundaries in order to point out the distinguished character of the Jesuit Order architectural endeavours in Brazil, which differed completely from the works carried out by the Spanish Jesuits elsewhere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.38
- 39 Robert C. Smith, The Art of Portugal 1500–1800, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968.
- 40 Reinaldo dos Santos, Oito séculos de arte portuguesa, história e espírito, Lisbon: Noticias, 1966.
- 41 Helmut Wohl, “Robert Chester Smith and the Art in the United States,” in Dalton Sala (ed.), Robert (...)
- 42 Erwin Panofsky, “Three Decades of Art History in the United States. Impressions of a Transplanted (...)
- 43 Carl Landauer, “Mimesis” and Erich Auerbach’s Self-Mythologizing,” German Studies Review, vol. 11, (...)
- 44 Kevin Parker, “Art History and exile: Richard Krautheimer and Erwin Panofsky,” in Stephanie Barron(...)
15Helmuth Wohl compared Smith’s The Art of Portugal 1550–1800 (1968)39 with Reinaldo dos Santos’s text Oito séculos de arte portuguesa, história e espírito,40 concluding that, while Smith’s research was written in an objective, balanced and informative way without any nationalist bias, dos Santos interpreted and celebrated the arts of Portugal as reflections of the soul and the genius of the Portuguese nation.41 Wohl’s standpoint might be applied to the historiographical perspective of Lúcio Costa concerning this latter position about Brazilian arts and architecture. Following Panofsky’s observations on art-history studies in the United States during the 1930s, Wohl ascribed Smith’s universalist perspective to the cultural and geographical distance of American historians vis-à-vis Europe. Effectively as expressed by Panofsky, “the American art historians were able to see the past in a perspective picture undistorted by national and regional bias, thus they were able to see the present in a perspective picture undistorted by personal or institutional parti pris […].”42 Even though during the 1930s the American academic milieu was permeated by prejudices towards immigrant professors, especially those of Jewish origins, the studies of art history took off in new directions with the presence of figures such Panofsky and Richard Krautheimer, who, in seeking to re-establish themselves as participants of an intersubjective world, not only proposed the broadening of the frontiers of Western tradition in a pan-European perspective, as noted by Erich Auerbach in his Mimesis,43 but also assumed the myth of a “disinterestedness” representation of history, which attempted to move away from politics and questions of differences that still included “the impossibility of reconciling the circumstances of their exile with their confidence in humanist ideals.”44
- 45 Lúcio Costa, “A Arquitetura dos Jesuítas no Brasil,” op. cit. (note 35), p. 7‒104.
- 46 Ibid., p. 97.
- 47 Ibid., p. 63.
- 48 Henri Focillon, The Life of forms in Art, op. cit. (note 10), p. 140‒141: “history is not unilinea (...)
16Kubler’s aforementioned argument concerning the American historians of Iberian affiliations and their circumstantial historiographical approach is corroborated in the conflict between how Smith’s working hypotheses operated in an extended architectural geography and Costa’s assertion, in his first long survey on Jesuit architecture in Brazil (1941),45 that “the coarser treatment […] and the roughness of design” of some of the architectural elements of the Jesuit Missions, in the south of the country, were consequences of “the workers” lack of experience…,” as well as “this mixture of diverse sources combined with environmental deficiencies…” Particularly, Costa mentioned the inexperience of the native builders, which he described as “that gaucherie that barbarians of any race display when they try to reproduce ‘from hearing’ the elements of Greco-Roman architecture […]”, and the hired professionals from Northern and Central Europe.46 Hence, restrained by his self-imposed “fictive ethnicity,” Costa dismissed from the “authentic expressions of Brazilian art”47 the dissonances, or, as expressed by Focillon, the “survivals and anticipations... slow, outmoded forms […] contemporaries of bold and rapid forms […]”48 juxtaposed at the very same moment. Concomitantly, the Brazilian historian refused to acknowledge the dialogue common to the interfaces of cultural planes, represented either by cultural sources or, in particular, by the work of other nationals, foreign professionals and immigrants. Apparently the only exception admitted by Costa beyond the closed space of his definition of an authentic Brazilian expression was the contemporaneous influence of Le Corbusier, whose impact on the Brazilian modern architecture he would later explain in his “Depoimento” (1948) through a biographical comparison:
- 49 Lúcio Costa, Lúcio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência, op. cit. (note 4), p. 198.
“The pioneering work of our beloved Gregório and the unique personality of Flávio avail us nothing, because what happened here would have happened without altering even one line, even though the former had carried out his work elsewhere, and the latter had spent his time in exile, since newborn, in Paris or in Passárgada. And this is because the achievements following the ‘coming’ of the architect […] Oscar Niemeyer […] are directly linked to the original sources of the global renovation movement that aim at restoring architecture to its legitimate functional foundations. It was not through second or third hand due to the work of Gregório that the process operated. The authentic seeds planted here at just the right time by Le Corbusier, in 1936, have borne fruit […].”49
- 50 Margaret Olin, “Jewish Christians” and “Early Christian” Synagogues. The Discovery at Dura-Europos (...)
- 51 Henri Focillon, The Life of forms in Art, op. cit. (note 10), p. 142.
- 52 Jean Bony, “Henri Focillon” in Henry Focillon, The Art of the West in the Middle Ages, op. cit. (n (...)
17Coming from another cultural space, Focillon, who openly opposed the nationalist German art historian Josef Strzygowski, sought to determine not the national origin of a particular style, but, rather, the way in which it was developed by the artist, whatever his origin.50 Therefore the French art historian believed that, just as race was a development subjected to irregularities, mutations and exchanges,51 so history was a “triple sheaf” of active forces formed by traditions, influences and experiments.52
- 53 Thomas F. Reese, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Thomas F. Reese (ed.), Studies in Ancient American an (...)
- 54 A.J.R. Russell-Wood, “Robert Chester Smith: research scholar and historian,” in Dalton Sala (ed.), (...)
- 55 Sidney Ratner, “Horace M. Kallen and Cultural Pluralism,” in Milton R. Konvitz (ed.), The Legacy o (...)
18While Latin American studies in the United States were privileged by the cultural exchanges promoted by the “good neighbor policy” during the Second World War,53 the particular perspective of Smith and Kubler regarding Latin American colonialism can be understood as part of the new surge of a Pan-Americanism between the 1920s and 1930s,54 and as informed by an intellectual environment nurtured by cultural pluralism. This latter represented both an ethnic consciousness as well as the binational identity of the immigrant communities that were part of the American pluralist democracy, as formulated by Horace Kallen, as early as 1915, in opposition to the “melting pot” metaphor. For Kallen, the future of culture in the United States was dependent on the contribution of each of the cultural communities present in its territory, and therefore on their spiritual loyalty to their homeland.55
- 56 Albert William Levi, “Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte: The lesson of Panofsky,” Journal of A (...)
- 57 Ibid., p. 70-83. For more information on the exiled German and Austrian historians and their impac (...)
19As mentioned above, Smith and Kubler’s bias, in particular, also benefited from the German tradition that disembarked on American shores, with the interwar intellectual émigrés representing a genealogy of art historians from Riegl to Wöfflin, Warburg, Dvorak and Panofsky, interacting with historians and philosophers such as Hegel, Burckhardt, Dilthey, Cassirer and Collingwood, who, in turn, rooted in a contextualist perspective,56 understood the work of art as a relational entity with a date and a historical incidence, and as having a creator with a biography and aesthetic intentions, and for whom cultural placement, the interference of creative intention, and the position occupied by the work of art or architecture in an ongoing tradition were not irrelevant externals but constitutive of the art itself and, as such, understood as historiographical tools.57
- 58 Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, Michael P. Steinberg ( (...)
20In fact in 1923 Aby Warburg reviewed his notes and reflections concerning his American journey among the Hopi Indians between 1895 and 1896. Using the figure of a serpent, he looked for connections between cultures distant in time and space, from biblical scriptures to medieval Christian cosmology, from the Florentine Renaissance to the German Reformation and contemporary Western culture, pursuing the process of cultural evolution from the concreteness and materiality of the symbol to its spiritualisation.58
21Some years later, in 1927, Panofsky was operating with the notions of historical time and historical space as units of meaning, or “frames of reference,” combined in relational systems, within and between which were established dynamic connections—influence and reception, stimulus and response, tradition and innovation—in a broad, meaningful space that compromised the cultural and physical domain. He noted:
- 59 Erwin Panofsky, “Reflections on Historical Time,” [1rst published in German in 1927], Critical Inq (...)
“Every historical phenomenon […] must necessarily belong to a multitude of frames of reference […] the human beings who created it […] entered into new spheres of influence through their own journeys through contact with itinerant artists or works of art… each of their creations […] represents the intersection of numerous frames of reference that confront each other as products of different spaces and times and whose interaction in each instance leads to a unique result […].”59
- 60 Anthony Vidler, “Spatial Estrangement in Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer,” New German Critique(...)
- 61 Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated, e (...)
- 62 Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture. A reader in cultura (...)
- 63 Ibid., p. 67‒68.
- 64 Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Robert E. Park and Ernst W. Burgess (eds.), Introduction to the S (...)
- 65 See S. Dale McLemore, “Simmel’s ‘Stranger’: A Critique of the Concept,” The Pacific Sociological R (...)
22Indeed, the spatial historiographical approach proposed by Panofsky as the intersection of different frames of reference confronting one another suggests affinities with Georg Simmel’s elaboration of the “in-between” at the beginning of the twentieth century.60 Especially since his essay Bridge and Door (1903) followed by the seminal “The Stranger” (1908), the German philosopher had been using the spatial metaphor in his cultural analyses, pointing out the objectivity of the stranger that allowed the individual to not only “import qualities” into the space, but also to survey conditions with less prejudice, through more general and objective ideals.61 And if the bridge defined a “symbol of the sphere of our will spanning across space,”62 the door expressed, in cultural terms, “the possibility of permanent exchange.”63 Translated and published in Robert E. Park and Ernst W. Burgess’s collection Introduction to the Science of Sociology in 1921,64 Simmel’s first essay had a considerable impact on social and urban studies in the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century.65
- 66 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, [1rst published in 1947], London: Routledge, 2002, p. 22‒38. Ma (...)
23In the preparation for the ciam 9 at Sigtuna (1952), two young Swiss architects, Rolf Gutmann and Theo Manz, invoked the idea of the “in-between” using Martin Buber’s late developments to enlarge the concept of a functional reciprocity between individuals manifesting itself in the space. Gutmann and Manz’s elaboration received the immediate support of Aldo van Eyck, who made the “in-between” one of his basic architectural approaches.66 However, Buber’s formulation of the encounter explained as a dialogue is likewise instrumental in absorbing the dissonances between the national and the other in the revision of mono-national historiographical biases. In this sense the concept of “transfer culturel” proposed in the 1980s by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner and later developed as “histoire croisée” somehow recovered the Buberian notion of the in-between space contributing to confronting the multiple national spaces and evidencing the crossbreed of forms and ideas or, as expressed by Espagne:
- 67 Michel Espagne, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands, Paris: PUF, 1999 (Perspectives germaniq (...)
“To escape from the purely ideological constellations that permeate national historiographies rather than postulating the existence of a global space where oppositions are overcome, it seems more fruitful to study the detail of the real overlaps long since hidden…”67
- 68 Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias,” in Joan Ockman (ed.), Architecture C (...)
24During the 1960s in the atmosphere of the Third World revolutions the Brazilian intellectual milieu was still very reserved regarding the issue of cultural transferences, resenting the schema of the history of influences, by which one culture was submitted to the influence of another through the perspective of the mediators or translators, the receiver culture being mostly considered–through the perspective of a hierarchical cultural dynamics–in a more or less low position. In this context, the lasting influence of Costa’s historiographical model on Brazilian scholars was sensibly perceived by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who chose to illustrate his heterotopia spatial metaphor using the Brazilian colonial space–the same fictive ethnicity space issued by the Brazilian intellectuals of the 1930s in their search for a national identity assertion. Foucault described the visitor’s bedroom in a traditional colonial farmhouse in Brazil in the following way: “any traveler, had the right to […] enter […] the room, and spend the night there. Now the rooms were arranged in such a way that anyone […] could never reach the heart of the family: more than ever a passing visitor, never a true guest […]”68
- 69 Jean-François Lyotard, La condición postmoderna. Informe sobre el saber, [1rst published as: La Co (...)
- 70 Mauricio Lissovsky and Paulo Sergio Moraes de Sá, Colunas da educação. A construção do Ministério (...)
- 71 Zilah Quezado Deckker, Brazil Built: The Architecture of the Modern Movement in Brazil, London; Ne (...)
- 72 Ibid.
- 73 Lúcio Costa, Lúcio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência, op. cit. (note 4), p. 198.
- 74 Pietro Maria Bardi, Lembrança De Le Corbusier: Atenas, Itália, Brasil, São Paulo: Nobel, 1984; Cec (...)
- 75 On the creation and cultural politics of the Iphan since the 1930s, see note 7.
25From the 1980s onwards literature and humanities studies in Latin America, and Brazil in particular, were permeated by the postmodern formulations concerning incredulity towards metanarratives,69 the recognition of the heterogeneous process of cultural exchange, and the coexistence of other multicultural dimensions within the apparent homogeneity that described the idea of a national culture since the first decades of the twentieth century. This new theoretical instrument reached the field of architecture and urban history in the 1990s, the decade that emerged as a point of inflection in the revision of Brazilian historiography with extensive archival investigations dedicated to scrutinising the key architectural accomplishments that reinforced and legitimised Costa’s narrative of the modern Brazilian architecture. This revision encompassed buildings such as the Ministry of Education and Health,70 as well as the first important ventures that divulged the country’s new architecture around the world like the Brazilian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1939) and the MOMA’s exhibition “Brazil Builds: Architecture new and old 1652-1942,” directed by Philip L. Goodwin with photographs taken by G.E. Kidder Smith (1943).71 Likewise the main architectural dialogues described by Costa between Europe, North America and Brazil began to be explored in depth.72 Hence it was not by coincidence that the Brazilian rapports of Le Corbusier, the main foreign actor of Costa’s construction and the “original source” of Oscar Niemeyer achievements73—were researched in European and American archives, with results that attracted the attention of the whole community of Corbusian scholars in search of a broader understanding of the modern master’s oeuvre.74 The same years also witnessed the first essays devoted to the cultural conjuncture that promoted and influenced the creation of the National Historic and Artistic Heritage (iphan).75
26However, if new issues and subjects formerly dismissed by the mono-national narrative have been pursued in the last years, the challenge for a critical Brazilian historiography will be accomplished only with the recognition of the spatial dynamics of cultural crossings or intersections, free from the ideological and national constraints. The richness of the idea of intersection is implied by the histoire croisée approach as proposed by Werner and Zimmerman:
- 76 Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire croisée and the Challenge of (...)
“A multidimensional approach that acknowledges plurality and the complex configurations that result from it. Accordingly, entities and objects of research are not merely considered in relation to one another but also through one another, in terms of relationships, interactions and circulation […] [the analysis] is not limited to the point of intersection or a moment of contact, but […] takes into account more broadly the processes that may result therefrom […] it points toward an analysis of residences, inertias, modifications–in trajectory, form, content… that can develop […] in the process of crossing […] the entities, persons, practices or objects that are intertwined with, or affected by, the crossing process, do not necessary remain intact and identical in form […] histoire croisée is concerned as much with novel and original elements produced by the intercrossing as with the way in which it affects each of the intercrossed parties, which are assumed to remain identifiable even if in altered form […].”76
Notes
1 Erwin Panofsky, “Reflections on Historical Time,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 4, 2004, p. 691–701.
2 Nicola Abbagnano, Dicionário de Filosofia, São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1998, p. 349.
3 Lúcio Costa, Lúcio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência, São Paulo: Editora UnB; Empresa das Artes, 1995, p. 434.
4 Regarding Lúcio Costa’s involvement with the neocolonial, the historian testified that “the so-called ‘traditionalist movement’, of which we also were part, emerged with the best of intentions. We did not realize that the true tradition was right there, two steps away, with our contemporary master-builders […]”. Ibid. (note 4), p. 55‒65, 461‒462.
5 Otavio Leonidio, Carradas de Razões Lúcio Costa e a Arquitetura Moderna Brasileira (1924–1951), Rio de Janeiro: Editora puc; São Paulo: Edições Loyola, 2007, p. 79.
6 Since the 1980s a consistent number of researches has been conducted dedicated to the creation of the sphan inside the Ministry of Education and Culture (mes) as part of a broader cultural and political project. See Lauro Cavalcanti, Modernistas na Repartição, Rio de Janeiro: Editora ufrj; Paço Imperial: Tempo Brasileiro, 1993; Maria Cecília Londres Fonseca, O Patrimônio em Processo: Trajetória da Política Federal de Preservação no Brasil, Editora ufrj; Minc-iphan, 1997 (Risco original); Simon Schwartzman, Helena Maria Bousquet Bomeny and Vanda Maria Ribeiro Costa, Tempos de Capanema, São Paulo: edusp; Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2000 (Coleção Estudos brasileiros, 81); Márcia Regina Romeiro Chuva, Os arquitetos da memória: sociogênese das praticas de preservação do patrimônio cultural no Brasil (anos 1930–1940), Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2009. On Lúcio Costa and the evolving of his hypothesis on Brazilian architecture within the context of the sphan, see José Pessôa, Lúcio Costa: Documentos de Trabalho, Rio de Janeiro: iphan, 2004.
7 Margaret Olin, “From Bezal’lel to Max Lieberman: Jewish Art in Nineteenth-Century Art-Historical Texts,” in Catherine M. Soussloff (ed.), Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999 (S. Mark Taper Foundation imprint in Jewish studies), p. 20-21; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Towards Geography of Art, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 43-67; Mitchell Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity, Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
8 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, Le style international, Marseille: Éditions Parenthèses, 2001 (Eupalinos), p. 29. See the authors’ harsh criticism regarding the European architects’ functionalism, and particularly Hannes Meyer, on p. 68.
9 Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (eds.), Race, Nation, Class: ambiguous identities, [1rst published as: Race, nation, classe : Les identités ambiguës, Paris: La Découverte, 1988], London; New York, NY: Verso, 1991 (Radical thinkers), p. 96.
10 Henri Focillon, The Life of forms in Art, [1rst published as: Vie des formes, Paris : E. Leroux, 1934], New York, NY: Zone Books, 1992, p. 118.
11 Lúcio Costa, “O Aleijadinho e a arquitetura tradicional,” in Alberto Xavier (ed.), Lúcio Costa: Sôbre arquitetura, [2nd edition], Porto Alegre: Editora UniRitter, 2007, p. 15.
12 “Assume and respect the original bedrock–Portuguese, African, indigenous. / Recognize the great importance for today’s Brazil of the contribution of the European migrations, Mediterranean and Nordic, as well as those from the Near East and Far East. / Accept the results of this merging as both legitimate and fruitful, but consider as fundamental to this absorption the contribution of our unique, unmistakable, Brazilian, way of being. / Preserve and cultivate those differentiating and unique characteristics. / Resist subservience, including cultural, but absorb and assimilate foreign innovation”; Lúcio Costa, “Recommendations,” in Lúcio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência, op. cit. (note 4), p. 382. Costa’s elaborations find affinities with the arguments used by writer and literary critic Sílvio Romero, who identified the ethnic character of the Brazilian people as the main foundation of the literary nationalism, ‘an organic need in the life of nations’. See Sílvio Romero, “Literatura y nacionalismo,” in Ensayos Literarios, Antonio Cándido (ed.), Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1982, p. 35‒36; Antonio Cándido, “Introdução,” in Sílvio Romero, Teoria, crítica e história literária, São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 1978, p. ix‒xxx. (Biblioteca Universitária de Literatura Brasileira). On the contribution of each ethnic group to the establishment of a Brazilian architecture, Lúcio Costa also seems to echo the racial theories of Sílvio Romero, which in turn evoke the formulation of Gobineau on “mestizaje”: “not that the works lose their quality or connotation of Portuguese works–the indigenous and African contribution was too fragile in this case to denaturalize it […]”. See Lúcio Costa, “Introdução à um relatório,” in Lúcio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência, op. cit. (note 4), p. 456. Both authors, Costa and Romero, pointed to the Inconfidência Mineira, the tentative colonial independence gesture aborted in 1789, as the emergence of a national consciousness.
13 Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (eds.), Race, Nation, Class: ambiguous identities, op. cit. (note 10), p. 130.
14 Margaret Olin, “From Bezal’lel to Max Lieberman. Jewish Art in Nineteenth- Century Art-Historical Texts,” op. cit. (note 8), p. 21.
15 Lúcio Costa, “Tradição local,” in Lúcio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência, op. cit. (note 4), p. 454.
16 Madalena Cunha Matos and Tania Beisl Ramos, “Um encontro, um desencontro. Lúcio Costa, Raul Lino e Carlos Ramos,” Proceedings of the conference (7 Docomomo arquitetura e urbanismo, Porto Alegre, ufpa, 22‒24 October 2007). URL: http://www.docomomo.org.br/seminario%207%20pdfs/034.pdf. Accessed 27 February 2015.
17 The hypothesis that considers the Baroque expression in Minas Gerais as the first evidence of a national artistic identity is, as suggested by Myriam Andrade Ribeiro de Oliveira, an anachronism. For the researcher, the studies on geography of art, especially in Portugal, confirmed that the architectural scene in Minas Gerais during the eighteenth century was unlikely to have been directly related to the emergence of the Rococo. See Myriam Andrade Ribeiro de Oliveira, O Rococó Religioso no Brasil e seus antecedentes europeus, São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2003.
18 José Francisco Oliveira Viana, Populações meridionais do Brasil: história, organização, psicologia, [1rst published in 1920], Rio de Janeiro: Editora Jose Olympio, 1952.
19 Gilberto de Mello Freyre, Casa-Grande e Senzala, [1rst published in 1933], Rio de Janeiro: Editora Jose Olympio, 1978. Freyre associated culture and ethnicity, considering the Brazilian people as an extension of the Iberian population assimilated with indigenous and African elements. However, he also identified the Portuguese psychological profile as shaped by the miscegenation of Arab and Jewish elements. See Elide Rugai Bastos, “Gilberto Freire. Casa‒Grande & Senzala,” in Lourenço Dantas Mota (eds.), Introdução ao Brasil. Um Banquete no Tropico, São Paulo: Editora Senac, 1999, p. 225; Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares-Burke, Gilberto Freyre. Um vitoriano dos trópicos, São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2003.
20 Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Raízes do Brasil, [1rst published in 1936], São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995, p. 172‒173.
21 Alberto Luiz Scheider, Sílvio Romero Hermeneuta do Brasil, São Paulo: Annablume, 2005.
22 Gilberto Freyre, “Brazilian National Character in the Twentieth Century,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 370, special issue National Character in the Perspective of the Social Sciences, 1967, p. 57‒62.
23 Lúcio Costa, Lúcio Costa, op. cit. (note 3), p. 198‒199. Anat Falbel, Arquitetos imigrantes no Brasil uma questão historiográfica, Proceedings of the conference (6 Docomomo arquitetura e urbanismo, Niteroi, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 16‒19 November 2015), p. 1‒20. URL: http://www.docomomo.org.br/seminario%206%20pdfs/Anat%20Falbel.pdf. Accessed 2 September 2015. Anat Falbel, “Immigrant Architects in Brazil. A Historiographical Issue,” Docomomo Journal, vol. 34, p. 58‒65.
24 Thomas F. Reese, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Thomas F. Reese (ed.), Studies in Ancient American and European Art. The Collected Essays of George Kubler, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985 (Yale publications in the history of art, 30), p. xvii‒xxxvi, p. 81‒7; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Towards a Geography of Art, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago, 2004, p. 219‒238.
25 George Kubler, “Non-Iberian European Contributions to Latin American Colonial Architecture,” in Thomas F. Reese (ed.), Studies in Ancient American and European Art. The Collected Essays of George Kubler, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985 (Yale publications in the history of art), p. 81.
26 Ibid., p. 85. See also Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art, op. cit. (note 25), p. 219‒238.
27 George Kubler, “Indianism, Mestizaje, and Indigenismo as Classical, Medieval, and Modern Traditions in Latin America,” in Thomas F. Reese (ed.), Studies in Ancient American and European Art, op. cit. (note 25), p. 75‒80.
28 Henri Focillon, The Art of the West. I: Romanesque Art, [1rst published as: Art d'Occident. 1. Le Moyen-Âge roman, Paris: A. Colin, 1938], London: Phaidon, 1963, p. 6.
29 See Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America 1542–1773, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
30 See Hanno-Walter Kruft, “The Theory of fortification,” in A History of Architectural Theory. From Vitruvius to the Present, London: Zwemmer; Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994, p. 110–117; Nestor Goulart Reis Filho, Imagens de vilas e cidades do Brasil Colonial, São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2000; Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira Bueno, Desenho e Desígnio. O Brasil dos Engenheiros Militares (1500–1822), PhD dissertation, Universidade Estadual de São Paulo; fausp, São Paulo, 2001; Nestor Goulart Reis Filho, As Minas de Ouro e a formação das Capitanias do Sul, São Paulo: Via das Artes, 2013.
31 Benedito Lima de Toledo, O Real Corpo de Engenheiros na Capitania de São Paulo: destacando-se a obra do brigadeiro João da Costa Ferreira, São Paulo: João Fortes Engenharia, 1981; Myriam Andrade Ribeiro de Oliveira, O Rococó Religioso no Brasil e seus antecedentes europeus, op. cit. (note 18), p. 298.
32 Gauvin Alexander Bailey, “Asia in the Arts of Colonial Latin America,” in Joseph J. Rishel and Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt (eds.), The Arts in Latin America 1492–1820, Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art; Mexico City: Antiguo Colegio de San Idelfonso; Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006 (Philadelphia Museum of Art series), p. 57‒69; Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America 1542‒1773, op. cit. (note 30).
33 A.J.R. Russell-Wood, “Robert Chester Smith research scholar and historian,” in Dalton Sala (ed.), Robert C. Smith: Research in History of Art, Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbekian, 2000, p. 43; Nestor Goulart Reis Filho, “Os tempos de Robert Smith,” in Nestor Goulart Reis Filho (ed.), Robert Smith e o Brasil: Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Brasilia: Iphan, 2012, p. 9‒24.
34 In 1941, Robert Chester Smith published his article “O Codice do Frei Cristovão de Lisboa,” in which he pointed to the valuable contributions of the Dutch in the Northeast of the country during the seventeenth century, confronting Lúcio Costa’s understanding that the Dutch in Brazil “had left little or nothing […] in exchange for so much that they destroyed or prevented from occurring, as one can easily gauge by a simple examination of the panoramas of Olinda, painted by Franz Post […]”. See Robert Chester Smith, “O Codice do Frei Cristovão de Lisboa,” Revista do Patrimonio Historico e Artistico Nacional, vol. 5, 1941, p. 118‒123; Lúcio Costa, “A arquitetura dos Jesuítas no Brasil,” Revista do Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, vol. 5, 1941, p. 7‒104.
35 Robert C. Smith Jr, “João Frederico Ludovice: an Eighteenth Century Architect in Portugal,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 18, no. 3, September 1936, p. 273‒370.
36 Ibid., p. 370.
37 Thomas F. Reese, op. cit. (note 25), p. xix. See also Malcolm Campbell, “Robert Chester Smith and the University of Pennsylvania,” in Dalton Sala (ed.), Robert C. Smith: Research in History of Art, op. cit. (note 34), p. 138.
38 Robert C. Smith, “Jesuit Buildings in Brazil,” The Art Bulletin, vol. 30, no.3, September 1948, p. 187‒213.
39 Robert C. Smith, The Art of Portugal 1500–1800, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968.
40 Reinaldo dos Santos, Oito séculos de arte portuguesa, história e espírito, Lisbon: Noticias, 1966.
41 Helmut Wohl, “Robert Chester Smith and the Art in the United States,” in Dalton Sala (ed.), Robert C. Smith: Research in History of Art, op. cit. (note 34), p. 17‒29.
42 Erwin Panofsky, “Three Decades of Art History in the United States. Impressions of a Transplanted European,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955 (Doubleday Anchor Books, A59), p. 321‒346.
43 Carl Landauer, “Mimesis” and Erich Auerbach’s Self-Mythologizing,” German Studies Review, vol. 11, no. 1, February 1988, p. 88‒89.
44 Kevin Parker, “Art History and exile: Richard Krautheimer and Erwin Panofsky,” in Stephanie Barron (ed.), Exiles + Emigrés. The flight of European Artists from Hitler, exhibition catalogue [Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 23 February‒11 May 1997; Montreal, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 19 June‒7 september 7 1997; Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, 9 october 1997‒4 january 1998], New York, NY: Harry N Abrams; Los Angeles, CA: County Museum of Art, 1997, p. 324.
45 Lúcio Costa, “A Arquitetura dos Jesuítas no Brasil,” op. cit. (note 35), p. 7‒104.
46 Ibid., p. 97.
47 Ibid., p. 63.
48 Henri Focillon, The Life of forms in Art, op. cit. (note 10), p. 140‒141: “history is not unilinear; it is not pure sequence […] history is variety, exchange and conflict […]”.
49 Lúcio Costa, Lúcio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência, op. cit. (note 4), p. 198.
50 Margaret Olin, “Jewish Christians” and “Early Christian” Synagogues. The Discovery at Dura-Europos and its Aftermath,” in The Nation without Art. Examining Modern Discourses on Jewish Art, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001 (Texts and contexts), p. 137‒139.
51 Henri Focillon, The Life of forms in Art, op. cit. (note 10), p. 142.
52 Jean Bony, “Henri Focillon” in Henry Focillon, The Art of the West in the Middle Ages, op. cit. (note 29), p. xix‒xx. Tradition represents the “collaboration of the past in the historical present […] [means] a vertical force rising the depths of ages […] adapting itself to the new periods by undergoing distortions and re-interpretations […] its influence operating in the present as a phenomenon of horizontal transference from exchanges between different contemporary environments […] it is the experiments, stimulated by the instinct to discover and create, which enrich and renew history […]”.
53 Thomas F. Reese, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Thomas F. Reese (ed.), Studies in Ancient American and European Art. The Collected Essays of George Kubler, op. cit. (note 25), p. xx.
54 A.J.R. Russell-Wood, “Robert Chester Smith: research scholar and historian,” in Dalton Sala (ed.), Robert C. Smith: Research in History of Art, op. cit. (note 34), p. 43. For a broader perspective of Latin American studies in the United States see George Kubler, “Architectural Historians before the Fact,” in Elisabeth Blair Macdougall (ed.), The Architectural Historian in America, Washington, DC: University Press of New England, 1990, p. 191‒197.
55 Sidney Ratner, “Horace M. Kallen and Cultural Pluralism,” in Milton R. Konvitz (ed.), The Legacy of Horace M. Kallen, New York, NY: Herzl Press Publication, 1987, p. 48–63; Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States, with a new introduction by Stephen J. Whitfield, [1rst published in 1924], New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998, p. 59‒117; Mona Harrington, “Loyalties: ‘Dual and Divided’,” in Michael Walzer, Edward T. Kantowicz, John Higham and Mona Harrington (eds.), The Politics of Ethnicity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard College, 1982, p. 101–102; Milton R. Konvitz, “Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1972): In Praise of Hyphenation and Orchestration,” in Milton R. Konvitz (ed.), The Legacy of Horace M. Kallen, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Canbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1987, p. 30.
56 Albert William Levi, “Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte: The lesson of Panofsky,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 20, no. 4, 1986, p. 70-83, p. 81.
57 Ibid., p. 70-83. For more information on the exiled German and Austrian historians and their impact on art studies in the United States, see Karen Michels, “Transfer and Transformation: the German Period in American Art History,” in Stephanie Barron (ed.), Exiles + Emigrés, op. cit. (note 45), p. 304–316, as well as Kevin Parker, “Art history and exile: Richard Krautheimer and Erwin Panofsky,” in ibid., p. 317‒325.
58 Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, Michael P. Steinberg (ed.) [Paper written in 1923], Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.
59 Erwin Panofsky, “Reflections on Historical Time,” [1rst published in German in 1927], Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no.4, summer 2004, p. 691‒701.
60 Anthony Vidler, “Spatial Estrangement in Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer,” New German Critique, no. 54, 1991, special issue on Siegfried Kracauer, p. 32.
61 Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff, New York, NY: The Free Press of Glencoe; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1964, p. 404‒405.
62 Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door,” in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture. A reader in cultural theory, [1rst published as: Brücke und Tür. Essays des Philosophischen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1903], London: Routledge, 1997, p. 66.
63 Ibid., p. 67‒68.
64 Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Robert E. Park and Ernst W. Burgess (eds.), Introduction to the Science of Sociology, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1921, p. 322-327.
65 See S. Dale McLemore, “Simmel’s ‘Stranger’: A Critique of the Concept,” The Pacific Sociological Review, vol. 13, no.2, 1970, p. 86–94; Louis Wirth, The Ghetto, [1rst published in 1928], Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1956.
66 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, [1rst published in 1947], London: Routledge, 2002, p. 22‒38. Martin Buber’s elaboration on the “in-between” was recovered as a theoretical tool in the revision of the functional approach by Rolf Gutmann and Theo Marz. At the preparation of the ciam 9 (Sigtuna, 1952), this very notion was appropriated by Aldo van Eyck to enlarge the level of the interpersonal space “between one man and another” to the urban scale, and, since then, the “in-between” has been responsible for new and enriched paths for a series of architects, urban planners and theorists who have being working and developing the concept through different approaches in the contemporaneity. Francis Strauven, Aldo van Eyck, The Shape of Relativity, Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura, 1998, p. 242–243; 354–379; Vincent Ligtelijn (ed.), Aldo van Eyck: Works, Basel; Boston, MA: Birkhäuser Publishers, 1999; Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel, Team 10 1953-81. In Search of a Utopia of the Present, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005.
67 Michel Espagne, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands, Paris: PUF, 1999 (Perspectives germaniques), p. 113.
68 Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces: utopias and heterotopias,” in Joan Ockman (ed.), Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology, [1rst published as: “Dits et écrits. Des espaces autres (conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967),” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n°5, octobre 1984, p. 46‒94], New York, NY: Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation; Rizzoli, 1993 (Columbia books of architecture), p. 419‒26.
69 Jean-François Lyotard, La condición postmoderna. Informe sobre el saber, [1rst published as: La Condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir, Paris: éditions de Minuit, 1979], Buenos Aires: Editorial R.E.I., 1991 (Teorema. Serie Mayor), p. 15.
70 Mauricio Lissovsky and Paulo Sergio Moraes de Sá, Colunas da educação. A construção do Ministério da Educação e Saúde, Rio de Janeiro: Mec; Iphan; Fundação Getulio Vargas; Cpdoc; Edições do Patrimônio, 1996.
71 Zilah Quezado Deckker, Brazil Built: The Architecture of the Modern Movement in Brazil, London; New York, NY: Spon Press, 2001. The book was developed from Quezado’s PhD research submitted in 1992.
72 Ibid.
73 Lúcio Costa, Lúcio Costa: Registro de uma Vivência, op. cit. (note 4), p. 198.
74 Pietro Maria Bardi, Lembrança De Le Corbusier: Atenas, Itália, Brasil, São Paulo: Nobel, 1984; Cecilia Rodrigues Dos Santos, Margareth Campos da Silva Pereira, Romão Veriano da Silva Pereira and Vasco Caldeiro da Silva, Le Corbusier e o Brasil, São Paulo: Tessela; Projeto, 1987; Yannis Tsiomis (ed.), Le Corbusier: Rio de Janeiro: 1929, 1936, exhibition catalogue (Rio de Janeiro, Centro de arquitectura e urbanismo, 1998–1999), Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Arquitetura e Urbanismo do Rio de Janeiro, 1998.
75 On the creation and cultural politics of the Iphan since the 1930s, see note 7.
76 Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” Religion and History, vol. 45, no. 1, 2006, p. 30‒50.
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