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Immigrant architects in Brazil: old and new tools for a historiographical discussion

Architectes immigrés au Brésil: anciens et nouveaux outils pour une discussion historiographique
Anat Falbel

Abstracts

The role of human displacement and migration in cultural processes as well as in the development of form in art and architecture has long been recognized. Throughout the last two decades, however, with the increase of human exchange and experiences of exile, issues concerning dynamics of cultural transfer have come to guide the course of mainstream architectural history. Bringing together old and new ideas surrounding these issues, this article opens up a discussion about the self-perception of Brazilian modern architectural historiography, addressing the role of foreign and immigrant architects in the spread of architectural modernism.

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Marcel Mauss and the processes of cultural exchange and transference

  • 1 See Marcel Mauss, “Les civilisations. Éléments et formes”, in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres 2, Paris, Les É (...)
  • 2 See Edward B. Tyler, Primitive Culture Research into the development of mythology, philosophy, reli (...)
  • 3 Ibid., p. 8.
  • 4 Ibid., p. 9: “It is above the bedrock of civilizations that the societies stand out, create their i (...)
  • 5 Marcel Mauss, La nation, Paris, PUF (1e éd. Marcel Fournier and Jean Terrier), 2013, p. 125.

1In the 1920s, Marcel Mauss conceived a social phenomenon that traveled and surpassed the limits of a singular society1. This conception fell within the corpus of ethnographic and anthropological studies, which had evolved since the second half of the nineteenth century, and which was, conversely to degeneration theory and the notion of the “genius of a race”, concerned with the effects of dislocation, displacement, and migration on cultural processes2. Mauss also described a “civilization phenomenon”, which extended across a surface much broader than the political geography of individual societies or nations. Its sources were rooted in the history of multiple nations, existing as a family of societies connected by historical, geographical, archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic facets3. He understood that these civilizational phenomena were essentially international or extra-national, noting that the individual character of a society would “stand out above the bedrock of international phenomena4”. His sensitive and original analysis also included notions such as the “permeability of the modern nation5” and the importance of social agents responsible for exchange and transferal processes which formed “transnational communities”.

  • 6 George Steiner, “Extraterritorial”, Extraterritorial, New York: Atheneum, 1971, pp. 3-11.

2In 1971, critic George Steiner took up Mauss’s notion of international phenomena, dubbing the linguistic homelessness and erratic features of modernity – which he considered a state of permanent exile – “extraterritoriality6”.

  • 7 Anna-Maria Mazzucchelli, “Richard Neutra,” Casabella, no. 85, January 1935, pp. 18-19.

3By the 1930s, however, the same understanding of extraterritoriality could already be found in the writings of critics and historians who recognized the disciplinary peculiarity of the foreigner and the exiled professional. In this context, one can mention Anna Maria Mazzucchelli’s article on Richard Neutra, for example, which was published in the Italian magazine Casabella in 1935. Mazzucchelli understood Richard Neutra’s restless trajectory in America as an emblem for that generation of modern architects, suggesting that Neutra’s achievements were “evidence of the universality of European taste and a clear instance of stylistic coherence7”.

  • 8 Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York, The (...)

4In the same vein, writing on László Moholy-Nagy’s first exhibition in Brno in 1936, Sigfried Giedion evoked Georg Simmel8 in an inspired account addressing the pioneers of the new vision who hailed from agricultural countries like Russia and Hungary.

  • 9 Sigfried Giedion, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, London, London Gallery Ltd., 1937: “The emotive values latent (...)

“Coming from the outskirts of civilization”, these pioneers “brought fresh energy to the problem of interpreting the realities of today [in] the Berlin artistic circles still fettered by expressionism9.”

  • 10 Le Corbusier, Quelles sont les formes d’agrégation d’une nouvelle société machiniste ? Manuscript, (...)

5Le Corbusier himself had the same intuition, recognizing the waves of contemporary dislocation driven by political persecution as a turning point for the development of original architecture and urban experiences in a newly mechanized society10.

Modern Brazilian architectural narrative and its cultural context

  • 11 See Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, nation, class: Ambiguous Identities, London, Ve (...)
  • 12 George Steiner, “Extraterritorial”, op. cit., p. 3.

6Conversely to Mauss’s essays and the progressive spirit that guided modern vanguards, Brazilian intellectuals who shaped the cultural perspective of Estado Novo in the 1930s idealized a “fictive ethnicity”. As Etienne Balibar put it11, this ethnicity understood race and language as the main manifestations of a national character, and articulated through binomial nationalism and modernity. Lucio Costa (1902–1998), the future planner of Brasília, joined this group of intellectuals that had gathered around the dictator Getúlio Vargas soon after the coup d’Etat in 1937. Influenced by Romantic theory12, Costa was responsible for forging the narrative of modern Brazilian architectural historiography, in which Brazilian architectural modernism appeared and developed as the result of a “national genius”, or Geist. This was implied in the figurative relationship between Brazilian colonial architecture and Brazilian modern architecture, or between colonial sculptor and church builder, Antônio Francisco Lisboa (“the Aleijadinho”), and architect Oscar Niemeyer:

  • 13 Lucio Costa, “Depoimento de um arquiteto carioca”, 1951, in Alberto Xavier (ed.), Lucio Costa: Sôbr (...)

7Our own national genius that was expressed through the elect personality of this artist [Oscar Niemeyer], in the same way as it had been expressed in the eighteenth century, under very similar circumstances, through the individuality of Antônio Francisco Lisboa, the Aleijadinho13

  • 14 Of note among those nationalist intellectuals are José Francisco, Oliveira Viana, Gilberto de Mello (...)
  • 15 See Anat Falbel, “Questions on space and intersections in the historiography of modern Brazilian ar (...)

8In the closed space of this construct, Costa addressed the issue of race, stressing that the original bedrock of the society’s Portuguese, African, and indigenous elements was a natural community that endured despite later waves of European and Oriental immigration. This adopted strategy legitimated the work of early, colonial-era Portuguese settlers who established a Brazilian language, considering that “par droit de conquête” the colonist was in fact at home and that, in speaking Portuguese or giving form to their buildings, they were using their own language rather than imitating someone else. Hence, in tune with other Brazilian nationalist intellectuals14, Costa identified Portuguese architectural culture as the first and only source of Brazilian architecture. It is thus to no surprise that, in the state of Minas Gerais – where the country’s first movement against Portuguese colonial power occurred – he pointed to the emergence of a national Brazilian character15.

  • 16 George Steiner, “Extraterritorial”, op. cit., p. 3.
  • 17 On the role of Lucio Costa in the development of Goodwin’s exhibition concept, see Mauricio Lissovs (...)
  • 18 Until the end of the 1980s, Brazilian intellectuals were very reserved around the issue of cultural (...)

9Costa’s historiographic writing, in particular his use of expressions such as “the national genius”, attests to the commitment of his generational and intellectual milieu to a romantic historicism, or the idea of an architectural language that might crystallize the inner history and specific worldview of the Volks, or nation16. This same construct informed the main narrative of argumentation for Brazil Builds, a MOMA exhibition (1942) curated by Philip L. Goodwin. It included photographs by G. E. Kidder Smith17, as well as initiatives of the Department of National Historic and Artistic Heritage (Secretaria do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, SPHAN), which focused on the preservation of traditional colonial building. The narrative engendered by the nationalist political and intellectual atmosphere of those decades continued to permeate progressive circles and research institutions fed by postcolonial discourses throughout the Latin American continent. This occurred even after the period of military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, which, for several decades, impoverished and narrowed the spectrum of Brazilian architectural historiography on the contribution of other nationals and architecture produced in Brazil throughout the nineteenth century through the turn of the twentieth century18.

10The lasting presence of Costa’s historiographical model among Brazilian scholars was noted by Michel Foucault who, in 1967, illustrated his heterotopia with the same colonial space as the one conceived by 1930s intellectuals in asserting their national identity. The French philosopher described the guestroom of a traditional colonial Brazilian farmhouse as follows:

  • 19 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Joan Ockman (ed.), Architecture Cu (...)

“[A]ny 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 guest19.”

  • 20 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, University of (...)
  • 21 See Étienne Balibar, “At the Borders of Europe,” in We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transn (...)
  • 22 George Steiner, “Extraterritorial”, op. cit., p. 11.
  • 23 See Beatriz Piccolotto S. Bueno, Desenho e Desígnio: o Brasil dos Engenheiros Militares (1500-1822)(...)

11Ultimately, in the final quarter of the twentieth century, the French postmodernist incredulity toward metanarratives20 began to be assimilated in the country through the disciplines of social sciences and humanities. This attitude opened the Brazilian historiographical space to new readings, notably to the revaluation of the “dialectic between confrontations with the foreigner and communication between civilizations21” not only in the “age of refugee22” but even since colonial times23.

Arch. Edgardo Minond, Transatlantic.

Arch. Edgardo Minond, Transatlantic.

Tools for revaluation of encounters between the foreigner and the national in Brazilian architectural historiography

  • 24 This expression was developed by scholar and writer Horace M. Kallen, in his 1915 article “Democrac (...)
  • 25 The initiatives of the architectural press are exemplified by the magazines Shelter (1932-1933; 193 (...)
  • 26 See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Harva (...)
  • 27 William H. Jordy, The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century, New York, Oxford U (...)

12At the turn of nineteenth century, the massive wave of emigration to America triggered early debates about Americanization and the idea of “the melting pot” versus cultural pluralism24. Those discussions were likely responsible for a premature recognition of the major role played by immigrant intellectuals and professionals upon their arrival to the United States during the interwar period and soon after, as they were pressed by political persecution and the rise of fascism. In the field of architecture, that recognition can be traced back to the 1930s through initiatives of the architectural press25 or the curatorial direction of MOMA’s exhibitions from the 1930s to the 1940s. It can also be found in Sigfried Giedion’s analyses of the specificity of the émigré’s production in the 1950s26. Giedion’s discussion of the impact of European modernism in America was followed by a new generation of thinkers in the 1960s, represented by historians like William Jordy (1972)27.

  • 28 Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture 1900–1 (...)

13In the 1980s, the dissemination of modern architectural culture between continents began to be scrutinized more extensively. This renewed scrutiny involved the circulation of not only architecture professionals in a broader geography, but also of ideas and forms that arose through different channels and media. Reyner Banham’s 1986 A Concrete Atlantis exemplified this trend, discussing the influence of American industrial buildings on European modernism28.

  • 29 See Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (eds.), Exiles + Emigrés. The Flight of European Artists fr (...)
  • 30 Charlotte Benton, A Different World: Émigré Architects in Britain: 1928–1958, London, Riba Heinz Ga (...)

14Occurring almost concomitantly to Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1997 exhibition, Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler29, came a series of studies on the same wave of exiled and émigré professionals that Giedion and Jordy had identified. The studies demonstrated the dissemination of modern architecture and the circulation of architects within Europe and beyond in Latin America, the Middle East, South Africa, and Asia30.

  • 31 The decades of the country’s great industrial development began under President Getúlio Vargas and (...)

15In Latin America and Brazil in particular, this new theoretical approach exposed the fictive ethnicity that had framed the architectural historiographical narrative, denying equal recognition to those exiles nurtured in cosmopolitan and modern European circles where some had already achieved professional recognition. Further, as a series of publications has revealed, those architects, urban planners, photographers, and designers, as well as artists and intellectuals, indeed exerted their influence on two generations of professionals. This was done through the hundreds of projects constructed in main urban centers by firms where dozens of newly graduated architects started their careers from the 1940s to the 1960s – the decades of the country’s great industrial development31 – and through their writing, teaching, and cultural activities.

16After deconstructing the old historiographical model of Brazilian architecture as defined by Lucio Costa, I will scrutinize the cultural encounter forged between the foreigner and the national primarily from the 1930s to 1960s. I will then present some examples from within particular trajectories – since one cannot comprehend all the vicissitudes of the hundreds of professionals who arrived on Brazil’s shores during that time period – through a tripartite approach. The first is concerned with the impact of the refugee’s awareness of his own otherness, taking Simmel’s writing on the space and “objectivity” of the foreigner as a theoretical backdrop. The second understands immigrant professionals as modernizing agents or intermediaries between cultures, and therefore sees the dynamics of cultural transference processes between Europe and America according to George Steiner’s formulation of modernity as extraterritoriality. And finally, the third uncovers a chain of associations and articulations of the foreign professional in the city’s cultural space according to the definition of landsmannschaft, or group of origins.

The immigrant’s awareness of their own “otherness”

  • 32 See Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, op. cit., (...)
  • 33 Ibid., p. 408.
  • 34 Kader Konuk, East-West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010.
  • 35 “Mimesis is quite consciously a book written by a particular person in a particular place during th (...)
  • 36 Erich Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” in Walter Muschg and E. Staiger (eds.), Weltliterat (...)

17In his seminal article “The Stranger” (1908)32, Georg Simmel signaled the peculiar position occupied by the stranger “composed of certain measures of nearness and distance33”. The stranger’s “objectivity” made him both practically and theoretically freer, not only to “import qualities” to a space, but also to survey conditions with less prejudice and with more general, objective ideals. The recently discussed reception of Mimesis, the paradigmatic production in exile by German philologist Erich Auerbach34, can be read with Simmel’s argument in mind, given Auerbach’s own experiences as a Jew in 1930s Germany, an academic exile in Turkey, and, later on, an intellectual émigré in America35. In his “Philologie der Weltliteratur36”, the exiled intellectual evoked Goethe’s categories of Weltliteratur and reasserted his humanistic position on the exile’s outlook, which transcended national limits. The exile was therefore endowed with an original vision; and, while most people were mainly aware of one culture, one setting, or one country, the exile was conscious of at least two, making it easier to reconcile the universal with the particular. These two concepts, first put forth by Goethe in his definition of Weltliteratur, were later reassumed by Auerbach, who wrote:

  • 37 Ibid., p. 17. Auerbach illustrated his viewpoint using this beautiful description by Hugo of St. Vi (...)

“The most priceless and indispensable part of a philologist’s heritage is still his own nation’s culture and language […] only when he is first separated from this heritage, and then transcends it does it become truly effective […] the spirit [Geist] is not national37.

  • 38 See Anat Falbel, “Cartas da América: Arquitetura e Modernidade,” in Roberto Segre et al., Arquitetu (...)
  • 39 Sobre Pierre Verger, manuscript, Archives of the Lina Bo Bardi Institute. On the photographer Pierr (...)

18In Latin America, Russian-born immigrant architect Wladimiro Acosta from Odessa, had a similar idea. After studying and building in Russia, Italy, Germany, and Brazil between 1916 and 1931, Acosta established himself in Argentina, where he became the first Argentinean CIAM representative. There, he reinstated Auerbach’s concept of the exiled intellectual’s original vision, declaring that the exile’s experience “meant the encounter with other cultures […] the intensifying of all differences […] and an accentuated sense of evolution38”. In the same vein, Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi – who settled in Brazil in 1946 with her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi (creator of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo – MASP) —dissected the work of her friend Pierre Verger, a French photographer (who worked in Bahia from 1946 until his death), considering the unique position he occupied within Brazilian cultural space. For Bo Bardi, Verger had never left behind his “European” position, which was “a cultural position that allowed him to fully grasp a city and understand its dwellers as if he were one of them, yet keeping his distance from both dangerous folklore and inane interpretations39”.

  • 40 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Meditazioni della Vita Offesa, Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 19 (...)
  • 41 Bruno Zevi, “Brasile incerto ed eclettico, architetto Lucian Korngold”, L’Architettura Cronache e S (...)
  • 42 Bruno Zevi, Erich Mendelsohn. Opera Completa: Architettura e Immagini Architettoniche, Turin, Texto (...)
  • 43 Bruno Zevi, “A Fábrica dos Sonhos,” in Cidadela da Liberdade, São Paulo, SESC/Instituto Lina Bo e P (...)

19Although in Minima Moralia40, Theodor Adorno had pointed out the “damaged” life of the exiled intellectual, Bruno Zevi was nevertheless one of the first architectural historians to locate the modern exiled architect’s estrangement around the issue of émigré production after his own experience as a refugee in the United States during the war. In a specific reference to the Polish-born architect, Lucjan Korngold, from 1957, Zevi described Korngold’s Brazilian work as “emblematic of his being an immigrant41”. The Italian historian would return to this question again in his book on Erich Mendelsohn42 as well as in his writing on Bo Bardi, a lifelong friend who had experienced, as he put it, “the tenacious and afflictive immersion into the enigmatic Brazilian world43”.

  • 44 The concept of “in-between”, meaning a space of dialogue and encounter found its references in Mart (...)
  • 45 Among the academics who promoted eclecticism was architect Christiano Stockler das Neves, a graduat (...)
  • 46 In his book José Mariano Filho, one of the main promoters of the neocolonial movement and future di (...)
  • 47 Lucio Costa, “Depoimento de um arquiteto carioca” (1951), in Alberto Xavier (ed.), Lucio Costa: Sôb (...)
  • 48 See Miguel Antonio Buzzar, João Batista Vilanova Artigas. Elementos para a compreensão de um caminh (...)

20Two images may therefore be presented as metaphors for the generation of modern refugees in Brazil. The first is the image of the wandering Jew, the secular stranger, who, in Latin America and Brazil in particular, was constrained within an “in-between” space44. In the local nationalist atmosphere that emerged from the First World War, this figure was deemed either “internationalist” or “stateless”, as exemplified by the critical fortune of architect Gregori Warchavchik, who was responsible for the foundational 1925 manifesto of modern architecture in Brazil. Indeed, between the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, Warchavchik suffered harsh criticism from both the representatives of academicism45 and the promoters of neo-colonial expression46. In the 1950s, his role as a pioneer was called into questioned by Lucio Costa in favor of Oscar Niemeyer, who was considered a “national genius47”, and later on, by architect and communist militant João Vilanova Artigas. Artigas justified this criticism by qualifying Warchavchik’s first works as formalist, an assumption that fueled the historiography of modern architecture between architectural historians in São Paulo for over a couple of decades48.

  • 49 John Hollander, “Introduction,” in Saul Steinberg, The Passport, New York, Vintage, 1979, no page n (...)
  • 50 See Liane Lefaivre, “Puer ludens,” in Times of Creative Destruction, London, Routledge, 2017.

21The second image can be drawn from one of Saul Steinberg’s passports. If a passport is a public persona, or a mask for a “rootless cosmopolitan49”, Steinberg’s series of document drawings that simulate attested identities might as well be a spatial metaphor for the same “in-between” place50 occupied by the Romanian-Jewish-Italian-educated American artist, who attempted to reconcile the question of difference among his many exiles.

  • 51 On Brazilian immigration politics during the interwar and Second World War period, see Fabio Koifma (...)
  • 52 See Anat Falbel, “Lucjan Korngold: a trajetória de um arquiteto imigrante”, Doctorate Thesis, FAUUS (...)

22Indeed, during the interwar period and Second World War, when most American countries either closed their doors to immigrants or imposed immigration quotas, a passport and a visa represented a somewhat unique possibility of survival51. In Brazil, along with the quotas and the country’s racial whitening policies, Getúlio Vargas’s nationalistic government prohibited the professional practice of foreigners until 1946. By 1933, Federal Decree 23.569 had regulated the practice of engineers, architects, and surveyors, and had also produced the Federal Council of Engineering and Architecture. According to article 1 lines c and d, the decree prevented foreign professionals without diplomas that were revalidated or registered by that date from practicing. The subsequent constitution of 1937 would extend these restrictions to all liberal professions, leaving no room for further interpretation. According to article 150, Brazil’s liberal professions were only open to the Brazilian-born and naturalized professionals who had served in the Brazilian military, except in cases of legitimate practice on the date of the constitution and those of international reciprocity admitted by law. The same article decreed that only Brazilian-born people would be allowed to revalidate professional diplomas issued by foreign educational institutions52.

  • 53 On Giancarlo Palanti, see Aline Coelho Sanches, “A Obra e a trajetória do arquiteto Giancarlo Palan (...)
  • 54 See Anat Falbel, “Lucjan Korngold; a trajetoria de um arquiteto imigrante”, op. cit., 2003.

23The process of naturalization, followed by diploma revalidation and acceptance into the order of architects, could sometimes take more than ten years, as attested to by the accounts of the Italian Giancarlo Palanti (1906-1977) and the German Adolf Franz Heep (1902-1978). Palanti, one of the representatives of Milan’s rationalist group who had made important contributions to the Milan Triennale and had served as the editor of Domus and Casabella, arrived in the country in 1946 but wasn’t able to sign his own projects until after 1954. Meanwhile, Heep, who had graduated from the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris and worked with Le Corbusier and Jean Ginsberg before arriving in Brazil in 1947, just barely received his license in 195853. In this context, the survival of these refugee professionals relied upon already established firms in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro that managed to get around the restrictive laws and who could therefore benefit from the services of this highly qualified group54.

Immigrant professionals as modernizing agents or intermediaries between cultures

  • 55 Jose Lira, Warchavchik Fraturas da Modernidade, São Paulo, COSACNAIFY, 2011.

24At the end of his life, the abovementioned Russian-born architect Warchavchik (whose role in bringing modern architecture to Brazil was only fully recognized in those final years55) suggested affinities with Richard Neutra. Some decades before the boom of studies on cultural transferences, immigration, and the presence of “other nationals” in peripheral Latin American countries’, processes of modernization had acquired major academic status. Warchavchik had sensed that his friendship with Neutra was due to a more profound “ship brotherhood”:

  • 56 Gregori Warchavchik , lecture at the Institute of Architects of Rio de Janeiro, 1971.

“I arrived in Brazil from Italy in 1923. In the same year my friend Richard Neutra arrived in USA from Austria […] Our affinity was due to the fact that we have both discovered America at the same time, bringing to different places the willingness to work with a new spirit56.”

  • 57 Pietro Maria Bardi, História da arte brasileira: pintura, escultura, arquitetura, outras artes, São (...)
  • 58 On Pietro Maria Bardi, see Francesco Tentori, P.M. Bardi, São Paulo, Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi (...)
  • 59 See Pietro Maria Bardi in his introduction to the exhibtion catalog Warchavchik e as origens da arq (...)
  • 60 See Anat Falbel, “The CIAM and the Functional City in Latin America between 1930 and 1946”, Journal (...)

25Warchavchik’s testimony affirms the sense of the immigrant professional’s role as a modernizing agent in the construction of São Paulo’s landscape, or as an intermediary between cultures – as suggested by Pietro Maria Bardi for the first time in the 1970s57. The latter – a major figure in the Italian rationalist scene during the interwar period58 – was also responsible for the first exhibition dedicated to Warchavchik’s architectural work at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, or MASP, in 1971. Bardi described the Russian architect’s trajectory as “another immigrants’ history, as all of them […] always fascinating and concealed by other particular histories59”. His account wisely extended Warchavchik’s experience to that of dozens of other immigrant professionals who disembarked in America during the interwar period, establishing themselves within a complex network of foreign, immigrant, and national elements distributed over the course of at least two continents. Bardi’s own cultural initiatives within the framework of MASP, comprising exhibitions, lectures, courses, and publications, effectively introduced generations of young people to a wide range of art, from photography to design. Against the backdrop of his former position in modern European and Italian circles, Bardi’s achievements can be understood as a crossway between the modern American and European cultural milieu. In the same spirit, Warchavchik had used the strategies of the European vanguard some decades before to expose the “modern spirit” in Brazil. He began in 1925 by publishing a manifesto on modern architecture. Then, between 1927 and 1928, he designed his own modernist house with landscaping done by his wife, Mina Klabin Warchavchik, where he entertained Le Corbusier in 1928. In 1927, he replicated the Weissenhof experience by inaugurating three exhibitions that featured the work of modern artists and intellectuals – the “Casa Modernista” in São Paulo (1930), the “Apartamento Modernista” and the “Casa Modernista” (1931) in Rio de Janeiro. Finally, in 1930, he was invited by Sigfried Giedion to be the first representative of Brazil’s CIAM group, a chair he occupied until the end of war60.

26In this context, the multilingualism implied by these professionals’ cosmopolitanism, and inferred in Simmel’s definition of “foreigner,” might have been decisive in their undertakings, including in their role as agents or intermediaries between cultures. It was not by chance that André Bloc, the editor of L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, invited Maria Laura Osser, an immigrant architect of Polish origin and Henri Bergson’s niece, to be his magazine’s first correspondent in Brazil in 1946, and then Bo Bardi in 1955, who was involved in professional editing projects both in Italy and Brazil.

The concept of Landsmannschaft and the chain of associations and articulations of foreign professionals in the city’s cultural space

  • 61 Louis Wirth, Le Ghetto, Grenoble : Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2006.
  • 62 Ibid., p. 224.
  • 63 Within the groups of origins as characterized above one could mention among the most active immigra (...)
  • 64 See Anat Falbel, Lucjan Korngold; a trajetoria de um arquiteto imigrante, Doctoral thesis, Faculty (...)

27In his essential study The Ghetto (1928)61, American scholar Louis Wirth used the traditional European notion of Landsmannschaft to point out the importance of social structures in the life of new immigrants in America62. This notion implied the grouping of individuals who shared common origins, as well as a language, either on a national or a European level. The same notion might serve as an instrumental conceptual model for analyzing the achievements of the so-called modernizing agents, by mapping the diverse interrelationships among and beyond immigrant circles. These include relationships between architects, engineers, landscape designers, contractors and real estate investors, the photographers who documented a vital shift in the urban horizon, and the engravers, painters, and sculptors whose production completed those modern spaces. In this context, an examination of those professional networks, from their origins within the Landsmannschaft63 to their final manifestations within local society, might lead to an understanding of immigrant presence in urban cultural space in a broader sense. This involves not only the distribution of foreign elements in an urban space, but also the understanding of particular building developments in a city body as the result of commitments forged inside the Landsmannschaft. Such was the case of the real estate development agency, Germaine Burchard, and the group of Polish professional refugees led by Korngold who were fleeing from European fascism64.

28The formulation of the Landsmannschaft helps locate a space from which different discourses may emerge, as well as negotiations between each group of origins and the national or local sphere — as in the case of Warchavchik’s critical fortunes.

Conclusion

  • 65 Jacques Derrida, O monolinguismo do outro ou a Prótese de Origem, Porto, Campo das Letras-Editores, (...)

29The tripartite approach described above allows us to distinguish the cultural encounters inside and outside the space that exists among clusters of immigrants and nationals. These encounters presuppose the existence of a dialogue between languages: the mother tongue of each creator and the local language, the language of the other as expressed by Derrida, which challenges the foreigner’s own estrangement through language65.

  • 66 On the architect Rino Levi, see Renato Anelli, Rino Levi arquitetura e cidade, São Paulo, Romano Gu (...)

30In the face of industrial growth in the decades between 1930 and 1960, immigrant architects confronted the urban problems of a developing country with the theoretical instruments produced by the European vanguard. They called upon specific American experiences and developments, as well as postwar debates inside of CIAM. As demonstrated in the work of architect Rino Levi (1901-1965), for example, who studied in Milan and Rome with Piacentini during the 1920s66, these architects encountered a diversity of projects: cinemas, theaters, hospitals, schools, universities, new typologies for commercial and residential buildings, and industries. They therefore left their imprint on the urban landscape through their writings and teachings from the 1940s to the 1960s.

31Yet if the dialogue between immigrants and nationals on the materiality of city space did have an effect within the cultural and, in particular, historiographical realm, it would take until almost the end of the 1980s to fully recognize their presence in an academic milieu.

  • 67 See Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire croisée and the challenge (...)

32The new wave of studies on the subject of architectural cultural exchange in Brazil was advanced and enriched by Michel Espagne and Michel Werner’s 1980s formulation of “transfert culturel”, later developed as “histoire croisée”, which implied the possibility of interaction on global and local levels simultaneously, illuminating “the synchronic tangle of political, economic, intellectual artistic and human dynamics involved in the cultural exchange67”. The additional theoretical apparatus stimulated the deconstruction of the old historiographical discourse, opening a path for recognizing the role of not only immigrant professionals in the forging of a modern cultural landscape, but also of “other” professionals and “other” architectures. Consequently, it prompted the revelation that a national expression is indeed the assemblage of many other-national strands and sedimentations, or as Sigfried Giedion still framed it in the 1950s:

  • 68 “The New Regionalismo” (1954), in Architecture you and me. The diary of a development, (Cambridge: (...)

“[…] no single country, no single movement, no single personality can be claimed as the originator of contemporary architecture. Trends shuttle to and fro, from one country one movement, one personality, to another, and become woven into a subtle pattern that portrays the emotional expression of the period […]68.”

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Bibliography

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Meditazioni della Vita Offesa, Torino, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1979 [published in German in 1951].

Esra Akcan, Architecture in translation: Germany, Turkey, and the modern house, London, Duke University Press, 2012.

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Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur”, translated by Edward and Marie Said, The Centennial Review, xiii, n° 1, 1969, pp. 1-17.

Étienne Balibar, Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London, Verso, 2002.

Étienne Balibar, “At the Borders of Europe”, in We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 1-10,

Lina Bo Bardi, Sobre Pierre Verger, manuscript, Archives of the Lina Bo Bardi Institute, n/d.

Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis. U.S Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture 1900-1925, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1986.

Pietro Maria Bardi, História da arte brasileira : pintura, escultura, arquitetura, outras artes, São Paulo, Melhoramentos, 1975.

Charlotte Benton, A different world: Émigré Architects in Britain: 1928-1958, London, Riba Heinz Gallery, 1995.

Ricardo Alberto Bielschowsky, Pensamento econômico brasileiro: o ciclo ideológico do desenvolvimentismo 1930-1964, Rio de Janeiro, Contraponto, 1996.

Willy Boesiger, Richard Neutra Buildings and Projects, Zürich, Verlag Girsberger, 1951.

Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish architectural culture in the early republic, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2001.

Yves Bruand, Arquitetura Contemporânea no Brasil, São Paulo, Editora Perspectiva, 1981.

Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, London, Routledge, 2002.

Beatriz Piccolotto S.Bueno, Desenho e Desígnio : o Brasil dos Engenheiros Militares (1500-1822), São Paulo, EDUSP, 2012.

Miguel Antonio Buzzar, João Batista Vilanova Artigas: Elementos para a compreensão de um caminho da arquitetura brasileira, 1938–1967, São Paulo, Senac/Editora UNESP, 2014.

Le Corbusier, Quelles sont les formes d’agrégation d’une nouvelle société machiniste ?, manuscript, Paris, Fondation Le Corbusier, 2-3 December, 1938.

Lucio Costa, “Depoimento de um arquiteto carioca” (1951), in Alberto Xavier (ed.), Lucio Costa : Sôbre Arquitetura, Porto Alegre, Editora UniRitter, 2007.

Lucio Costa, Lucio Costa : Registro de uma vivência, São Paulo, Empresa das Artes, 1995.

Warren Dean, A industrializacão de São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Difel, 1976

Jacques Derrida, O monolinguismo do outro ou a Prótese de Origem, Porto, Campo das Letras-Editores, S.A., 2001.

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Michel Espagne, Michel Werner (eds.), Transferts, Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand, Paris, Editions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1988.

Anat Falbel, “Bruno et Lina : entre discussions et disputes... comme de véritables amis”, in Alessandra Criconia, Elisabeth Essaian (eds.), Lina Bo Bardi enseignements partagés, Paris, Archibooks et Satereau, 2017, pp. 51-65.

Anat Falbel, “Questions on space and intersections in the historiography of modern Brazilian architecture”, ABE Journal, 7, 2015, [online] http://abe.revues.org/2610; DOI: 10.4000/abe.2610, posted 15/09/2015.

Anat Falbel, “Cartas da América: Arquitetura e Modernidade”, in Roberto Segre et al., Arquitetura+arte+cidade: um debate internacional, Rio de Janeiro, Viana & Mosley Editora/PROURB, 2010, pp. 120-135.

Anat Falbel, “Sobre utopia e exílios na América Latina”, Politéia, UESB, 9, 2009, pp. 107-140.

Anat Falbel, “El CIAM y la Ciudad Funcional en América Latina entre 1930 y 1946”, Arqui tectónica, 18-19,2010, pp. 135-146.

Anat Falbel, 2005 “Immigrant Architects in Brazil. A Historiographical Issue”, DOCOMOMO Journal, Paris, v. 34, pp. 58-65.

Anat Falbel, Lucjan Korngold ; a trajetoria de um arquiteto imigrante, Doctoral thesis, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, 2003.

Agnaldo Aricê Caldas Farias, A Arquitetura Eclipsada : Notas sobre história e arquitetura a propósito da obra de Gregori Warchvchik, introdutor da arquitetura moderna no Brasil, Master’s thesis, UNICAMP, Campinas, 1990.

Michel Foucault, “Of other spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias”, in Joan Ockman (ed.), Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology, New York, Rizzoli, 1993, pp. 419-426.

Gilberto de Mello Freyre, Casa-Grande e Senzala, Rio de Janeiro, Editora Jose Olympio, 1978.

Arnoldo Gaite, Wladimiro Acosta, Buenos Aires, Nobuko, 2007.

Sigfried Giedion, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, London, London Gallery Ltd, 1937.

Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997.

Adrian Gorelik, Jorge Francisco Liernur, La Sombra de la Vanguardia : Hannes Meyer en México, 1938-1949, Departamento de Procesos Audiovisuales, Imprenta y Publicaciones de la Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo, Buenos Aires, 1993

Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Raízes do Brasil, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1995.

John Hollander, “Introduction”, in Saul Steinberg, The Passport, New York, Vintage, 1979.

William H. Jordy, The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century, New York, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Kader Konuk, East-West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010.

Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot”, in Culture and Democracy in the United States, New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers, 1998, pp. 59-117.

Mechthild Borries Knopp, Building Paradise: exile architecture in California: Villa Aurora Architecture Symposium 2003, Berlin, Kreis der Fruende/Fördere der Villa Aurora, 2004

Fabio Koifman, Quixote nas trevas. O embaixador Souza Dantas e os refugiados do nazismo, Rio de Janeiro, Record, 2002.

Liane Lefaivre, “Puer ludens”, in Times of Creative destruction, London, Routledge, 2017.

Carlos A. Lemos, “Arquitetura Contemporânea”, in Walter Zanini (ed.), História Geral da Arte no Brasil, São Paulo, Instituto W. Moreira Salles/Fundação Djalma Guimarães, 1983, pp. 831–835.

Seth Lerer, “Introduction”, in Seth Lerer (ed.), Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996.

Zeuler R. M. de A. Lima, Lina Bo Bardi, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013.

Herbert Lindenberger, “On the Reception of Mimesis”, in Seth Lerer (ed.), Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996.

Mauricio Lissovsky, Paulo Sergio Moraes de Sá, Colunas da Educacão. A construção do Ministério da Educação e Saúde, Rio de Janeiro, MEC/IPHAN, Fundação Getúlio Vargas/CPDOC, 1996.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Marcel Mauss, La nation, Paris, PUF, 2013.

Marcel Mauss, “Les civilisations : Éléments et formes”, in Marcel Mauss, Œuvres 2, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969.

Riccardo Mariani, Razionalismo e architettura moderna. Storia di una polemica, Milan, Edizioni Comunità, 1989.

José Mariano Filho, À margem do Problema arquitetônico nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Estúdio de Artes Gráficas C. Mendes Junior, 1943.

Anna-Maria Mazzuccheli, “Richard Neutra”, Casabella, n° 85, January 1935, pp. 18-19.

Avraham Milgram, Os judeus do Vaticano, Rio de Janeiro, Imago, 1994.

Jose Maria Dias Pereira, “Uma breve história do desenvolvimentismo no Brasil”, Cadernos do Desenvolvimento, 6, n° 9, July-Dec. 2011, pp. 121-141.

Bernd Nicolai, Moderne und Exil: deutschsprachige Architekten in der Türkei, 1925-1955, Berlin, Verlag für Bauwesen, 1998.

Bernd Nicolai, Charlotte Benton, Architektur und Exil: Kulturtransfer und architektonische Emigration 1930 bis 1950, Trier, Porta Alba, 2003.

Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile”, in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2001.

Alberto Luiz Schneider, Sílvio Romero Hermeneuta do Brasil, São Paulo, Annablume, 2005.

Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door”, Theory, Culture & Society, 11, n° 5, February 1994), pp. 5-10.

Georg Simmel,“The Stranger”, in Robert E. Park and Ernst W. Burgess (eds.), Introduction to the Science of Sociology, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1921, pp. 322-327.

Georg Simmel, “The Stranger” in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York, The Free Press, 1964, pp. 402-408.

Gisela Barcellos de Souza, Tessituras híbridas ou o duplo regresso : Encontros latino-americanos e traduções culturais do debate sobre o Retorno à cidade, Doctorate thesis, FAUUSP, São Paulo, 2013.

George Steiner, “Extraterritorial”, in Extraterritorial, New York, Atheneum, 1971, pp. 3-11.

Christiano Stockler das Neves, “O Bluff Architectonico”, Architectura e Construções, 2, n° 23, November 1931, pp. 1-6.

Nitza Metzger Szmuk, Véra Pinto Lasry, Vivianne Barsky, Dani Karavan, Dwelling on the Dunes: Tel Aviv, Modern Movement and Bauhaus Ideals, Paris, Éditions de Éclat, Paris, 2004.

Francis Strauven, Aldo van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity, Amsterdam, Architectura & Natura, 1998.

Wilson Suzigan, Indústria brasileira-origem e desenvolvimento, São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1986

Francesco Tentori, P.M. Bardi, São Paulo, Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi/Imprensa Oficial, 2000.

José Francisco Oliveira Viana, Populações meridionais do Brasil : história, organização, psicologia, Rio de Janeiro, Editora Jose Olympio, 1952.

Pierre Verger, Pierre Verger : 50 anos de fotografia 1932–1982, Salvador, Fundação Pierre Verger, 2011.

Anthony Vidler, “Spatial Estrangement in Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer”, New German Critique, n° 54, Special Issue on Siegfried Kracauer, 1991, pp. 31-45.

Michael Werner, Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire croisée and the challenge of Reflexivity”, Religion and History, 45, 2006, pp. 30-50.

Louis Wirth, Le Ghetto, Grenoble, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2006.

Bruno Zevi, “A Fábrica dos Sonhos”, in Cidadela da Liberdade, São Paulo, SESC/Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi, 1999, p. 106.

Bruno Zevi, “Brasile incerto ed eclettico, architetto Lucian Korngold”, L’Architettura Cronache e Storia 17, anno II, March 1957, pp. 806-807.

Bruno Zevi, Erich Mendelsohn : Opera Completa. Architettura e Immagini Architettoniche, Turin, Texto & Immagine, 1997.

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Notes

1 See Marcel Mauss, “Les civilisations. Éléments et formes”, in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres 2, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969, pp. 456-479, [on line] http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/oeuvres_2/oeuvres_2_13/mauss_les_civilisation.pdf

2 See Edward B. Tyler, Primitive Culture Research into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom 1, London, John Murray, 1871, p. 31, as well as Herbert Baldus, “Adolf Bastian”, Revista de Antropologia, n°14, 1966, p. 129.

3 Ibid., p. 8.

4 Ibid., p. 9: “It is above the bedrock of civilizations that the societies stand out, create their idiosyncrasies and individual character.”

5 Marcel Mauss, La nation, Paris, PUF (1e éd. Marcel Fournier and Jean Terrier), 2013, p. 125.

6 George Steiner, “Extraterritorial”, Extraterritorial, New York: Atheneum, 1971, pp. 3-11.

7 Anna-Maria Mazzucchelli, “Richard Neutra,” Casabella, no. 85, January 1935, pp. 18-19.

8 Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York, The Free Press, 1964, pp. 402-408.

9 Sigfried Giedion, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, London, London Gallery Ltd., 1937: “The emotive values latent in modern industry and in realities of modern life in general were lost on the townsman in much the same way as the peasant of previous ages was irresponsive to the emotional appeal of the landscape.[…] Unlike the Berlin artistic circles still fettered by expressionism […], the Hungarians had succeeded in giving a far more precise and coherent expression to their consciousness of our age […] working on parallel lines to L’Esprit Nouveau in which Le Corbusier and Ozenfant had been revealing the interdependence of painting, sculpture and the technique of modern industry.”

10 Le Corbusier, Quelles sont les formes d’agrégation d’une nouvelle société machiniste ? Manuscript, Paris, Fondation Le Corbusier, December 3, 1938, 2.

11 See Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, nation, class: Ambiguous Identities, London, Verso, 2002, p. 96.

12 George Steiner, “Extraterritorial”, op. cit., p. 3.

13 Lucio Costa, “Depoimento de um arquiteto carioca”, 1951, in Alberto Xavier (ed.), Lucio Costa: Sôbre Arquitetura, Porto Alegre, Editora UniRitter, 2007, p. 197.

14 Of note among those nationalist intellectuals are José Francisco, Oliveira Viana, Gilberto de Mello Freyre, and Sergio Buarque de Holanda, whose writings between the 1920s and 1930s were preceded by the analysis of Silvio Romero, one of the first Brazilian thinkers to recover the Portuguese element in the formation of Brazilian nationality. See Alberto Luiz Schneider, Sílvio Romero Hermeneuta do Brasil, São Paulo, Annablume, 2005; José Francisco Oliveira Viana, Populações meridionais do Brasil: história, organização, psicologia, Rio de Janeiro, Editora Jose Olympio, 1952 (first edition, 1920); Gilberto de Mello Freyre, Casa-Grande e Senzala, Rio de Janeiro, Editora Jose Olympio, 1978 (first edition, 1933); and Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Raízes do Brasil, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1995 (first edition 1936).

15 See Anat Falbel, “Questions on space and intersections in the historiography of modern Brazilian architecture”, ABE Journal 7, 2015, [online] http://abe.revues.org/2610; DOI: 10.4000/abe.2610. Lucio Costa’s notion of the figural relationship between Brazilian colonial and modern architecture appeared for the first time in 1948, in “Depoimento.” See Lucio Costa, Lucio Costa. Registro de uma vivência, São Paulo, Empresa das Artes, 1995, pp. 198-200.

16 George Steiner, “Extraterritorial”, op. cit., p. 3.

17 On the role of Lucio Costa in the development of Goodwin’s exhibition concept, see Mauricio Lissovsky and Paulo Sergio Moraes de Sá, Colunas da Educacão. A construção do Ministério da Educação e Saúde, Rio de Janeiro, MEC/IPHAN/Fundação Getúlio Vargas/CPDOC, 1996. See also Zilah Quezado Deckker, Brazil Built: The Architecture of the Modern Movement in Brazil, London/New York, Spon Press, 2001.

18 Until the end of the 1980s, Brazilian intellectuals were very reserved around the issue of cultural transferences. They resented the schema of the history of influences, through which one culture was submitted to the influence of another through the perspective of mediators, translators, and a context in which the receiver culture was mostly considered to be in a lower position, implying a cultural hierarchy. The cultural atmosphere can be exemplified by the debates inside the SAL (Seminarios de Arquitectura Latina Americanos) on an abstract Latin American cultural and architectural identity, deprived of its substantial regional differences. See Gisela Barcellos de Souza, Tessituras híbridas ou o duplo regresso: Encontros latino-americanos e traduções culturais do debate sobre o Retorno à cidade, doctorate thesis, FAUUSP, 2013, pp. 83-87.

19 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Joan Ockman (ed.), Architecture Culture 1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology, New York, Rizzoli, 1993, pp. 419-26.

20 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, xxiv.

21 See Étienne Balibar, “At the Borders of Europe,” in We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 1.

22 George Steiner, “Extraterritorial”, op. cit., p. 11.

23 See Beatriz Piccolotto S. Bueno, Desenho e Desígnio: o Brasil dos Engenheiros Militares (1500-1822), São Paulo, EDUSP, 2012.

24 This expression was developed by scholar and writer Horace M. Kallen, in his 1915 article “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot”, in Culture and Democracy in the United States, New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers, 1998, pp. 59-117.

25 The initiatives of the architectural press are exemplified by the magazines Shelter (1932-1933; 1938-1939) and USA Tomorrow (1953), both edited by Maxwell Levinson. These publications not only championed modern architecture but also included the work and writing of American, European, and émigré architects who had embraced modern ideals and language.

26 See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997. Still acutely sensitive to issues of cultural circulation in 1951, Giedion used a paraphrase of Heinrich Heine’s famous expression to suggest that Richard Neutra took the new conception of space-time with him “as luggage” to United States. See Willy Boesiger, Richard Neutra Buildings and Projects, Zürich, Verlag Girsberger, 1951, p. 9.

27 William H. Jordy, The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century, New York, Oxford University Press, 1986.

28 Reyner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis: U.S Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture 1900–1925, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1986.

29 See Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (eds.), Exiles + Emigrés. The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Harry Abrams Publishers, 1997.

30 Charlotte Benton, A Different World: Émigré Architects in Britain: 1928–1958, London, Riba Heinz Gallery, 1995); Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2001; Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House, London, Duke University Press, 2012; Bernd Nicolai, Moderne und Exil: deutschsprachige Architekten in der Türkei, 1925-1955, Berlin, Verlag für Bauwesen, 1998; Bernd Nicolai and Charlotte Benton, Architektur und Exil: Kulturtransfer und architektonische Emigration 1930 bis 1950, Trier, Porta Alba, 2003; Nitza Metzger-Szmuk, Véra Pinto-Lasry, Vivianne Barsky and Dani Karavan, Dwelling on the Dunes: Tel Aviv, Modern Movement and Bauhaus Ideals, Paris, Éditions de l’Éclat, Paris, 2004; Mechthild Borries-Knopp, Building Paradise: Exile architecture in California: Villa Aurora Architecture Symposium 2003, Berlin, Kreis der Fruende und Fördere der Villa Aurora, 2004; and Arnoldo Gaite, Wladimiro Acosta, Buenos Aires, Nobuko, 2007.

31 The decades of the country’s great industrial development began under President Getúlio Vargas and culminated with President Juscelino Kubitschek’s economic “national development” project, which stimulated and attracted international capital and multinational enterprises. See Wilson Suzigan, Indústria brasileira-origem e desenvolvimento, São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1986; Ricardo Alberto Bielschowsky, Pensamento econômico brasileiro: o ciclo ideológico do desenvolvimentismo 1963-1964, Rio de Janeiro, Contraponto, 1996); Warren Dean, A industrializacão de São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Difel, 1976); and Jose Maria Dias Pereira, “Uma breve história do desenvolvimentismo no Brasil,” Cadernos do Desenvolvimento 6, n°9, July-Dec. 2011, pp. 121-41.

32 See Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, op. cit., pp. 402–08. The article was published in English in 1921. See Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Robert E. Park and Ernst W. Burgess (eds.), Introduction to the Science of Sociology, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1921, pp. 322-27.

33 Ibid., p. 408.

34 Kader Konuk, East-West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010.

35 “Mimesis is quite consciously a book written by a particular person in a particular place during the early 1940s.” See Herbert Lindenberger, “On the reception of Mimesis”, in Seth Lerer (ed.), Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 209. See also page 5 of Lerer’s introduction to the book. In his introduction to Mimesis, Auerbach justified and explained his writing process: “[T]he book was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies . . . it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library” (Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, São Paulo, Perspectiva, 2013, p. 502).

36 Erich Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” in Walter Muschg and E. Staiger (eds.), Weltliteratur: Festgabe für Frtiz Strich zum 70. Geburtstag, Bern, Francke, 1952, pp. 39-50. The article was translated into English by Edward and Marie Said as “Philology and Weltliteratur”, and published by The Centennial Review, xiii, n°1, 1969, pp. 1-17.

37 Ibid., p. 17. Auerbach illustrated his viewpoint using this beautiful description by Hugo of St. Victor: “The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong, but he is perfect to whom the entire world is a foreign place.” See also Edward Said’s appropriation of the same concept through Auerbach’s writing in Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2001, pp. 185–86.

38 See Anat Falbel, “Cartas da América: Arquitetura e Modernidade,” in Roberto Segre et al., Arquitetura+arte+cidade: um debate internacional, Rio de Janeiro, Viana & Mosley Editora/PROURB, 2010, pp. 120-135; “Sobre utopia e exílios na América Latina,” Politéia (UESB), 9, 2009, pp. 107-140; and “El CIAM y la Ciudad Funcional en América Latina entre 1930 y 1946”, Arqui tectónica, 18-19, 2010, pp. 135-146.

39 Sobre Pierre Verger, manuscript, Archives of the Lina Bo Bardi Institute. On the photographer Pierre Verger see Pierre Verger, Pierre Verger 50 anos de fotografia 1932–1982, Salvador, Fundação Pierre Verger, 2011.

40 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Meditazioni della Vita Offesa, Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1979, pp. 34-35. The book written between 1944 and 1949, was first published in 1951.

41 Bruno Zevi, “Brasile incerto ed eclettico, architetto Lucian Korngold”, L’Architettura Cronache e Storia, 17, anno II, March 1957, pp. 806-807.

42 Bruno Zevi, Erich Mendelsohn. Opera Completa: Architettura e Immagini Architettoniche, Turin, Texto & Immagine, 1997.

43 Bruno Zevi, “A Fábrica dos Sonhos,” in Cidadela da Liberdade, São Paulo, SESC/Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi, 1999, p. 106. The article was first published in L’Expresso, May 1987. See Anat Falbel, “Bruno et Lina : entre discussions et disputes...comme de veritables amis”, in Alessandra Criconia and Elisabeth Essaian (eds.), Lina Bo Bardi enseignements partagés, Paris, Archibooks et Sautereau, 2017, pp. 51-65. On Lina Bo Bardi, see also R. Zeuler, M. de A. Lima, Lina Bo Bardi, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013.

44 The concept of “in-between”, meaning a space of dialogue and encounter found its references in Martin Buber’s elaborations under the influence of Simmel’s sensible writings. The concept was recovered as a theoretical tool by Rolf Gutmann and Theo Marz at the CIAM’s Interim Congress at Sigtuna, 1952, and appropriated by Aldo van Eyck. See Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, London, Routledge, 2002, pp. 22-38; Georg Simmel, “Bridge and Door”, Theory, Culture & Society 11, n°5, February, 1994, pp. 5-10; Francis Strauven, Aldo van Eyck: The Shape of Relativity, Amsterdam, Architectura & Natura, 1998, p. 357. See also Anthony Vidler, “Spatial Estrangement in Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer,” New German Critique, n°54, Special Issue on Siegfried Kracauer (1991), pp. 31-45.

45 Among the academics who promoted eclecticism was architect Christiano Stockler das Neves, a graduate from the School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1931, Stockler das Neves, a ferocious critic of Warchavchik and modern architecture, wrote that “Futurism is just utilitarian […]. It is practiced by people less given to art: Russians, Germans, Dutch, and Jews.” See Christiano Stockler das Neves, “O Bluff Architectonico,” in Architectura e Construções, 2, n° 23, November, 1931, pp. 1-6.

46 In his book José Mariano Filho, one of the main promoters of the neocolonial movement and future director of the National School of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro [Escola Nacional de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro], confronted Warchavchik directly: “Foreigners with no fatherland […] cannot understand the delicate sentiment of nationality that surrounds the architectural problem, and still impose on their clients the modern house.” See José Mariano Filho, À margem do Problema arquitetônico nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Estúdio de Artes Gráficas C. Mendes Junior, 1943, p. 32.

47 Lucio Costa, “Depoimento de um arquiteto carioca” (1951), in Alberto Xavier (ed.), Lucio Costa: Sôbre Arquitetura, Porto Alegre, Editora UniRitter, 2007, p. 197.

48 See Miguel Antonio Buzzar, João Batista Vilanova Artigas. Elementos para a compreensão de um caminho da arquitetura brasileira, 1938–1967, Sao Paulo, Senac/Editora UNESP, 2014, p. 283; Agnaldo Aricê Caldas Farias, A Arquitetura Eclipsada. Notas sobre história e arquitetura a propósito da obra de Gregori Warchvchik, introdutor da arquitetura moderna no Brasil, master’s thesis, UNICAMP, Campinas, 1990. Among the historians who carried on Costa and Artigas’s narrative concerning Warchavchik several years before it began to be reviewed by a new generation of architecture historians, I would mention the very naïve description of Warchavchik’s reception in Brazil by the French historian Yves Bruand in his Arquitetura Contemporânea no Brasil, São Paulo, Editora Perspectiva, 1981), pp. 63-71; as well as the unfortunately biased and superficial version presented by Carlos A. Lemos in “Arquitetura Contemporânea,” in Walter Zanini (ed.), História Geral da Arte no Brasil, São Paulo, Instituto W. Moreira Salles/Fundação Djalma Guimarães, 1983), 831–35. The first author to defend Warchvachik’s place within Brazilian historiography would be the critic Geraldo Ferraz, who, with the support of Pietro Maria Bardi, published Warchvchik e a introdução da nova arquitetura no Brasil: 1925–1940, São Paulo, MASP, 1965.

49 John Hollander, “Introduction,” in Saul Steinberg, The Passport, New York, Vintage, 1979, no page number.

50 See Liane Lefaivre, “Puer ludens,” in Times of Creative Destruction, London, Routledge, 2017.

51 On Brazilian immigration politics during the interwar and Second World War period, see Fabio Koifman, Quixote nas trevas. O embaixador Souza Dantas e os refugiados do nazismo, Rio de Janeiro, Record, 2002; Avraham Milgram, Os judeus do Vaticano, Rio de Janeiro, Imago, 1994.

52 See Anat Falbel, “Lucjan Korngold: a trajetória de um arquiteto imigrante”, Doctorate Thesis, FAUUSP, 2003, pp. 106-107.

53 On Giancarlo Palanti, see Aline Coelho Sanches, “A Obra e a trajetória do arquiteto Giancarlo Palanti. Itália e Brasil”, master’s thesis, EESCUSP, São Carlo, 2004; and Ricardo H. Medrano and Celso E. Ohno, “Giancarlo Palanti: Uma trayetoria de rupturas y continuidades,” in Ramón Gutiérrez (ed.), Los Palanti: Su trayetoria in Italia, Argentina, Uruguay y Brasil, Buenos Aires, Embajada Italia/Cedodal, 2015, pp. 153-162. On Adolf Franz Heep, see Paulo Y. Fujioka, “O Edificio Italia e a Arquitetura dos Edifícios de Escritorios em São Paulo”, master’s thesis, FAUUSP, 1996; Marcelo Consiglio Barbosa, “A obra de Adolf Franz Heep no Brasil”, master’s thesis, FAUUSP, 2002; and Joana M de Carvalho e Silva, “O arquiteto e a produção da cidade: a experiência de Jacques Pilon em perspectiva”, doctorate thesis, FAUUSP, 2010.

54 See Anat Falbel, “Lucjan Korngold; a trajetoria de um arquiteto imigrante”, op. cit., 2003.

55 Jose Lira, Warchavchik Fraturas da Modernidade, São Paulo, COSACNAIFY, 2011.

56 Gregori Warchavchik , lecture at the Institute of Architects of Rio de Janeiro, 1971.

57 Pietro Maria Bardi, História da arte brasileira: pintura, escultura, arquitetura, outras artes, São Paulo, Melhoramentos, 1975.

58 On Pietro Maria Bardi, see Francesco Tentori, P.M. Bardi, São Paulo, Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi/Imprensa Oficial, 2000; Riccardo Mariani, Razionalismo e architettura moderna: Storia di una polemica, Milan: Edizioni Comunità, 1989; Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, Um Certo Ponto de Vista- Pietro Maria Bardi- 100 anos, Catalog, São Paulo, Pinacoteca do Estado, 2000.

59 See Pietro Maria Bardi in his introduction to the exhibtion catalog Warchavchik e as origens da arquitetura moderna no Brasil (Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, August 1971). Exhibition sponsored by the immigrant couple Aracy e Samuel Klabin.

60 See Anat Falbel, “The CIAM and the Functional City in Latin America between 1930 and 1946”, Journal ArquiTectónica, n°18-19, Mexico City, Architecture Department of the Universidad Iberoamericana A.C, 2010, pp. 135-145.

61 Louis Wirth, Le Ghetto, Grenoble : Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2006.

62 Ibid., p. 224.

63 Within the groups of origins as characterized above one could mention among the most active immigrant architects of the period the Italian speaking group that included, among others, Rino Levi (1901-1965), Daniele Calabi (1906-1964), Giancarlo Palanti (1906-1977), Lina Bo Bardi (1915-1992), Mario Russo, and even Bernard Rudofsky (1905-1988) despite his Austrian origin; an Eastern European group represented by names such as Lucjan Korngold (1897-1963), who was born and studied in Warsaw, Jorge Zalszupin (1922), who was certified in Bucharest, and Victor Reif (1909-2000), who studied in Germany; or Gregori Warchavchik (1896-1972), born in Odessa, though he studied with Piacentini at the University of Rome; a German group formed by architects such as Alexandre Altberg (1908) who attended Bauhaus; and also those who had been trained in France, such as Jacques Pilon (1905-1973) from the École des Beaux Arts, and Franz Heep (1902-1978), who had studied and worked with Adolf Meyer in Frankfurt before going to Paris, where he collaborated with André Lurçat, Le Corbusier, and Jean Ginsberg.

64 See Anat Falbel, Lucjan Korngold; a trajetoria de um arquiteto imigrante, Doctoral thesis, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo, 2003, pp. 130-139. Germaine Burchard was the heir of nineteenth-century German emigrant Meir Martim Burchard, who had acquired a representative stock of urban land in the city of São Paulo. After marrying the Polish nobleman Count Roman W. S. Sangusko, Germaine’s agency turned into the main employer of Polish refugee professionals in the city of São Paulo, as well a frequent associate of Polish entrepreneurs involved in real estate development.

65 Jacques Derrida, O monolinguismo do outro ou a Prótese de Origem, Porto, Campo das Letras-Editores, S.A., 2001. See also Anat Falbel, Anat Falbel, “Immigrant Architects in Brazil. A Historiographical Issue”, DOCOMOMO Journal, Paris, v. 34, 2005, pp. 58-65.

66 On the architect Rino Levi, see Renato Anelli, Rino Levi arquitetura e cidade, São Paulo, Romano Guerra Editora, 2001.

67 See Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire croisée and the challenge of Reflexivity,” in Religion and History 45 (2006), 30–50; Michel Espagne, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999); and Transferts: Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand, ed. Michel Espagne and Michel Werner, (Paris: Editions Recherche sur les civilizations, 1988).

68 “The New Regionalismo” (1954), in Architecture you and me. The diary of a development, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p.138

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References

Electronic reference

Anat Falbel, “Immigrant architects in Brazil: old and new tools for a historiographical discussion ”Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale urbaine et paysagère [Online], 2 | 2018, Online since 27 March 2020, connection on 28 March 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/craup/479; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/craup.479

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About the author

Anat Falbel

Anat Falbel is a Canadian Center of Architecture Visiting scholar and presently a lecturer at the Post Graduate Urban Studies Program/FAU/Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Her main field of studies is the transference of modern architecture and visual culture between Europe and America having being responsible for the exhibition Exilio e Modernidade : O espaco e o estrangeiro na cidade de Sao Paulo, presented at the Centro de Cultura Judaica, Sao Paulo, (17/11/2011- 12/02/2012). She has published in the journals ABE architecture Beyond Europe, Sociétés & Represéntations, Docomomo Journal, as well as Anales del Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Esteticas Mario J Buschiazzo.
Anat Falbel est chercheuse invitée au Centre canadien d’architecture et actuellement conférencière au sein du Programme d’études supérieures post-universitaires (FAU) à l’Université fédérale de Rio de Janeiro. Son principal domaine d’études est le transfert de l’architecture moderne et de la culture visuelle entre l’Europe et l’Amérique. Elle a organisé l’exposition Exilio e Modernidade : O espaco e o estrangeiro na cidade de Sao Paulo, presentée au Centro de Cultura Judaica, Sao Paulo (17/11/2011- 12/02/2012). Elle a notamment publié dans les revues ABE architecture Beyond Europe, Sociétés et Représentations, Docomomo Journal, ainsi que les Anales del Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Esteticas Mario J Buschiazzo.
anatfalbel@uol.com.br

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