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Brutalism and the People: Architectural Articulations of National Developmentalism in Mid-Twentieth-Century São Paulo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 March 2020

José H. Bortoluci
José H. Bortoluci*
Affiliation:
Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV-SP)
*
jhbortoluci@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article examines the question of how architects in São Paulo during the 1950s and 1960s addressed the political nature of their work, and more specifically the connections between their practice and the lives and politics of the urban poor in the context of a rapidly expanding metropolis of the Global South. More specifically, it assesses how they elaborated strategies to articulate the semiotic and material practices of Brutalism and the political repertoire of national developmentalism, initially in its democratic and later in its authoritarian form. The article argues that these architects deployed two semio-material strategies to operationalize the articulation between that political repertoire and the field of architecture: metaphorical indexicality and the impetus for the industrialization of construction. The image of the urban poor reinforced by that political repertoire was marked by a severe distance from their empirical life experiences, which deeply affected the practices of design and construction that progressive architects advanced.

Keywords

BrutalismBrazilian architectureArtigasSão Paulopragmatismmaterialitypolitics of architecturenational developmentalismpragmatist sociologysociology of architecture
Type
Taste, Territory and “the People”
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 62 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 296 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2020

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