ARQUITETURA NOVA 1960

Rodrigo Brotero Lefèvre     (São Paulo 9 febrero 1938 - Guiné-Bissau 9 junio 1984)

Flávio Império   (São Paulo 19 decembre 1935 - São Paulo 7 setembre 1985)

Sérgio Ferro   (25 julio 1938 – en vida)

“In Sao Paulo Arquitetura Nova took the prevailing ideas of liberation as a starting point and looked to apply them in tougher and more compromised environment of architecture, and popular housing in particular. […] They built little, and their existence (like their contemporaries Archigram in the UK and Superstudio in Italy) was based less on architecture than a cultivate notoriety. […] their liberation meant freedom from alienated work, wage slavery and social class. Arquitetura Nova was a group of three – Sérgio Ferro, Flávio Império and Rodrigo Lefévre – all pupils of Vilanova Artigas at FAU-USP in the early 1960’s. They adopted Artigas’s idea of an aesthetics of poverty.[…] Ferro was the group’s theorist. His writing show a more or less complete disregard for professional niceties, starting with 1967 manifesto ‘Arquitetura Nova itself, first published in the journal Teoria e Pratica. […] Ferro later developed and expanded his ideas in his best-known text, O Canteiro e o Desenho, first published in exile in 1979, the major elaboration of the Arquitetura Nova project.[…] In 1964 Ferro was called as a witness in the trial of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU-USP). […] He continued as a member of the Communist Party until 1967, when he left for Acao Libertadora Nacional (ALN), a group advocating armed resistance. In 1968 both Ferro and Lefévre staged bomb attacks and bank robberies in Sao Paulo. Imprisoned in 1970, Ferro was sacked by FAU-USP […] On his release in 1971, he made his way to France, where he took up a teaching position at the University of Grenoble. […]Lefévre also spent a year in prison 1970-71. […] Império meanwhile abandoned architecture in 1968, and turned to theatre and painting, resigning from his teaching position at FAU-USP in 1977 after being denied space for experimental theatre by the authorities.”1

1. Richard J. Williams , Brazil, Reaktion Books Ltd London 2009