CASA DINO ZAMATARO 1971

CASA JUAREZ BRANDAO 1968

 

 

“For Arquitetura Nova, Brasília represented for them everything that had to be overturned: it was a place that elevated design at expenses of building, with the result that its realization involved profoundly exploitative processes. At the National Congress, Ferro described the building in terms of endemic cruelty. […] Worse, the work was physically dangerous. […]  Precisely how Arquitetura Nova planned to realized their critique is less clear. […] The built legacy consists of a series of individual villas, built on relatively small budgets mostly for friends, all in Sao Paulo. […] By the early 1970’s it was all over. The most interesting of these houses are those that employ a simple vault to define the house, a device used for both pragmatic and rethorical reasons. The group built in a ‘poor’ way as a way both reducing costs (their clients were mostly their friends) and of finding models of building that would be appropriate for Brazil’s poor. […]The vaults of Arquitetura Nova recalled the simplest forms of dwelling, and were meant to look as such. Ferro elaborated further: this was a technology that was simple, cheap and easily mass-produced.[…] Recalling the most primitive forms of housing, these used the minimum materials and were simple to build. In practice, the vault appeared in houses like Lefevre’s Casa Dino Zamataro. In the perspective drawing of it, and the photographs of it realized, it appears as a single curved volume, rising to two storeys in height.[…] the simplicity of the exterior form largely continues inside: this is a big, informal, open-plan space […] it could be said, providing a stage in which new forms of social behaviour might take place.[…] The vault houses abolish internal divisions, and suggest that the social divisions they represent might also disappear” 1

“As they found with the last of their built projects together, the Casa Juarez Brandao Lopes, the deployment of unlikely forms and materials did not of itself satisfy their radical political aims. To be radical involved direct actions against specific target –and it is no surprise to find that explorations of two members of the group, Ferro y Lefévre, led them away from tha practiceof architecture and towards art.[…]” 1.

 

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