Heritage Agencies and the Conservation of Brazilian Modern Masterpieces: A Partial Report

Carlos Eduardo Dias Comas

doi:10.1186/bf03545692

Abstract

Heritage agencies have been protecting modern architecture in Brazil since 1948, starting with Oscar Niemeyer’s Pampulha Chapel. So far 75 modern works have been listed mostly because of their artistic value. Listing prevents demolition. Unfortunately, it does not ensure proper conservation, and many interventions have disfigured works of architecture listed as modern masterpieces. Among those tolerated by the Brazilian heritage agencies, an early one is the roofing of the balconies of Oscar Niemeyer’s Ouro Preto Grand Hotel. Among those approved were the construction of theatres diverging from those designed but unexecuted at the time of the listing, and renovations associated with the introduction or updating of air conditioning systems. The former included one by Niemeyer himself, at his Ibirapuera Park complex, and another at Affonso Eduardo Reidy’s Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro. The latter included the Pampulha Dance Hall, two Ibirapuera Park Pavilions, and the Planalto Palace. The paper analyses these retrofits along with the restoration project of Reidy’s Pedregulho Housing Estate, and discusses the connections of the heritage agencies’ stands regarding these interventions with scientism and the traditions of the conservation field. It suggests a bias of the agencies toward affirmation of historical values and celebration of picturesque disorder, and defends the need for their reorientation towards affirmation of the modern compositional logic.

Highlights

Brazil Builds: New and Old 1652–1942 (Goodwin and Kidder-Smith 1942) is the title of the 1943 exhibition at MoMA that publicised the emergence of a Brazilian school of modern architecture led by Lucio Costa (1902– 1998) and based on Rio de Janeiro (Comas 2002)
Mello Franco de Andrade was a lawyer by training, but most of his successors have been architects, remarkable exceptions being graphic designer Aluisio Magalhães (1927–1982), president from 1979 to 1982, who emphasised the recognition of cultural goods by their social value instead of their esthetic values or erudite characteristics, and historian Katia Bogéa, who was inaugurated in 2016, the first president to rise from the rank and file (Schlee 2017a, 2017b)
With headquarters in Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro, the agency comprises twenty-seven state-based branches, called Super-intendências, and twenty-seven city-based offices around the country, called Escritórios Técnicos, plus four special units, one in Brasilia (Centro Nacional de Arqueologia, dealing with the conservation of archeological remains), and three in Rio de Janeiro (Sítio Burle Marx, where the famed landscape architect lived and worked, a kind of botanical garden and plant nursery; Paço Imperial, the former viceregal and imperial administrative center turned into an exhibition gallery; a museum for folklore and popular culture, Centro Nacional do Folclore e Cultura Popular)

Summary

Listing Modern Masterpieces

The national agency listed for the first time a modern building in 1947, Niemeyer’s Chapel of St. Two preventive listings in the sixties involved incomplete works, Niemeyer’s Brasilia Cathedral and the Flamengo Park, with gardens by Burle Marx, and buildings by Reidy, including the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, one of the links connecting the Carioca School, of purist connotations, to the later Paulista School, of brutalist connotations (Zein 2005; Comas 2015, 40–67). Owners and their architects can propose whatever alteration they might wish; they cannot overrule the heritage agencies’ verdicts on their proposals These verdicts can be problematic: in the last decades, heritage agencies have tolerated or approved interventions that disfigured works of architecture recognised as modern masterpieces in their listings. They were mischaracterised, robbed of a distinctive trait, devalued. Their artistic integrity—once called beauty—was impaired at the level of both multisensory perception (which includes vision and touch, image and substance, and cannot be reduced to either element of those pairs) and intellectual stimulation (substance of another sort)

Exemplary Case Studies

Learning from Experience