On Triangles and Houses: Conjectures on Space and the City in Relation to Some of Vilanova Artigas’s Houses in São Paulo

Abstract

In São Paulo during the 1950s, a number of architectural projects for private residences had a significant impact on discussions concerning the relationship between architecture and the city within the context of industrial modernization and developmentism. The work of Vilanova Artigas (1915-1985) not only assembled the greatest number of theories on potential spatial and architectural configuration in this emerging peripheral metropolis but, from that moment onward, also had a permanent impact on Brazilian architecture. This was a period of expansive growth in the occupation and urbanization of Brazilian industrial cities and the problems thrown up by Vilanova Artigas’s architecture determined the endurance of architectural patterns which focused on a wide range of urbanity issues related to buildings which could not be controlled or changed by land occupations of that time. The aim of this work is to analyze the development of architectural and spatial patterns, which we believe, are at the root of the constructive experimentations in homes projected by Vilanova Artigas. Through his works, the architect was able to give shape to the social contradictions of the conservative modernization of South America’s greatest metropolis, São Paulo. The aim of this paper is to propose new topics which can assist the theorization of the difficult relationship between Brazilian architecture and the accelerated development of Brazil’s large cities. Brazil is currently undergoing a period of great urban transformations in the wake of the recent public and private investment in cities. Which local conceptions of architecture will counteract the processes of territorial degradation, a product of the aggression of economic movements driven by private conceptions of the collective space?