The Many Faces of a Para-Fascist Culture: Architecture, Politics and Power in Vargas’ Regime (1930–1945)

Francisco Sales Trajano Filho

doi:10.1163/22116257-00702003

Abstract

This article considers key developments in Brazilian architecture which occurred under the ambiguous and contradictory Vargas’ regime (1930–1945), when it was exposed to both internal and external political contingencies, including the crisis of liberalism, which affected its ability to expand and consolidate itself. This situation was not unique to Brazil, since many interwar dictatorships, including the Soviet and fascist regimes, shared the same characteristics. In the Brazilian twentieth century, both during democratic and dictatorial times, whether dominated by left-wing or right-wing ideologies, architecture and the State constantly sought to take advantage of the relationship between them. The demands, projects and interests of both spheres set up an intricate web of relationships that shaped national identity and embodied its material representation. Investigating the place of architecture within a broader context, that of the Brazilian nation-building process, the article establishes that the architectural representation of the Brazilian state was never straight forward, combining a set of breakthroughs and setbacks, and always leaving the quest for a uniform and coherent aesthetic language unsolved. This anomalous situation has led scholarship to disregard the complex relationship between the State and architecture, between ideology and aesthetics and, simultaneously, to ignore the profound contradictions within Vargas’s government, both in the political and architectural field, and to underestimate the role played by the modernism of European fascism in acting as one of the poles of attraction acting on how building projects were conceived.

Highlights

This anomalous situation has led scholarship to disregard the complex relationship between the State and architecture, between ideology and aesthetics and, simultaneously, to ignore the profound contradictions within Vargas’s government, both in the political and architectural field, and to underestimate the role played by the modernism of European fascism in acting as one of the poles of attraction acting on how building projects were conceived
All the architectural solutions are found and discussed and there was enormous energy devoted to the art of building.’[54]. One immediate result of the Vargas regime was that architects were called upon to provide the state bureaucracy with adequate working conditions, given the deeply engrained practice that had been passed on from the Empire to the Old Republic of using rented and improvised buildings to house public administration offices
Rather than in spite of, Vargas’ obvious lack of interest in imposing a uniform regime aesthetic, it is clear that architecture faithfully reflects three important features of the Estado Novo of interest to comparative fascist studies

Summary

Introduction

He openly expressed sympathy for the Führer’s work and wrote apologias for Europe’s totalitarian regimes in his writings, writing, for instance: ‘whoever wants to understand the process by which political decisions are arrived at, should study the German masses, spell-bound by the charismatic performances of the Führer, and whose faces, marked by traces of tension, anxiety and anguish, betray a state of fascination and hypnosis.’[20] Campos was one of the main representatives of the authoritarian nationalist thinking which was central to the discourse of support expressed for Vargas’ Estado Novo.[21] Along with intellectuals such as Oliveira Viana and Azevedo Amaral, he formed the hard core of what Bolivar Lamounier called the state ideology, according to which the State, not civil society, is the true agent of national construction.

Results

Conclusion