Incomplete utopias: embedded inequalities in Brazilian modern architecture

Extract

Modern architecture has always had a complex relationship with its own utopian roots. From Marinetti proclaiming that war is the most beautiful choreography in 1918 to Le Corbusier's famous concluding sentence from 1923, ‘architecture can avoid revolution’, the attempt to build a better world through architecture has constantly been tainted by skewed definitions of what exactly this new world should be. The case of Brazil is not much different. The architecture of the 1930s and '40s was much more successful in promoting a national image of modernisation than in addressing modernisation as such. Traditional gender roles abide in modern housing design, which sadly has also absorbed class (and racial) inequalities in its spatial organisation. This paper departs from the discussion of the origins of modern architecture in Brazil to discuss the extent to which certain inequalities were so thoroughly embedded in Brazilian society that they were even incorporated into a utopian discourse about modernity - a discourse that is still very much present.