Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Written in 1976/7 by Brazilian architect and professor Rodrigo Brotero Lefèvre the text “Notes from a Study on the Objectives of Teaching Architecture and Means to Achieve them in the Design Process” discusses some parameters and paths for helping to bridge the gap between teaching and practice, between design activities and construction activities, between the individuality of creation and the necessity of learning to creatively work within a team. This re-reading of that fundamental text seeks to understand some of the circumstances of the author and his time and some of the most relevant reflections the text proposes, which include the dealing with the difficulties, and obstacles to overcome, and the advantages and interests in promoting and activating the possibility of the architectural design process to be taken as both a self-understanding individual process and a collective team process.

It approaches the relation in Sérgio Ferro's first production side by side with Flávio Império and Rodrigo Lefèvre and with the São Paulo modern architecture scene in terms of its ideology and language scope before the 1964 military coup and the radical criticism that they would later elaborate. Witch it affiliated to the Brazilian Marxist intellectual interpretive approach, which was related to the duality between archaic and modern. It enlightens the commitment of their ideas to users and architects with a view for a solution for the housing construction with social concern. It is about bourgeois residences designed by Ferro, characterized by construction sites served as heterogeneous manufacturing laboratories - Boris Fausto’s house, in São Paulo - and organic manufacture - Bernardo Isller’s house, in Cotia – this one in a dome design.

John Ruskin (1819–1900) assembled an impressive collection of shells over the course of his life.  During his final years he displayed some of the fruits of his labours at Brantwood, his home overlooking Coniston Water in the northwest of England.  Ruskin valued these shells for their beauty.  He put them in a glass cabinet alongside geological specimens, historical artefacts and works of art.  But Ruskin’s interest in his shell collection was not just superficial.  In this essay, I ponder the deeper meaning Ruskin discovered in the shells he collected, both marine and terrestrial, and I suggest how his shell studies reflect principles developed in his writings on art and architecture, as well as his attitude towards the natural sciences.  In order to stake an approach to these issues, I begin this essay by considering the remarks of other writers who have commented on the beauty and curiosity of shells.  I then proceed to contrast these aesthetic appreciations with Ruskin’s more ethically informed contemplations.

Architecture has always been a tool for spatial control. The civilizing mission imbedded in our profession comes with a layer of coloniality that we need to first be aware of and then subvert. Arturo Escobar’s discussion of colonization as something inherent to modernization explains that our civilization and our civilizing processes are directly responsible for the social evils that circle us today. The question that comes regards the role of architecture as both a tool and a result of such modernization/colonization and the possible antidotes that I believe lies in the political realm.

The first studies examined the role of Grupo Arquitetura Nova in contemporary Brazilian architecture that was done almost 20 years ago. (Koury, 1999 [2003], Arantes, 2000 [2002]). The arq.urb journal, from the Graduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism at São Judas University, features an edition that seeks to broaden the debate on the multifaceted work of architects Flávio Império Rodrigo Lefèvre and Sérgio Ferro. These early studies admitted that the three architects' work in the 1960s was a co-production between them, as Sérgio Ferro repeatedly stated in his interviews. [...]

Rodrigo Lefèvre’s Master’s dissertation, Project for a Work Encampment: A Utopia, offers a production model for migrant housing along the periphery of São Paulo based upon mutually enriching collaborations between migrants constructing their dwellings and mentoring technicians. This partnership, an evolution of previous theories on eliminating hierarchical relationships between architects and laborers at building sites, recalls the foundational principles underpinning Lefèvre’s earlier collaborations with Sérgio Ferro and Flávio Império under the collective Arquitetura Nova. In his proposed work encampment, these interactions become a mechanism to rebalance cultural transmission away from delegitimizing migrant heritage and towards an equitable and heterogenous urban demography. Though suggested as a utopia, this framework also may be understood as a heterotopia—an alternate yet plausibly concurrent paradigm for the construction of migrant housing. As a heterotopia, Lefèvre’s proposal, similar to other texts published by the members of Arquitetura Nova, is simultaneously a critique of prevailing conditions as well as an aspirational solution. And, as both criticism and expectation, Lefèvre’s project illustrates the important contributions made by migrants in the development of society and invites us to evaluate and rediscover our empathy towards them.

As cultural artefacts, architectural exhibitions have fostered dominant political imaginaries. In the mid-20th Century, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and its Department of Architecture and Design presented modern architecture as a symbol of liberty and democracy under the egis of the United States. Modern architecture in Latin America played an important role in this worldview. Starting with the exhibition Brazil Builds, MoMA deployed a strong curatorial agenda to stage this message and used its exhibitions as cultural weapons to manage dictatorships in the region and to explain to U.S. audiences how “democracy” worked in Latin America.

The separation of desenho and canteiro, identified by Arquitetura Nova as the cleavage of the conflict between capital and labour, operates today in an augmented reality. The role of the architect is one of an illusionist who reduces the complexity of architectural labour to uniqueness, a process through which capital is reified and endlessly reproduced in the pervasive circulation of images. Against this condition Arquitetura Nova's work offers a method. As a group they exercised a radically collective form of practice that opposed authorship placing the workers’ knowledge at the centre of the design and building process. More importantly they turned the gap between the real subject and one imagined in their theory and practice into the substance of their political project. The archetype of the vault-house, in its very material form, reclaims and exposes architecture as a collectively produced form of common knowledge: architecture as praxis, rational critical action.

This article traces the emergence and trajectory of a new UK / Brazil 3.5 year collaborative project Translating Ferro / Transforming Knowledges of Architecture, Design and Labour for the New Field of Production Studies (TF/TK) launching 01 October 2020. It outlines the growing interest in Sérgio Ferro’s work on architecture and labour in the English-speaking context, and sets out how it will provide the basis for a new and much-needed cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural field of Production Studies. The key objective of this new field is to challenge architecture’s blindness to production, and understand and interrogate design and construction across cultural contexts.

This text seeks to approach Brazilian realism in the 60’s by looking at the thought and work of Sérgio Ferro and Flávio Império. After a general analysis of realism in visual arts, we examine how the intellectual orientation of Flávio Império’s set design practice at Arena Theatre company and the critical debate on architecture led by Sérgio Ferro intertwine. It is possible to notice a convergence in their practice, although set in different fields, when we look at their critique of a realism that was not able to acknowledge Brazilian social reality