Lucio Costa's Summary

In 2002, Lucio Costa would have been 100 years old. The Mais! supplement from the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo published a special issue as a tribute to the architect and urban planner on January 24, including this article by Otília Arantes. In “Lucio Costa as a Summary”, Otília resumes and further develops the main argument of another text, also published in Folha on April 12, 1996, which reviewed the book Registro de uma vivência and was included, with a few changes, in The Meaning of Formation (Sentido da Formação, Paz e Terra,1997). The main argument was that Costa retells the history of Brazilian architecture from the point of view of an “already-formed” and “successful” architecture, in the sense that its cycle was completed in a short period of time, from the Ministry of Education to the Pampulha Modern Ensemble or the Brazilian Pavilion in New York, culminating in Brasília. From independent manifestations to the system, less than two decades went by—an impressive apparatus indeed, especially for the technical expertise it demonstrated. A “miracle” that would baffle foreign critics. Formation as part of the Brazilian cultural system, in the sense used by Antonio Candido in Formação da Literatura Brasileira (The Formation of Brazilian Literature)—and by Caio Prado and Celso Furtado, about the economic formation). It is, therefore, about national formation, against the ever-present background of colonial heritage that should be overcome. At the same time, as a dependent country, the external inflow remains dominant, insomuch that its update also reveals the inconsistency of its origin. A historical mismatch that was translated into Brazilian architecture as a certain formalism, whose aesthetic bias paradoxically revealed the truth about Modern Architecture in its matrix—its “false bottom”, so to speak. As it turns out, Lucio Costa, historian and leading figure in this story, might be who bests summarizes the contradictions and illusions of the Modern Project. At the same time, his career—and how he sees it—is surely the key to the author’s interpretation of the Modern Movement.

Keywords: Lucio Costa, Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, National School of Fine Arts, Modern Architecture, Brasília, History of Architecture, Formation, Antonio Candido.