Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

We have already spoken of Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa in connection with Brasília, but a few other equally important architects should be mentioned. Jorge M. Moreira is perhaps the most “European,” known for his delicate sense of proportion and suitability, his refinement of detail, and careful attention to finish (which unfortunately cannot be said of all Brazilian work). He is the architect of the huge University City going up outside Rio, now long delayed for lack of government funds. Those buildings already completed are admirable, and this enormous work will undoubtedly be Moreira’s masterpiece. Affonso Reidy has always been interested in the sociological side of architecture; among his other such designs is the large working-class development of Pedregulho, with its own school and playgrounds, fitted to the contours of a high hill in the suburbs of Rio. He is also the architect of the new Museum of Modern Art. Sérgio Bernardes is perhaps the most imaginative of all; his style changes from building to building; he loves the spectacular, new materials, “tricks,” and, at their best, his buildings — or bridges or pavilions, — have an unmistakable gaiety and bravura.

There are, of course, others; and all the better-known architects have apprentices working with them, young men from Europe, the United States, Japan, even refugees from Communist China. The architects, as a group, seem to be the freest, happiest, and least provincial people in the country; they never lack for commissions, and in spite of all the ups and downs of government and real estate, their art flourishes.

They have disadvantages, of course. Because of the backwardness of Brazil’s steel industry, steel-girder construction is rarely used; even the highest buildings are of reinforced concrete. Until quite recently there was very little standardization of parts, which made construction expensive and slow. Such parts as are standardized, roofing materials, ceramics, etc., are often not quite standardized enough — the quality is uneven, or the colors or finishes are not permanent. This combined with economic problems is the real explanation of what Henry-Russell Hitchcock called Brazil’s “fantastic disregard for upkeep.”

But building in Brazil has many advantages that foreigners are not apt to realize and that may partly account for its fine tradition of solid, beautiful buildings over the centuries. Things are simplified in many ways: there are no earthquakes or hurricanes; there need be no heating, no screens, not much insulation. Many old houses still have no glass in their windows, just shutters to be barred at night. And though we think of the tropics as constantly swarming with insects, it is possible, in most of Brazil, to sit in the evenings the year round with open windows. Seasonal swarms of moths or termites, wandering fire-flies, bother no one, and a burning spiral joss-stick (called SLEEP WELL) keeps away mosquitoes …

The architect is spared our impedimenta of cellars, complicated window-frames and heating systems. He also has a much freer building code and can put up buildings that in stricter countries would be considered dangerous, or not allowed because of zoning laws. On the other hand, endless wild real-estate speculation hampers him, particularly in the cities, where building lots are too expensive for even the wealthy to have “yards,” and town houses are crowded together, cutting off each other’s views and breezes.

Copacabana Beach is the outstanding example of this unrestricted land speculation. A solid frieze of apartment-houses now cuts off every breath of air from the ocean so that only the privileged few along the front can keep cool; the rest of the huge suburb, really a city in itself, swelters between the wall of buildings on one side and the mountains on the other — and this disastrous lack of planning is being repeated all over Brazil.

Along with the architects, special mention should be made of the landscape-gardener and botanist Roberto Burle Marx. Like too many Brazilian specialists, he is better known outside his own country than in it; many people consider him the greatest landscape-gardener since André Le Nôtre. Until Burle Marx, the average public (or large private) garden in the tropics, or sub-tropics, was an inappropriate, sun-yellowed imitation of the Tuileries. He has changed this by introducing, for the first time, the wealth of native plants and trees in all their exotic colors, shapes, and textures; pools, cascades or falling sheets of water; and real rocks, instead of insipid or melodramatic statuary. For oil-rich Caracas, he is making a public garden bigger than Central Park in New York; and he is also working on public projects in Brazil on a smaller scale. One of his innovations is the use of two varieties of grass for lawns, two shades of green in geometric designs. Brazil’s mosaic sidewalks are famous, particularly those of Copacabana Beach, laid out in black and white waves parallel to the ocean waves. This pattern was copied from the mosaics of Lisbon which commemorate the great earthquake of 1755 and its subsequent tidal wave. In one new garden Burle Marx has repeated this same wave pattern in lighter and darker grasses, a beautiful way of using one of the world’s simplest decorative materials.

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Although Brazil did not evolve a distinctive building style (as New England did, for example), its tradition was ancient and honorable and is still alive. One looks out of a sky-scraper apartment-house and sees a family at work building its own house, of mud-and-twigs or mud-and-rubble, with a thatch of straw or grass, according to a model thousands of years old, old long before Brazil was discovered. These huts and houses, little stores and bars, identical all over the country, could not be simpler or poorer, and yet with their white-wash (or pink or blue wash), their heavy shutters and half-doors, their effect is very pleasing. Along the Amazon the houses are more apt to be woven of palm leaves, Indian style, and resemble beautiful basket work. Even the favelas have a melancholy and horrible beauty. Built of old boards, tin cans, bamboo, sacks, any material that comes to hand, they are light and graceful, piled against the hill sides like birds’ nests, painted in faded colors, and festooned with steps, ladders, potted plants, and the inevitable bird-cages.

The big old fazenda houses grew directly from the classical mud-and-twig huts, merely larger-scale, with thicker walls to keep out the heat and the same thatch roofs, later tile. They are not elegant; there are no halls and the rooms open one into another. There are the dark interior bedrooms where the young virgins of the family led their dreary lives. There is also a chapel and frequently a bedroom and sacristy for a resident padre. And always a room for guests, to one side of the porch, perhaps with the lock on the outside, — for although hospitality was obligatory, it was just as well to be cautious. The town houses are the same, only narrower and higher. But the plain facades, stone trims, and long concave sloping roofs (an Oriental effect, derived from Portuguese Macao) are appealing, and also the (again from Macao) ornamented ridge tiles and drain pipes carried out like trumpets above the narrow sidewalks.

By the 16th century Portugal had been de-forested and was a stone building country, and apparently it didn’t occur to early arrivals in Brazil to use wood. The churches were like the houses, and at first carved stone was imported for their facades; later good native stone-cutting emerged. The smallest, earliest churches have paved squares in front for occasions when the congregation was too big to get into the church itself; sometimes these became roofed porches. The Brazilian Jesuit style flowered in the 17th and 18th centuries, and hundreds of beautiful, modest or magnificent, churches were built: Belém, Recife, Fortaleza, Bahia, Rio, São Paulo, and, slightly later, in the last fling of the Jesuit style, the churches of Minas Gerais. There are thirteen in Ouro Prêto alone and all the half-deserted towns of Minas attest to the former wealth and devoutness of the Mineiros.