In an article written in 1951 entitled “Depoimento de um arquiteto carioca” [Testimony of an Architect from Rio de Janeiro], Lúcio Costa describes Le Corbusier’s visit to Brazil in 1929, his plan for the city’s urban layout, and what he classified as a conflicting, crazy, un-Brazilian reaction. Costa speaks highly of the changes that took place over the course of just two decades that contributed to the renovation of the local cityscape and upgraded the quality of much of Brazilian architecture to international levels; he believes that it was all the result of a string of disconnected, contradictory events that are neither particularly relevant nor worth considering. Costa mentions the abolition of slavery in Brazil (1888) and the Industrial Revolution that replaced creative craftsmen with workers who had no artistic experience. He describes the transition in styles in Rio de Janeiro in the early twentieth century and justifies the tendency to import constructive elements from Europe. As distinct from the “do-it-all” engineer, the architectural profession is remarkable for the interest that its work attracts and for its essentially artistic nature. Costa, however, believes that the technical contribution involved in the development of reinforced concrete should mainly be credited to the demands made by architectural works. He describes the modernist style of the earliest architectural projects in Brazil, referring in particular to the purists who worked with Le Corbusier (a group that was assembled between 1931 and 1935) and who were responsible for the paradigmatic building created for the Ministério da Educação e Saúde, which Costa thinks was a spontaneous effort on the part of the group to implement the Swiss Maestro’s ideas. Costa compares Oscar Niemeyer to Aleijadinho, a local genius who contributes to the unique quality of Brazilian architecture. He warns against using modernist approaches that are not supported by appropriate artistic formulations; in his opinion, such cases are due to weaknesses in an educational system that is not ready to address the fundamental aspects of modern expression. He also insists that the fine arts and architecture should be considered one and the same thing.

This article was written in 1951 by the architect and urban planner Lúcio Costa (1902–98) in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the newspaper Correio da Manhã, and was published in the commmorative issue. It was subsequently published again, in 1962, in the anthology Lúcio Costa: sobre arquitetura, organized by Alberto Xavier in Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul), under the title mentioned above, “Depoimento de um arquiteto carioca.”

The Brazilian architect’s article helps enormously to understand the transformations undergone by Brazilian architecture in the early twentieth century, its embrace of modern architecture, and the ideas introduced by the Swiss architect, designer, and urban planner Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887–1965). The article discusses the debate prompted by a functionalist faction that was critical of Oscar Niemeyer’s inventive freedom, a controversy that simmered throughout that decade. 

Drawing on Costa’s article, the art critic Mário Pedrosa (1900–81) gave a lecture in Paris on the subject of “L’architecture moderne au Brésil,” that was published shortly thereafter in the magazine Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Paris, December 1953. It was not published in Brazil until 1981, when it appeared in Aracy Amaral’s translation in the book Dos murais de Portinari aos espaços de Brasília.