In this article, the architect and visual artist Sérgio Ferro criticizes the state of Brazilian architecture, especially in São Paulo, during the period in the 1960s, known as post-Brasilia. He takes a radical and critical approach by exposing the flaws and shortcomings in the production process and in the formal and ethical values advocated by the famous maestros of modern Brazilian architecture, Oscar Niemeyer and Francisco Vilanova Artigas. Ferro is referring to the distortion of the axiology of a “sober and direct” aesthetic that is still concerned with “large scale collective needs.” While the country suffers under a military dictatorship and cultural censorship, Ferro protests the segues and “mannerisms” affected by new architects, which separate “structure and density” from content and reality, even resorting to exaggeration in their language; he reveals his “discomfort” faced with a country that is falling apart. Ferro discusses the dead-end situation in which Brazilian architects find themselves, and quotes Marx in his vehement criticism of the production system of which architecture is a part—during both the design and the execution phases—while pointing to the alienation in architectural work and the inability of “new” generations to establish critical positions. At that time, architecture contributed “truths in and of themselves” by bringing up a contradiction whose “crystalized technique” is oblivious to social reality. Ferro also criticizes the “fad for seeing architecture as a system of signs,” warning his readers about this semiotic hazard that separates “men from things,” depriving them of hands-on experience.  

Architect and visual artist Sérgio Ferro (b. 1938) graduated while Brasilia was under construction (1956–61); he worked for the architect Francisco Vilanova Artigas (in São Paulo), who was also his teacher, as was Flávio Motta. Ferro, Rodrigo Lefèvre (another architect), and the set designer Flávio Império started the group Nova Arquitetura. Ferro was a fierce critic of the profession, of its medium (drawing), and of what it produced. While still a student, he proposed discussing class struggle and the desirability of creating an alliance between construction workers and drawing specialists that could generate a different aesthetic based on “a poetics of the economy” that would address truly national problems. Both Ferro and Lefèvre had to get out of Brazil during the military dictatorship (1964–85); Ferro became a professor of architecture at the Université de Grenoble (France) in 1972; Lefèvre met a tragic death on a construction site in Guinea-Bissau in the mid-1980s.

In this article, Ferro is still criticizing the semiotic theory he learned in Italy in 1965 from Umberto Eco. This is undoubtedly one of Ferro’s most caustic articles, which became the basis for the discussion he initiated in 1976 in “O Canteiro e o desenho” [The Jobsite and the Drawing]. The magazine Teoria e Prática was published over a period of two years (1967–68) and was then shut down by the military dictatorship on the grounds that it was discussing subjects related to Brazilian international culture and social sciences.   

[As complementary reading, see the following articles by the author in the ICAA digital archive: “A forma da arquitetura e o desenho da mercadoria” (doc. no. 1111152); “Os limites da denúncia” (doc. no. 771159); “Pintura nova” (doc. no. 1090696); and “Vale tudo” (doc. no. 1090648)].