The text reads as follows: “These artists do not possess the appropriate merit-based credentials and ‘they are accepted here’ under the auspices of a pernicious kind of protectionism, and as a result of actions fueled by rumors or scandals; those, that is, whose own eccentricity leads them to take the criminal step of unloading their grotesque nonsense here, on us.”
According to the IPA, “Futurist” architects were exponents of an “unattractive” trend. The text continues: “A project that is overwhelmingly utilitarian cannot be considered a ‘work of art’; it is merely something that has been produced by industry or engineering. Such a project is, in other words, a product of constructive art, which is not exactly architecture.” The IPA does not approve of using terms (drawn from Le Corbusier’s writings) such as “machine for living” or “mechanical houses” to describe modern works.
The person who was most aggressively targeted as the leader of the “Futurist” movement was naturally, Lucio Costa, who, at that time, was the director of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (ENBA) in Rio de Janeiro, where he developed an innovative study plan during the modernization period. The protest letter came from São Paulo, where radical faculty members at the IPA included architects and artists such as: Alexander Buddeus, Gregori Warchavchik, Celso Antonio, Leo Putz, Felipe dos Santos Reis, Mello e Souza, and Edson Passos.
