An ongoing conversation recorded in the form of exchanged emails (the contemporary equivalent of a letter exchange), Ilze Wolff and Paulo Tavares discuss fascist networks of solidarity between Brazil and Apartheid South Africa through the publication Brazil Build, a book focused on colonial and modern architecture.

Ola Paulo

Was great to chat last week - I just came back from an awesome seaside holiday along the south coast of the cape at a place called Kassiesbaai. It's very romantic and makes me think of what a Greek seaside village could be like (not that I have been). BUT,  I quickly found out about its harsh history of forced removal due to a SA apartheid weapons testing site nearby and that some of the fisher families that lived in this place called Skipkop were moved to where we were staying. Everywhere you go the insanity of state enforced terror and spatial violence follows you. I was thinking a lot about that when walking along the coast with Heinrich and the boys, spotting whales and finding the famous Arniston Cave.

Brazil was on my mind too - I packed the Midlin and Goodwin book in to consult as a reference for our  conversation. I felt I was not so fully prepared for our brief chat on Wednesday - I know the story, the facts just eluded me for a moment.

So….I opened the Brazil Builds book and Heinrich, sitting next to me, reminded me that we actually inherited our tattered copies from Wynand Smit. He was a prominent architect, his daughter Eleanor (also an architect) contacted us about 12 years ago about her late father’s library and she asked whether we could be interested in some of the books. [Brazil Builds]  was part of that collection. Smit was one of the first lecturers of the Pretoria school and a huge fan of Brazilian modernism. He was responsible for the design of the facade of the Jan Smuts Airport (now OR Tambo) I attach an image of the now mostly demolished or buried-under-bland-corporate-airport-identity facade. The  ironies of these intersections are truly fascinating.

I also attach some articles that basically say nothing more than that SA architects from the newly opened 1948 Pretoria School of architecture ….drumroll… copied Niemeyer and therefore Brazil has influenced SA modernism.

I am not really interested in these stylistic concerns but they make for a good basis for a discussion on a transported idea of modernity, colonial settlers’ occupation and an anxiety of ‘belonging’ in the 'new country’  as second generation and an emerging settler identity. Very similar to Brazil…

Also these were all architectures, concerns and stylistic aspirations crafted by straight / straight acting white men. University of Pretoria School of Architecture has not really concerned itself with their origin story (not that I am proposing that we begin to do that for them) but I am very interested in how their aspiration began to imagine (through its negation) into the making of Black space.

Also - I am actually just eager to learn more about Brazil from the point of view of the southernmost part of SA and how the levels of control in Pretoria percolated the nationalist spatial imagination of post-war SA.

PS - This 31 March 1944 Architectural Review article ‘The Brazillian Style’ is behind a paywall. Apparently there's a reference to Colonial buildings in Cape Town not being entirely Dutch. This point is made in order to explain colonial buildings in Brazil not being entirely Portuguese. Here we see a kind of projection of ‘style’, being mixed with identity, mixed with a sense of settler belonging or maybe unbelonging. I may have to pay to get the full story…

Until later,

Ilze

https://www.architectural-review.com/archive/the-brazilian-style?utm_source=WordPress&utm_medium=Recommendation&utm_campaign=Recommended_Articles

Airport facade - https://atom.drisa.co.za/collections/N_Collection_lo-res/N83111.jpg

Ola Ilze,

How are things?

Here in Brazil, things have intensified. The political climate has become increasingly tense as the presidential elections approach. Episodes of political violence are on the rise. It’s a decisive moment for us because we cannot let Bolsonaro’s fascist government get another round.

I realize now that it took me nearly a month to reply to your message. My apologies.

I was immersed in some writing/research that took all my energy—much of it related to our conversations, sending you some notes produced during this time—and I wanted to take the proper time to dive into the material you sent.

Reading your letter again, after dwelling in the Brazil Builds archives during this month, and thinking about our previous exchanges, I wonder how your experience-description of Kassiesbaai as a conflictual landscape between idyllic and terror relates to what we are looking at in this project on “colonial-modernism” across the Atlantic…

…the project of settler modernism…

In a way, the “idyllic” – progressive, utopian? – architecture of “tropical modernism” that traveled across the Atlantic between Brazil and South Africa through Brazil Builds is also an ideological veil to the necropolitical terror of settler-racial colonialism operating in both Brazil (BR) and South Africa (SA) at that time.

I came to be interested in Brazil Builds because it expressed the consolidation and acclaim of Lucio Costa’s architectural synthesis between colonial and modern architecture. Lucio Costa’s theory was that the singular language of the “Brazilian Style” in modernism came from its genetic association with the architecture of colonialism, what he called “traditional Brazilian architecture” or “Luso-Brazilian architecture”.(insert footnote or link to reference online) These ideas have deeply racial connotations, associating “architectural traditions” with colonialism and the white West, and representing the ideals of  "racial democracy" developed by sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s.

I am sharing with you some notes on this based on recent writings to give you some context on the ideological frames of the “Brazilian Style” (as racial democracy) that was “exported” to South Africa, and how Brazil Builds operates within this political-ideological construction.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lr97hogg0ub1emw/PT%20notes%20on%20BR%20modernism.pdf?dl=0

I also made a copy of the Brazil BuildsBB chapter from Zilah’s book Brazil Built, my main reference on the history of Brazil Builds.

(also in dropbox, eventually I can get someone to scan the whole book for you…)

I studied the articles you sent, all this is new to me. So I am impressed. It's remarkable to note how an entire school in SA was shaped by the influence of ideas coming from Brazilian modernism and Brazil Builds. The “Pretoria School” is somehow the equivalent to the “Carioca School” in Rio de Janeiro (RJ).

I was particularly taken by the expression of Nikolaus Pevsner's association of Joburg’s modernism to a “little Brazil,” Pretoria perhaps being the best example of this “little Brazil”, as the other text states.

I was also interested in learning  more about how this translation from BB to SA was seen and shaped as “African identity”, as one article explores in relation to Eaton’s Netherlands Bank, including the appropriation of indigenous motives and ornamentation.

In Brazil, the “Brazilian Style” came to symbolize the nationalist (proto-fascist) state of Getúlio Vargas, and modernism's ideological association between the colonial and the modern served to sustain Vargas's neocolonial politics of “conquering the West”. It was a process of fabricating a settler-colonial identity through a modern lens,  although Brazil would never recognize itself as a settler-colonial society.

Regarding the article on Arch Review, I wrote to them to see if they can send us the entire number scanned, which is dedicated to BB. Let’s see.

In SA, I wonder how this image of modernity and nationhood through architecture was associated/appropriated/shaped by the rise of the National Party to power, and how it served as an avatar for settler identity and apartheid?

Interestingly, Gilberto Freyre was commissioned by the UN to do a report on SA in 1954. The full reference is below, but I could not find the original file.

Gilbero Freyre, “Elimination des Conflits et Tensions Entre Las Races: Méthodes employées dans diverse pays notamment ceux où les conditions se rapprochent le plus de la situation dans l’Union Sud-Africaine,” Nations Unies Assemblee Generale, Comission des Nations Unies Pour l’Etude de la Situation Raciale Dans l’Union Sud-Africaine, 25 de agosto de 1954.

In dropbox I also included a text on GF’s work in Africa in the post-WW period and the ways his theory of racial democracy later expanded to the whole Portuguese Empire in Africa under the concept of “luso-tropicalism”, which served to undermine the black liberation movements under the Salazar dictatorship's attempt to perpetuate colonial rule in Angola and Mozambique.

More interesting still, I did some (very brief) research on how modern architecture was used in the Portuguese Colonies in the post-WW period. It turns out that Portuguese modern architects were also inspired/drew from the “Brazilian Style” that became known worldwide with the publication of Brazil Builds.

For all that I could see up to now, this is a really interesting story that needs to be told.

And here I think you are right on the spot about what this story means:

"I am not really interested in these stylistic concerns but they make for a good basis for a discussion on a transported idea of modernity, colonial settlers' occupation and an anxiety of ‘belonging’ in the 'new country’ as second generation and an emerging settler identity which is very similar to Brazil. Also these were all architectures, concerns and stylistic aspirations crafted by straight / straight acting white men."

(to the latter point, same in Brazil, all white elite dudes…)

Finally, there is another thread of research perhaps…
"Recently I had a conversation with historian-curator Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto, she wrote the fourth cover of my recent book 'Was Lucio Costa racist?', and we are in constant dialogue. I mentioned our conversations, and she pointed me to the research of Guilherme Oliveira Lemos on the relationship between SA’s townships and the 'Eradication Campaign' that was conducted in Brasília under the military regime to relocate the poor (mostly black) population out of the pilot plan to the so-called 'satellite cities.'”

… South Africa Builds...

As you see I opened a dropbox so we can organize the files.

I also want to point you to this upcoming book on MoMA’s architectural exhibitions on LA, by Cuban-American historian and curator Patricio del Real, which should be good and relates to our project.

https://www.amazon.com.br/gp/product/0300254563/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Regarding the article on Arch Review, I wrote to them to see if they can send us the entire number scanned, which is dedicated to BB. Let’s see.

And finally finally… shall we apply to Sharjah ? I think we could… the form is brief, not much work. And our material is shaping in interesting and powerful ways…

Let's talk sooner than later, take good care and have a good weekend.

and again sorry for such delay, hope you are still there.

hugs, p.