LIGA Book vol. 2 “Exposed Architecture”
Architecture Exhibitions in Brazil: A Brief Overview
Agnaldo Farias
In 1992, Fábio Magalhães, curator at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), invited architect and scholar Anne Marie Sumner to create a program of architecture exhibitions for the museum, which is the most important of its kind in the country, housed in a landmark building by Lina Bo Bardi.
Prior to this, the MASP— in common with other Brazilian museums-had not organized architecture exhibitions. It was, however, a question of time before certain institutions came to recognize the value of this kind of exhibitions in presenting new ideas, reviewing past output through new readings, and in the specific case of Brazil, fostering interventions in a country that is vast in history and geography alike. Sumner, the author of provocative research into the relationship between minimalism and architecture, chose to hold an exhibition dedicated to the work of Peter Eisenman. In a country where modern thought dominated the scene-where everything from Robert Venturi or Ricardo Bofill to Richard Meier or Zaha Hadid was dismissed as “postmodern” —it was a bold move to present the work of an architect such as Eisenman, which stands in powerful contrast to the still-dominant Corbusian paradigm in Brazil.
Anne Marie Sumner traveled to New York to meet Eisenman, who she says reacted with a certain skepticism to the invitation. Nevertheless, moved by the curator’s enthusiasm and by the fact he had nothing to lose other than time spent designing the exhibition, he accepted the challenge.
Sumner wasted no time and pulled out all the stops to ensure the museum was ready to host the exhibition, and in 1993 the impressively impeccable retrospective show opened, with the title “Meshes, Scales, Paths and Folds in the Work of Peter Eisenman,” including exquisite models, photographs and prints of all kinds. The exhibition catalogue contained all this material, together with essays by Otilia Arantes and Sophia da Silva Telles, and an incisive interview by Nicholas Sevcenko. These were given context by the influential article “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of The End,” written by the architect himself.
The exhibition had a significant impact on the architectural com-munity, which was not accustomed to exhibitions in their field, and especially not of this quality. The presence of Eisenman was celebrated and a very well-attended lecture took place. As a result, the MASP’s program of exhibitions opened with a great success. In a conversation with Sumner, and to her great surprise, Eisenman admitted that the exhibition had exceeded all his expectations and that a show of such quality (i.e. so complete and so costly) had never been held anywhere.
Yet how was it possible for a country where the museum system has always suffered from chronic instability— and where architecture is not perceived to be as attractive as art, since it is viewed above all as a professional practice- to implement a program of architecture exhibitions on the scale suggested by the inaugural exhibition? Not only did it prove impossible, but to date this situation has not changed.
The outcome of this story could not be more ironic: the scale of the resources involved in the production of “Meshes, Scales…” meant that the first exhibition in the MASP architecture program was also the last.
The peculiarity of the failure of this first program of architecture exhibitions at a major Brazilian museum serves to introduce the complexity of the panorama. It is important to reflect on some of the causes, starting with the absence of debate on emerging architectural production in Brazil and around the world, together with what is taught in schools, which generally speaking is an uncritical transfer of modernist ideas.
It is interesting that this has been a side-effect of our successful modernist period in architecture, with Niemeyer to the fore: the unthinking reverence shown towards such figures as Sérgio Bernardes, Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Reidy, Vilanova Artigas, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Lina Bo Bardi, and João Filgueiras. We believed we were honoring their major contributions, when in reality we were stuffing and mounting them. In this provincial framework for established architects and the institutions they were affiliated to, the international architecture exhibitions that presented examples of recent work were mostly forgettable. In addition, they were expensive to mount and were far from attracting the necessary attention and resources of traditional arts patrons.
Graduating in the late 1970s, Anne Marie Sumner, like her fellow students, was drawn by the hubbub created by architecture in the sphere of world culture, above all since the emergence of postmodernity, a notion bursting with both positive and negative aspects. She bore witness to the creation of the Venice Architecture Biennale, museums of architecture, urban interventions in Paris, London, Buenos Aires and elsewhere, and the rapid expansion of architecture publishing. Indeed, and as proof of how far behind we were lagging, we need only recall that two of the classic books from the 1970s, “The Architecture of the City” and “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” by Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi respec-tively, were only published in Brazil in 1995.
Young architects struggled against the sluggishness of the architectural sphere, with meager success. In the desire to get involved in this debate, it was predictable that it would give rise to unbalanced situations like the one described above, typical of a confused context where the situation, objective conditions, objectives, or strategies were not properly evaluated. In the case of the MASP, this failing can also be ascribed to the chief curator.
Setting aside the success-cum-failure of the Eisenman exhibition, in the late 1990s the Center for Architecture and Urbanism (CAU) was created in Rio de Janeiro. It is no coincidence that this was the work of the sole mayor this great city has seen who trained as an architect, Luiz Paulo Conde. Under the expert guidance of Jorge Daniel Czajkowski, a program of exhibitions, publications and debates was created, in line with the expectations of the community of architects, which by this stage had undergone generational renewal and by then was attracting the laity, who had begun to understand the importance of architecture and urbanism in their lives. Opened in 1997, the CAU lasted until 2000. Subsequently, it reduced its actions to the scale implied by the timidity of public institutions, whose ambitions seem to extend no further than to continue functioning.
In São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city and the second-largest in Latin America, the panorama continued to lag behind-and does so to this day-even after the revitalization of the Museum of the Brazilian Home (MCB1) and the creation of the Tomie Ohtake Institute (ITO2), in 2000. In the same period, notable advances in the field of publishing included the creation of the Vitruvius site, the result of an exhaustive effort by archi-tect, critic and curator Abílio Guerra, and the publishers Martins Fontes and Cosac Naify, although the latter closed in summer 2016 as a result of Brazil’s economic crisis. Also of recent note is the 10th Architecture Biennial, curated by Guilherme Wisnik in 2013. However, since these are isolated actions, lacking the overall perspective of an effective program, they must be examined elsewhere.
As for the MCB and ITO, beginning in the year 2000 a reasonable program of architecture exhibitions commenced, within the limitations the reduced budgets allowed, which were distributed with a singular moderation by the marketing heads of sponsor companies, especially in the case of the ITO which, unlike the publicly-funded MCB, is a private not-for-profit institution, which makes it a hostage to fortune. The sponsors, in the shape of their heads of marketing, view architecture exhibitions as less attractive and charismatic than their fine art equivalents.
The lengthy negotiations between business owners and those responsible for their companies’ money has become the great tragedy of Brazil’s museums and cultural cen-ters, transforming most of them into storefronts open to exhibitions of any kind, not only architecture.
Exhibitions that may be of greater or lesser merit, but that arrive with their expenses already paid. As a result, what is shown is not necessarily what people want to show, but what they have to show. The question of “how to show” is one that is discussed less and less frequently, as exhibitions often come together with someone responsible for ensuring the installation guidelines are followed.
The more prestigious the institution and the more facilities it has, the greater the chance of receiving a quality exhibition proposal, and even one that is in line with its own program. Given this passivity, it is worth querying the museum’s role as a center committed to knowledge production, and the purpose of a curator?.
Having been chief curator for the first ten years of the Tomie Ohtake Institute, which is dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art and its reference points in modern art, and where I remain a consultant curator, I experienced for myself- together with the president, Ricardo Ohtake— the difficulty of implementing an architecture program consistent with the institution’s objectives, and not just to host externally produced exhibi-tions. With great effort, at a rate of about one per year, we held exhibitions on Vilanova Artigas, Oscar Niemeyer, Alvaro Siza, SANAA, and Steven Holl, among others, and in 1994 we established an annual architecture prize, the AkzoNobel Prize, which includes organizing a symposium.
Today, the institution’s principal initiative is its program of exhibitions on Brazilian architecture. The first exhibition, curated by Abilio Guerra, presented a reevaluation of significant Brazilian modernist buildings using models, photographs and prints, to examine the history of adaptations made by Brazilian architecture to European paradigms, and how our climate, geography, and history were taken into account. The second show was developed by Julio Katinsky, who, interested in the treatment of some of our public spaces, looked at Guinle Park and the Pedregulho Housing Project in Rio de Janeiro, and the National Assembly in São Paulo, among other buildings. The third exhibition, by Andre Correa do Lago, confronted the relationship between architecture and photogra-phy, a connection that was addressed in a different key by the curator of the subsequent show, Nelson Brissac Peixoto, which was concerned with presenting “what the city doesn’t let us see” and invited three leading photographers for that purpose.
The dominance of photography in the exhibitions by Corrêa do Lago and Brissac Peixoto must be understood as a way of proceeding in the face of the lack of resources to address important questions using economical methods. It is now 2016, yet we still confront the task of constructing and stabilizing these basic aspects of the architectural sphere, including the production of exhibitions.
