From the summer house to the gated community: Forms, uses and transformations of the gaucho coast in the 20th century

• Grant number: 17/19939-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: March 01, 2018
• End date: April 30, 2020
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - Modern and Contemporary History
• Principal Investigator: Aline Vieira de Carvalho
• Grantee: Joana Carolina Schossler
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The summer house is a shelter for adventure on the beach. For the history of seaside resorts it represents a time when one lives the sociability in family or in community. As a synonym of vacations, the summer house is a temporary residence space, where it forms a link with the maritime territory and shares a common history among vacationers. From the 1940s until the democratization of leisure in the 1980s, the desire to build a house on the beach engendered new architectures that triggered urban transformations along the coast, causing profound changes in the territory and maritime landscape due to the lack of legal norms and regulations to protect and to guide an urbanization of the maritime coast. The purpose of this research is to investigate the evolution of the summer house on the coast of Rio Grande do Sul from the beginning of the urbanization of its resorts in the 1940s until the verticalization and implementation of closed condominiums in the 1980s. Through the study on the mutations of the summer house during the 20th century, this paper seeks to analyze the repertoire, values, techniques, uses of materials and the evolution of the ways of living that domestic leisure architecture attributed to the coast. It thereby highlights how this desire to live by the sea has caused a transformation in the maritime landscape, which, lacking legal norms and regulations for its protection, contributes to the urbanization and massive real estate speculation in the coast of Rio Grande do Sul.