Architecture, national identity and political projects during Getúlio Vargas\'s dictatorial government : the São Paulo\'s practical schools of agriculture.

Author(s)

Marianna Ramos Boghosian Al Assal

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU/SBI)
• Defense date: 2010-02-02

Examining board members

Ana Lucia Duarte Lanna; Maria Helena Rolim Capelato; Maria Lucia Bressan Pinheiro

• Advisor: Ana Lucia Duarte Lanna

Abstract

Between 1937 and 1945 Brazil was under the dictatorial government of the Estado Novo, whose ideology of progress and national growth appears strongly characterized by the paradigms of nationalism, defense of the national sovereignty, modernization of institutions, industrialization of production processes, and mainly by the belief in the government as a mediator of tensions. In this process, marked by the transformation of the collective imagery in a regulatory instrument of daily life, the construction of a unifying national identity, able to accommodate differences, became a central mechanism of power. Furthermore, we can say that, in the same period, the long process of construction of an architectural autonomous professional field - especially in what concerns its erudite aspect - reached its culmination. This process, which was present in the previous decades, involved many procedures and strategies not only in the educational field, but also regarding the consolidation of a recognized plastic language, the construction of emblematic buildings and the power to elaborate its own history. In such a context, architecture and the state established, especially during these years of dictatorial government, a very particular relationship. The aim of this dissertation is to approach some of these questions by addressing a specific episode: the construction of the Practical Schools of Agriculture, carried through by the governor of São Paulo, Fernando Costa, between 1942 and 1945. Therefore the research was centered in the analysis of the idealization, conception of the architectural project and establishment of these schools, in the effort to identify, through its architecture, interconnected or contrasting political projects. In this scenario, special attention was given to the neocolonial architecture adopted as the central aspect of the conception of these schools - whose architectural projects were conceived by governmental institutions -, and its assumed ideological discourse, where the esthetic and symbolic elements made reference to but also proposed new constructions to the collective imagery, and where these elaborations were understood as part of architectural social responsibility. (AU)