Tropical Modernism in Brazil — The Current Landscape

# Tropical Modernism in Brazil — The Current Landscape *By TropMod Editorial* Brazil occupies a singular position in the history of twentieth-century architecture. No other nation of comparable scale has so thoroughly absorbed the language of international modernism and reshaped it into something unmistakably its own. From the heroic years of the 1930s through to the present day, Brazilian architects have demonstrated an almost alchemical ability to transform the rigid geometries of modernist orthodoxy into forms that breathe with warmth, fluidity, and an intimate understanding of the tropical environment. This is not simply modernism transplanted to southern latitudes; it is modernism reimagined, infused with the rhythms of Brazilian life and the demands of its climate. To understand the current state of tropical modernism in Brazil, one must first reckon with its founding mythologies. The story begins in 1936, when Le Corbusier arrived in Rio de Janeiro to consult on what would become the Ministry of Education and Health building — the Gustavo Capanema Palace. Working alongside a team of young Brazilian architects including Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, and Carlos Leão, Le Corbusier's visit catalysed something far larger than a single commission. It ignited a generation. The building that resulted remains one of the most significant modernist structures in the Americas: a slender tower raised on pilotis, fitted with the first large-scale application of *brise-soleil* — adjustable sun breakers that would become a defining motif of Brazilian modernism. The ground-level gardens, designed by Roberto Burle Marx, introduced a new vocabulary of tropical planting that rejected European formalism in favour of the voluptuous, painterly arrangements of native species for which Burle Marx would become legendary. From this crucible emerged Oscar Niemeyer, whose career would span more than seven decades and produce over five hundred buildings across three continents. Niemeyer's genius lay in his rejection of the straight line. "What attracts me," he wrote, "is the free and sensual curve — the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman." His architecture of flowing concrete, whether at the Pampulha complex in Belo Horizonte (1942) or the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum (1996), established a visual language that became synonymous with Brazil itself. Then came Brasília. In 1956, President Juscelino Kubitschek committed the nation to building a new capital on the empty *cerrado* of the central plateau, and he turned to Costa for the master plan and Niemeyer for the architecture. The result, inaugurated in 1960, remains the most ambitious expression of modernist urbanism ever realised. Costa's Pilot Plan — a city shaped like a cross or, as many prefer, a bird in flight — organised urban life along two axes: the monumental (government, culture, commerce) and the residential (the famous *superquadras*, self-contained neighbourhood blocks). Niemeyer's buildings — the National Congress with its twin towers and opposing domes, the Cathedral with its crown of concrete ribs reaching skyward, the Palácio da Alvorada floating on its reflecting pool — gave the city its instantly recognisable silhouette. Brasília is both triumph and cautionary tale. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage site in 1987, recognising it as "a singular artistic achievement, a prime creation of the human genius." Yet the city has struggled with the limitations inherent in its utopian blueprint: strict zoning that discourages the organic mixing of uses, a planning scale that privileges the automobile, and the exclusion of the very workers who built it to satellite cities far from the monumental core. The preservation of Brasília's architectural integrity — every building in the Plano Piloto is protected — has become a live debate, pitting heritage purists against those who argue that a living city must evolve. --- **The Paulista School and the Counter-Tradition** If Niemeyer gave Brazilian modernism its poetry, the architects of São Paulo gave it its conscience. The so-called Paulista School, crystallised around the figures of João Batista Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, developed a distinctive architecture of exposed reinforced concrete, spatial generosity, and a profound social commitment. Their buildings are heavier, more tectonic, more insistently structural than the Carioca grace of Niemeyer. Artigas's masterpiece is the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP, 1968), a vast shed-like structure supported by just six massive columns, its interior a continuous, undivided space flooded with light from an enormous skylight system. It is a building that embodies an entire pedagogical philosophy: architecture as a fundamentally collective, democratic endeavour. Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who received the Pritzker Prize in 2006, carried this tradition into the twenty-first century with works of extraordinary power. The Brazilian Museum of Sculpture (MuBE, 1988) in São Paulo is less a building than an inhabitable landscape: a vast concrete beam spans sixty metres over a sunken plaza, creating a public room in the city. His renovation of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (1998) demonstrated how brutalist concrete could be handled with surgical precision to create luminous, elegant gallery spaces. Mendes da Rocha's work consistently argued that architecture's first duty is to the public realm, to the creation of spaces where citizens gather, where the city finds its civic voice. And then there is Lina Bo Bardi. Italian-born, Brazilian by choice, Bo Bardi arrived in Rio in 1946 and spent the next five decades producing a body of work that defies easy categorisation. Her Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP, 1968) — a glass box suspended beneath two enormous red concrete beams, creating a 74-metre clear span — is one of the most radical structural gestures in modern architecture. The void beneath the building was deliberately left open as a public square, a belvedere over Avenida Paulista. Bo Bardi wrote of "poor architecture" — not architecture without means, but architecture stripped to essentials, drawing on vernacular wisdom, on the improvisational intelligence of Brazilian popular culture. Her SESC Pompéia (1982), a former factory transformed into a community leisure centre with rough concrete towers connected by aerial walkways, remains one of the most influential adaptive reuse projects anywhere in the world. --- **The Contemporary Field** The Brazilian architectural scene today is remarkably plural, encompassing practitioners who work at every scale and in every register. The shadow of the masters is long, but the current generation has found ways to honour the lineage without becoming trapped by it. In São Paulo, **Marcio Kogan** and his **Studio MK27** have become the most internationally visible Brazilian practice of the twenty-first century. Kogan's work — exemplified by the Canopy House (2024) in Guarujá, a weekend retreat suspended on slender columns above the Atlantic Forest floor — pursues a language of extreme refinement: Brazilian wood, raw concrete, and vast planes of glass arranged with the precision of a Miesian pavilion, yet entirely at home in the tropics. Kogan speaks of architecture as cinema, of choreographing sequences of light and shadow, compression and release. His recently published Rizzoli monograph and the selection of his Canopy House as one of the most significant houses of the year signal the global appetite for his vision. **Arthur Casas**, operating from offices in São Paulo, New York, and Lisbon, works across scales from furniture to towers with a consistent sensibility rooted in material honesty and spatial clarity. His Angra House (2024) in Angra dos Reis, on the coast south of Rio de Janeiro, deploys raw stone, timber, and *mashrabiyas* — the latticed screens inherited from Brazil's Moorish-Portuguese architectural lineage — to create a house that dissolves into its dramatic seaside setting. Casas's approach exemplifies a broader trend: the rediscovery of traditional passive cooling strategies, updated with contemporary materials and detailing. In Brasília, practices such as **BLOCO Arquitetos** and **CODA Arquitetura** work within the constraints of the city's UNESCO-protected fabric, renovating apartments in the *superquadras* with meticulous sensitivity. Their projects, such as BLOCO's 114S Apartment (2022) and CODA's Apartment 112 Sul (2020), demonstrate the vitality of adaptive reuse within a modernist heritage context, proving that preservation and contemporary living are not antagonists. In Belo Horizonte, **TETRO Arquitetura** — led by Carlos Maia, Débora Mendes, and Igor Macedo — has emerged as a significant voice with projects such as the Ponte House (2024) in Florianópolis and the Tangram House (2025) in Lagoa Santa, a composition of angular volumes that engage the lakeside terrain through a deliberate interplay of solid and void. In the northeast, **Laurent Troost Architectures** operates out of Manaus, applying tropical modernism's principles to the Amazonian context. Troost's Cajuí House (2025), nestled among existing trees on a site bordering an environmental protection area, demonstrates how architecture can negotiate the competing demands of development and conservation in one of the world's most ecologically sensitive regions. The rising generation includes figures such as **Carla Juaçaba**, whose work in Minas Gerais — documented by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in their "With an Acre" film series — explores the architect's role in land regeneration and smallholder agriculture, extending the discipline's reach beyond the building envelope into broader ecological systems. **messina | rivas**, led by Francisco Rivas and Rodrigo Messina, have built a practice around hands-on construction and material experimentation in Cunha, São Paulo, producing projects of quiet rigour that speak to the ongoing vitality of the Brazilian modernist tradition's constructive intelligence. --- **Climate, Materials, and the Brazilian Condition** What distinguishes Brazilian tropical modernism from its European antecedents is not merely stylistic adjustment but a fundamental reorientation of architecture's relationship with climate. The devices that became signatures of the movement — the *brise-soleil*, the *cobogó* (perforated concrete breeze blocks), the deep verandas, the elevated ground planes — were not aesthetic choices first. They were intelligent responses to heat, humidity, and solar radiation, developed decades before sustainability entered the architectural lexicon. Contemporary practice has deepened this engagement. The *cobogó*, invented in Recife in the 1920s by three engineers — hence the name, a portmanteau of their surnames — has been continuously reinterpreted. In projects such as the Angra House (Arthur Casas, 2024), traditional *mashrabiya* screens are fabricated with contemporary precision to achieve calibrated degrees of transparency, privacy, and ventilation. The *brise-soleil*, refined over decades by architects from Rino Levi to Studio MK27, has evolved from a climate-response device into a compositional element capable of generating complex facade rhythms. Concrete remains the material of choice — a legacy of both the modernist era and Brazil's industrial development trajectory — but its use has become more nuanced. Where Mendes da Rocha deployed concrete with raw power, contemporary practitioners such as Bernardes Arquitetura (led by Thiago Bernardes, grandson of Sergio Bernardes) treat it with greater lightness, often combining it with timber, stone, and extensive glazing. The Dam House (2024) in Itaúna, Minas Gerais, by Bernardes Arquitetura, exemplifies this evolution: a low-slung pavilion that opens entirely to a reservoir landscape, its structural discipline producing an effect of weightless horizontality. The use of wood has expanded significantly. Brazil possesses extraordinary timber resources, and the development of engineered wood products — cross-laminated timber, glulam — has enabled architects to incorporate exposed timber structure into projects at scales previously reserved for concrete and steel. The Catimbau House (2025) by AzulPitanga, located within the Catimbau National Park in Pernambuco, employs local timber and traditional construction techniques adapted to a contemporary architectural language, demonstrating how vernacular building intelligence can inform architectural practice without lapsing into nostalgia. --- **Preservation and Its Discontents** Brazil's modernist patrimony is extraordinary and under constant pressure. The country possesses one of the world's great concentrations of twentieth-century architecture, yet the mechanisms for its protection are uneven. IPHAN (the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage) has listed individual modernist masterpieces, and Brasília enjoys UNESCO protection, but the broader fabric of mid-century Brazilian modernism — apartment buildings by Artacho Jurado and Franz Heep in São Paulo, public schools by Affonso Eduardo Reidy in Rio, the hundreds of lesser-known houses by architects such as Rino Levi, Oswaldo Bratke, and Sergio Bernardes — remains vulnerable to neglect, insensitive alteration, and demolition. Promising developments exist. The ABERTO exhibition series, founded in 2022 by Filipe Assis, has become a notable platform for the intersection of art, design, and modernist heritage, staging exhibitions in houses designed by Niemeyer, Vilanova Artigas, Ruy Ohtake, and Chu Ming Silveira. In 2025, ABERTO mounted its first international edition at Le Corbusier's Maison La Roche in Paris. The recent opening of Eduardo Longo's Casa Bola — a radical spherical house in São Paulo — for ABERTO's fifth edition signals a growing public appetite for engaging with this architectural legacy. The renovation of the Louveira Building apartments in São Paulo (designed by Vilanova Artigas and Carlos Cascaldi in 1946) by Ana Sawaia Arquitetura, and the sensitive intervention in the Guinle Park's Caledônia Building in Rio (designed by Lúcio Costa in 1954) by LINHA Arquitetura, demonstrate that renovation of modernist heritage can be achieved to a high standard when architects work with, rather than against, the original spatial logic. The ongoing expansion of MASP by Metro Arquitetos (2024) — the Pietro Maria Bardi Building, named after Bo Bardi's husband and the museum's founding director — represents the most significant addition to São Paulo's most iconic modernist institution since its original construction. The project navigates the delicate terrain between preservation of a landmark and the practical demands of a growing museum, a challenge that Brazilian architecture will face with increasing frequency as the mid-century stock ages. --- **Looking Forward** Brazilian tropical modernism enters the second quarter of the twenty-first century with its founding masters largely departed — Mendes da Rocha died in 2021, the last of the giants — but with an energetic and diverse field of practitioners well equipped to carry the tradition forward. The challenges are considerable: climate change demands ever more sophisticated passive design strategies; economic inequality shapes the profession's social obligations; and the globalisation of architectural culture risks flattening regional specificity. Yet the Brazilian tradition has always been defined by its capacity to metabolise external influences without surrendering its identity. The Paulista School's insistence on architecture's civic role, Bo Bardi's "poor architecture" and its attentiveness to popular culture, the Carioca School's celebration of sensuous form, and the contemporary generation's fusion of these lineages with a deepened ecological consciousness — together they constitute a living tradition with few parallels in world architecture. The buildings are there, from the monumental to the domestic, from Brasília's sweeping axes to the quiet pavilions emerging at the edges of reservoirs and forests. The question, as always, is whether the culture will value them enough to protect them, and whether the architects now practising will produce work worthy of the inheritance they have received. On present evidence, there is reason for guarded optimism.