João Batista Vilanova Artigas (Curitiba PR 1915 - São Paulo SP 1985)
Architect, engineer, urban planner and teacher.
He graduated as an engineer-architect from the Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo - Poli/USP in 1937, after interning at the construction firm Bratke e Botti. He opened a design and construction firm with Duílio Marone, Artigas & Marone Engenheiros, while taking part in exhibitions of the Família Artística Paulista - FAP. In 1944, he left the construction firm and set up his own office with the structural engineer Carlos Cascaldi and, committed to the regulation of the profession, he founded, with other colleagues, the São Paulo chapter of the Instituto dos Arquitetos do Brasil - IAB/SP. He joined the Partido Comunista Brasileiro - PCB [Brazilian Communist Party] in 1945.
In 1947, he received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship that allowed him to travel for 13 months in the United States. In 1948, he took part in the founding of the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo - FAU/USP, where he began teaching. As the Cold War intensified, he radicalized the ideological tone of his discourse, particularly in the texts he wrote for the Marxist magazine Fundamentos, linked to the PCB: Le Corbusier e o Imperialismo [Le Corbusier and Imperialism], 1951, and Os Caminhos da Arquitetura Moderna [The Paths of Modern Architecture], 1952. He traveled to the Soviet Union, became disenchanted with the art and architecture of Socialist Realism, and fell into a professional crisis that lasted until the mid-1950s, when he designed the Olga Baeta house, 1956, the Rubem de Mendonça house ("house of triangles"), 1958, and the second Taques Bittencourt house, 1959, with reinforced concrete porticoes. He began a series of school projects for the São Paulo state government, notably the secondary schools in Itanhaém and Guarulhos. These projects, carried out under the Carvalho Pinto administration (1910 - 1987), mark the beginning of relations between modern architecture and the public authorities in São Paulo, almost nonexistent until then.
In 1961, he produced a remarkable sequence of projects that define the main lines of what is called the "escola paulista" [São Paulo school]: the Anhembi Tênis Clube, the Boat Garage of the Iate Clube Santa Paula, and the FAU/USP building at the Cidade Universitária, all in São Paulo. The following year, he proposed striking teaching innovations in the FAU/USP "teaching reform", establishing curricular criteria later adopted by many architecture schools. After the 1964 military coup, he was arrested and soon after exiled to Uruguay, from where he returned to live underground. He returned to FAU/USP in 1967 and gave an inaugural lecture rejecting armed struggle, entitled O Desenho [Design], in which he defended design as an act of resistance to oppression. In 1968, with Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1928 - 2021) and Fábio Penteado (1929 - 2011), he designed the Conjunto Habitacional Zezinho Magalhães Prado - Parque Cecap housing complex in Guarulhos, for 50,000 residents.
After Institutional Act No. 5 - AI-5, in 1969, he was again removed from FAU/USP, to which he returned only with the amnesty, at the end of 1979, as a teaching assistant. In 1984 he regained the position he held before being purged, after sitting a competitive examination for full professor, whose oral examinations were published under the title A Função Social do Arquiteto [The Social Function of the Architect].1 He is one of the most important Brazilian architects, having received from the Union Internationale des Architectes - UIA the Jean Tschumi Prize, 1972, for his contribution to architectural education, and the Auguste Perret Prize, 1985, for his built work.
Note
1 ARTIGAS, Vilanova. A função social do arquiteto. São Paulo: Nobel-Fundação Vilanova Artigas, 1989. Esse conjunto de arguições foi posteriormente incorporado em: ARTIGAS, Vilanova. Caminhos da arquitetura. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2004.
Critical Commentary
The author of an extensive and forceful body of work, Vilanova Artigas is the greatest example in Brazil of an architect who manages to combine effective political and social engagement, poetic and formal density, technical and constructive refinement, and teaching, united by a general principle of experimental restlessness and ideological coherence. He was able to train disciples as important and different as Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1928 - 2021), Joaquim Guedes (1932 - 2008) and Sérgio Ferro (1938). In this sense, as Professor Carlos Lemos (1925) puts it, he is the founder of the so-called "escola paulista",1 also called "Paulista Brutalism", in reference to the English "New Brutalism". Based in São Paulo, where architectural education derives from engineering rather than the fine arts, this production is characterized by a constructive emphasis, expressed in large spans and the extensive use of reinforced and exposed concrete, highlighting the profile of the structures and the forces to which they are subjected.
Even before graduating as an engineer-architect in 1937, Artigas attended the art drawing course at the Escola de Belas-Artes, which brought him into contact with the artists of the Grupo Santa Helena, such as Alfredo Volpi (1896 - 1988), Francisco Rebolo (1902 - 1980) and Bonadei (1906 - 1974), with whom he identified in the process of building a "São Paulo urban culture". Thus, the single-family house plays a prominent role in his work, as the architect makes clear: "My houses as a whole have a civic meaning. I built São Paulo with my houses."2 This emphasis, however, must also be understood in light of the political project of the Partido Comunista Brasileiro - PCB, which the architect joined in 1945. For the PCB, the national bourgeoisie was considered one of the agents of social transformation, which meant it had to be educated through a new ethic of dwelling, capable of making it aware of its revolutionary social role.
Artigas's early work is strongly influenced by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 - 1959). This interest is guided by the deduction of an intrinsic "constructive morality", which leads him to criticize the disguised falseness of Gregori Warchavchik (1896 - 1972), whose works try to copy the forms of modern architecture by covering brick masonry with plaster and raising parapets to hide roofs. For Artigas, there is no alternative but to work with local technical conditions, using materials such as brick, wood and ceramic roof tiles. This simplicity, however, does not prevent him from achieving unprecedented technical feats, as in the Rio Branco Paranhos house, 1943, where he built reinforced-brick slabs with large cantilevers, which he calculated himself. It can be seen, therefore, that Artigas arrives at Wright through polytechnic constructive pragmatism.
His work of the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s is marked by a formal optimism, characterized by the incorporation of the airy lightness of Rio architecture, especially that of Oscar Niemeyer (1907 - 2012). The ideological tensions of the Cold War intensify, deepening the gulf Artigas felt between the architect's professional activity and his real capacity to confront the interests of the ruling classes. This impasse led him to insoluble questions and often to an intransigent sectarianism. Such is the case of his criticism of abstract art, particularly Concretism, which he believed replaced political struggle with an aesthetic view of the world; and also his condemnation of the São Paulo International Biennial, which he considered the spearhead of American imperialism in the country. Which paths to follow in defense of national culture? A new realism? Faced with this question, posed by many Marxist-trained artists in the 1950s, Artigas rejected both the regionalism inspired by the Socialist Realism of the architects from Rio Grande do Sul, led by Demétrio Ribeiro (1916), and the reproduction of Brazilian colonial architecture he inferred from the proposals of Lucio Costa (1902 - 1998). In Os Caminhos da Arquitetura Moderna, 1952, he declared that as long as the link between architects and the popular masses was not established, there would be no popular architecture. "Until then...," he says, "a critical attitude toward reality."3
The solution to this impasse, in his work, comes in the second half of the 1950s, when he manages to give formal expression to the difficulty of a frank and optimistic relationship between building and city, conceiving "introverted constructions" whose outer faces are blind walls, and whose elementary, concise volumes manage to eliminate corridors, defining split levels experienced spatially along continuous ramps, like interior landscapes that often open onto a central void with a skylit roof. Many projects exemplify these qualities, such as the second Taques Bittencourt house, 1959, the Guarulhos secondary school, 1960, the boat garage of the Iate Clube Santa Paula, and the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo - FAU/USP, both from 1961.
The 1964 military coup shook the PCB's belief in the revolutionary role of the national bourgeoisie. After being arrested and exiled, and while facing federal charges, Artigas expressed in the Elza Berquó house, 1967, a sarcastic and ironic view of his earlier utopia. It is a "somewhat pop" house, he says, with a concrete structure resting on tree trunks, made "to say that, at that moment, all this reinforced-concrete technique that created such magnificent architecture was nothing but hopeless foolishness in view of all the political conditions of that time".4 A house whose unorthodox "disorder" made it resemble the carefree freedom of a working-class house.
However, this moment of doubt was not followed by a radical turn toward advocating armed struggle and abandoning the profession, but by renewed praise of "design"5 as the architect's most effective weapon for critical expression. Describing that moment as "a false crisis",6 he reinforced his belief in industrialization at any cost, betting on the emancipatory role of the development of the productive forces. Consistent with this belief was his commitment to the development of a national industrial design, modeled on the Bauhaus, 1919 - 1933, and the consequent effort to develop industrialized building systems with prefabricated components. This is the keynote, for example, of the project for the Conjunto Habitacional Zezinho Magalhães Prado - Parque Cecap, 1968, in Guarulhos, which, to his frustration, was built using the conventional cast-in-place system.
In 1984, in the lectures he gave as oral examinations for the full professorship at FAU/USP - a title that was rightfully his - he defined the essence of his architecture with poetic sharpness: "As for me, I confess that I seek the value of the force of gravity, not through the process of making very thin things one after another, so that the light is light because it is light. What delights me is to use heavy forms and come close to the earth and, dialectically, deny them."7
Notes
1 LEMOS, Carlos A. C. Arquitetura brasileira. São Paulo: Melhoramentos-Edusp, 1979.
2 ARTIGAS, Vilanova. A função social do arquiteto. In: ______. Caminhos da arquitetura. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2004, p. 213.
3 ARTIGAS, Vilanova. Os caminhos da arquitetura moderna (1952). In: ______. Op. cit., p. 50.
4 ARTIGAS, Vilanova. A função social do arquiteto. In: ______. Op. cit., p. 211.
5 Cf. ARTIGAS, Vilanova. O desenho. In: ______. Op. cit.
6 Cf. ARTIGAS, Vilanova. Uma falsa crise. In: ______. Op. cit.
7 ARTIGAS, Vilanova. A função social do arquiteto. In: ______. Op. cit., p. 225.
Group Exhibitions
1939 - São Paulo SP - 2nd Família Artística Paulista Salon, at Automóvel Clube
1976 - São Paulo SP - Os Salões: da Família Artística Paulista, de Maio e do Sindicato dos Artistas Plásticos de São Paulo [The Salons: of the Família Artística Paulista, of May and of the São Paulo Visual Artists' Union], at Museu Lasar Segall
Posthumous Exhibitions
1999 - São Paulo SP - Década de 50 e seus Envolvimentos [The 1950s and Their Involvements], at Jo Slaviero Galeria de Arte
2000 - Valencia (Spain) - De la Antropofagia a Brasília: Brasil 1920-1950 [From Anthropophagy to Brasília: Brazil 1920-1950], at IVAM. Centre Julio González
2002 - São Paulo SP - Da Antropofagia a Brasília: Brasil 1920-1950 [From Anthropophagy to Brasília: Brazil 1920-1950], at MAB/Faap
2003 - São Paulo SP - Vilanova Artigas, at Instituto Tomie Ohtake
Source: Itaú Cultural
