Luiz Nunes (Rio de Janeiro RJ 19091 - idem 1937)
Architect and urban planner.
Luiz Carlos Nunes de Souza entered the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes - Enba [National School of Fine Arts], in Rio de Janeiro, in 1926. As president of the student union, he took part in the 1931 student strike against the dismissal of the then director, Lucio Costa, and in favor of reinstating the teachers Costa had hired in the 1930 teaching reform. Nunes graduated in 1933 and designed two apartment buildings that Lucio Costa considered pioneering works of the modern movement in the city.2 He moved to Recife, probably in June 1934, hired by governor Carlos Lima Cavalcanti, whose administration stood out for its investment in programs of collective interest. Nunes worked first at the Secretaria de Viação e Obras Públicas [Department of Transport and Public Works] and took over the Secção Técnica de Engenharia e Arquitetura - STEA [Technical Section of Engineering and Architecture], tasked with organizing the State's building output. During this period he designed the Escola de Anormais [School for Children with Special Needs], 1934, for the mental health program led by psychiatrist Ulysses Pernambuco; the Usina Higienizadora de Leite [Milk Pasteurization Plant], 1934, for the public health program developed by physicians Décio Parreiras and Josué de Castro; and the Hospital da Brigada Militar [Military Brigade Hospital], 1934.
In August 1935, the STEA was divided into specialized technical directorates, among them the Diretoria de Arquitetura e Construções - DAC [Directorate of Architecture and Construction]. Headed by Nunes, the DAC furthered the STEA's efforts to rationalize and modernize designs and building techniques, carrying out a series of works, notably the Entreposto de Pesca e Mercado de Peixe [Fish Depot and Fish Market], 1935 (not built), the Restaurante Popular Desmontável [Demountable Popular Restaurant], 1935, and the Escola Rural Alberto Torres [Alberto Torres Rural School], 1935. That same year, in Porto Alegre, he presented the Pernambuco State Pavilion at the Exhibition Commemorating the Centenary of the Farroupilha Revolution, considered the first exhibition of modern architecture in Brazil.3
The DAC's activities were interrupted in November 1935 on suspicion that the team was involved with the communist movement, but also because the introduction of working methods that encouraged the participation of master builders and workers in design decisions was disapproved of by some members of the government as a threat to established hierarchies and powers.4 Removed from the DAC, Nunes worked as an independent architect in Rio de Janeiro and published two articles on the work carried out in Recife. Reinstated at the DAC at the request of its technical staff, he restructured the body to extend its remit to drawing up urban plans for towns in the interior of the State. Renamed the Diretoria de Arquitetura e Urbanismo - DAU [Directorate of Architecture and Urbanism], between 1936 and 1937 the body produced some 30 projects, notably the Mirueira Leprosarium, the Pavilhão de Verificação de Óbitos [Death Verification Pavilion] and the Olinda Water Tower, and published Organização dos Serviços Técnicos Administrativos [Organization of Technical-Administrative Services],5 a kind of specifications manual for the construction of public buildings. In November 1937, Lima Cavalcanti was deposed by the Estado Novo and the DAU was practically abolished. Nunes returned to Rio de Janeiro with advanced tuberculosis and died prematurely, aged 28.
Critical Commentary
Between 1934 and 1937, Luiz Nunes carried out in Recife an experience unique in the Brazilian architectural scene. Embodying the original reforming utopia of the modern movement, he developed with the government of the State of Pernambuco an architecture driven by the desire for social transformation and by the commitment to creating a new world for a new man. In this sense, his work was political and went beyond the technical and aesthetic aspects of the profession.
The task of organizing the public works services that Nunes received in 1934, on taking up the post of architect of the Secretaria de Viação e Obras Públicas, took shape with the creation of the Diretoria de Arquitetura e Construções - DAC, 1934-1935. The directorate was responsible for centralizing all of the government's civil construction activities, from the development of designs and budgets to the construction, renovation and maintenance of state, municipal and private buildings, as requested by the different levels of government and in the public interest, including the approval of all projects to be built with state funds. Under his management, Nunes coordinated a series of integrated actions aimed at improving the architectural and constructive quality of state buildings and reducing public spending on construction. These actions ranged from investment in the educational and technical improvement of the local workforce to the introduction of new methods, materials and techniques on the building site, and from the formation of a diversified technical team of architects, engineers, draftsmen, artists and workers to the development of complete construction designs that favored technical and constructive rationality.
What stands out most in the architect's work is the way the DAC team's work was organized, with master builders and workers taking part in design decisions, so as to combine the knowledge of empirical practice with academic knowledge - in other words, to recover the lost unity between theory and practice. Indeed, while the DAC's output shows how experience on the building site informed the design, pointing to technical solutions and defining new drawings and forms of representation, the improvement of the workforce is also remarkable, as workers came to understand not only the technical language of architectural drawing but also the process of constructing the building as a whole. The commitments and activities developed at the DAC continued at the Diretoria de Arquitetura e Urbanismo - DAU, although from an architectural point of view its creation, in 1936, marks the beginning of a new phase.
The works produced by the DAC between 1934 and 1935, especially the Escola de Anormais, the Usina Higienizadora de Leite, 1934, and the Hospital da Brigada Militar, 1934, are prismatic volumes made up of flat slabs, smooth unornamented surfaces and standardized horizontal openings, which respond to specific programmatic needs and reveal the inspiration of modern German architecture. The layout of the Escola de Anormais in two large pavilions linked by verandas and canopies, for example, follows the precepts of the "École de plein air" [open-air school], which call for integrating the building's interior and exterior spaces. The design, as the poet and engineer Joaquim Cardozo points out, recalls the Karl Marx School Group, 1930/1933, by the French architect André Lurçat, built in Villejuif, France. The design of the Hospital da Brigada Militar, in turn, arranges the program in blocks rather than pavilions, as advocated by the most advanced currents of medicine at the time. As in the Usina Higienizadora de Leite, the reference to the Bauhaus is perceptible, especially to the designs of the German architect Walter Gropius.
During construction, the design of the Hospital da Brigada Militar was substantially modified; the final character of the building moves away from this group of projects and closer to the Escola Rural Alberto Torres, 1935/1936, which is marked by the prominence given to its reinforced concrete structure. Following the same principles of integrating the school's rooms with the outdoor spaces used in the Escola de Anormais, this building does not have a harmonious composition, owing to the articulation between the rectangular main block and the set of circulation ramps suspended by tie rods fixed to parabolic reinforced-concrete arches, which recall the designs of the Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, 1931, and Lucio Costa's design for the Auditorium of the Universidade do Brasil, 1936. While in this last building the structural system consists of an independent frame and flat reinforced-concrete slabs, the earlier projects are characterized by the simultaneous use of load-bearing clay-brick masonry and reinforced-concrete columns and slabs, showing the need to adapt the precepts of modern architecture to local technical and economic possibilities.
Also from this first phase are the designs for the police stations and the popular restaurant, whose interest lies, in the first case, in the attempt to develop a less rigid and monotonous standardization that nonetheless ensures identity and, at the same time, economy in construction through the standardization of rooms and building elements; and, in the second case, in the development of a demountable building made of wood and zinc roofing, technology and materials available at the time.
The projects developed by the DAU, 1936-1937, break free of the strict programmatic, technical and economic constraints of the directorate's first phase, gaining greater plastic expressiveness. This clear change of direction is explained, on the one hand, by Nunes's stay in Rio de Janeiro in the same year that Le Corbusier was in the country for the projects for the Universidade do Brasil and the Ministério da Educação e Saúde - MES [Ministry of Education and Health], 1936/1945, and, on the other, by the arrival of two new collaborators, the engineer-architects João Correia Lima and Fernando Saturnino de Brito, graduates of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes - Enba. While Le Corbusier's postulates of modern architecture - independent structure, free plan, pilotis, roof garden - are visible in the Mirueira Leprosarium, the Death Pavilion of the School of Medicine and the Olinda Water Tower, the references to Lucio Costa are no less present: more direct in the leprosarium, whose buildings follow the same approach the architect adopted in the competition for the Vila Operária Monlevade [Monlevade Workers' Village], Minas Gerais, 1934, and indirect in the pavilion and the Olinda reservoir, but perceptible in the adaptation of that architect's precepts to local technical and climatic conditions. In the Olinda Water Tower, as in the project to extend the Secretaria de Segurança Pública [Department of Public Security], 1934, the problem of intervening in historic sites arises, solved in both cases by building modern structures with very sober lines that highlight their singularity in the context - a solution very different from the one adopted by Oscar Niemeyer (1907 - 2012) at the Ouro Preto Hotel, Minas Gerais, 1940.
The experience of the architecture directorates headed by Nunes did not end with the abolition of the DAU by the Estado Novo, nor even with the architect's premature death. Many of the architects, engineers and draftsmen who worked there carried the work forward, contributing to the spread of modern architecture in the country, notably Joaquim Cardozo, the landscape architect Burle Marx and the engineer and urban planner Antônio Bezerra Baltar.
Notes
1 The architect's date and place of birth are disputed. Some authors, such as the architectural historians Alberto Xavier, Hugo Segawa and Guilah Naslavsky, state that the architect was born in 1908 in Belo Horizonte. The architect Rita de Cássia Alves Vaz, however, states in her master's thesis that he was born in Rio de Janeiro on July 31, 1909, information confirmed by the architect's birth certificate.
2 COSTA, Lucio. Depoimento de um arquiteto carioca. In: XAVIER, Alberto (Org.). Lucio Costa: sobre arquitetura. Porto Alegre: Centro de Estudantes Universitários de Arquitetura, 1962. p. 169-201.
3 CARDOZO, Joaquim. Testemunho dos aspectos socioculturais. (Prefácio). In: BARROS, Souza. A Década de 20 em Pernambuco. Rio de Janeiro: Gráfica Editora Acadêmica Ltda, 1972. p. 144.
4 NUNES, Luiz. Escola para anormais. Revista da Diretoria de Engenharia. Rio de Janeiro, PDF, v. 3, n. 1, jan. 1936; NUNES, Luiz. Uma diretoria de arquitetura. Revista da Diretoria de Engenharia. Rio de Janeiro, PDF, n.3, mar. 1936. p. 55-60.
5 Organização dos Serviços Técnico-Administrativos. Diretoria de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Secretaria de Viação de Obras Públicas do Estado de Pernambuco. Recife: Imprensa Oficial, 1937.
Posthumous Exhibitions
2000 - Valencia (Spain) - De la Antropofagia a Brasilia: 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
Source: Itaú Cultural
