Saturday, May 15, 2010

Poet-Architects of Brazil and Chile

An exhibition in Madrid looks back on the late avant-garde:
Desvíos de la deriva
Reina Sofía Museum of Contemporary Art
May 4 – August 23, 2010
Curators: Lisette Lagnado and María Berríos

From the Museum's web page:
The different Brazilian and Chilean architectural concepts that form the subject of this exhibition share a humanist, visionary basis in their way of approaching the relationship between public space and collective life, topography and urbanism. This is reflected in drawings, texts and architectural models by
Flavio de Carvalho (1899-1973), Juan Borchers (1910-1975), Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992), Roberto Matta (1911-2002), and Sergio Bernardes (1919-2002), and in the Valparaíso School’s communal teaching. Poet-architects were torn between a growing drive towards modernity and technology’s promise to reduce working hours and increase leisure time. Their goal was to expand the space for homo ludens and implement a community-based life. In the case of Brazil, this was based on Carvalho’s take on Oswald de Andrade’s Anthropophagous Manifesto (1928), while in Chile it involved the assumption of values based on hospitality and accessibility....
(Continues)

Photo:
Juegos y torneos, Ciudad Abierta
, 1972-77
Archivo histórico José Vial Armstrong, Escuela de Arquitectura y
Diseño de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile.