Edifício moderno brasileiro na cidade pré-moderna: paradoxos entre paradigmas

The subject of the insertion of buildings in consolidated urban contexts before the application of the Athens Letter is regarded as one of the central questions of the modern debate involving architecture and its view on the city. In the center of the European constructive vanguards proposals is the incessant search for the universality, precision, severity and aesthetic economy, associated to a immateriality and slightness that cross artistic making, passing by the building conception and culminating with of these true artificial construtos with its involving space. In fact, the named obsession of the modern architecture by the isolated object that comes of a space notion based on the plastic arts, finds in the Functional City a great paradox: the reductionism of architectural types in free spaces of the named tyranny of the street-corridor, results in a homogeneity that tends to weaken the immanent characteristics of the modern work. Curiously, in an opposite side, the modern building, when submitted to contrary laws of its theoretical urban postulates, or, limited for the pressures of urban density and block division and restrictive rules, operates in favor of composition strategies, recognizing in the primary elements of the urban morphology the specific conditions to establish necessary visual relations to its formal configuration. In this perspective, the article establishes a panorama of the modern building inserted in Rio de Janeiro, city that is regarded as great stage of the Brazilian modern architecture since 1936, by the design of the Ministry of Education and Health and the Brazilian Press Association until 1960, the year of the transference of the federal capital to Brasilia. The analysis concentrates in the solutions that evidence a multiplicity of resultant types of the connections of horizontal volumes. The comparisons between those base questions, compact body of the building, constants in the rise of the modern building are identified from the relations between elements of traditional morphologic characteristics (enclosed blocks, traditional street, street-park, hillside streets) and the solutions of floor-type and base floor of the buildings, considering the diverse positions characteristics. After that, the article proceeds to an examination of the elements that composes the implied tripartite façade in the five points of Le Corbusier. The article searches to identify and discuss the bases of the modern ideal city, supported in the independence among building, road system and green open space, when transposed for the context of the traditional city, resulting in a paradox: instead of weakening its formularizations, they emulate a plurality of types that establishes when the design of the building does not reject the relations with the elements of the secular urban morphology. As theory references, Brasilia, paradigm of modern ideal city and the application of the principles of the Functional City, is retaken from the diversified solutions of implantation of the modern architectural object in traditional morphologic context. The article finishes discussing the tension of the modern building on the space of the city morphologically consolidated as favorable factor to the condition of the modern work, once the determination for the construction of specific places, inherent to the architectural dimension, connects with the notion of immanent object of the modern art.