Ética Brutalista na arquitetura introspectiva de Vilanova Artigas: 1966-1969

The "introspective" houses architect Vilanova Artigas designed between 1966 and 1969 - Berquó (1966), Porto (1968) and Martirani (1969) – fleeing urban daily life and the relationship with the city, to express his "immense poetry" between four walls, which are: architecturally anti-urban. Clearly the coup d’état of 1964, which transformed Artigas into a "convict-architect", not physically, but conceptually, became a key fact in understanding this attitude of rejection of the projective relationship with urban life tainted by military repression. However, not all Artigas’s houses from this period are introspective. The André Mendes residence, his first work after the Uruguayan exile, for example, leans blatantly into the street. Another important example would be the "urban" project of 1967 in the city of Guarulhos: the CECAP housing complex. The very "reactive" attitude, pointed out by Kamita (2000), is also not exactly the same in all three residences because the Berquó house, for example, is a building with a courtyard, while the Port and the Martinari houses are compact buildings. However, the first incorporates the zenith lighting, emphasizing the blunt side closure, and the second, is defined through the design of a double skin that makes it an exoskeleton able to build a controlled outside. Faced with this complexity, the approaches and understanding of Artigas’ production of that period, we believe a comparison and analysis of the suggested projects from the perspective of interpretative New Brutalism may shed light on this form of resistance architecture, understood as being architecture "without rhetoric", to use the expression by Alison and Peter Smithson. In line with the thinking of these English architects, we can also say that, at that time, this "new brutalism" declared that it was the task of the architect to draw a "rude poetry of confused and powerful forces" that structured, or destructured human society, claim that this statement could have been signed by Artigas himself. Reyner Banham, first author to discuss the movement theoretically, claimed in the 1950s that the production of the architecture of New Brutalism could only be understood and analyzed if taken as a concept of architectural production that was "ethical and not aesthetic". The use of reinforced concrete so naked and apparent, yet it was a formal feature that was conventionally called brutalism would not be a determining factor in analyzing a work from the point of view of its conceptual insertion in the production of New Brutalism. This is particularly because the first brutalist work was a school that the Smithson did in Hunstanton (1949-1954) within the formal standards, construction and materials, used by Mies van der Rohe. Is not the material that is being used which determines the inclusion of a work in the analytical and interpretive, parameters of the New Brutalism but the intentions and design which supports the project, an idea that fits in Artigas’s thinking. Our research discusses the possibility of understanding, through this ethical sense registered and defined by Banham and the Smithson, the designs that guided the project decisions that led Artigas to raise this anti-urban architecture. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate the artistic and stylistic dimension which is expressed in the form of the work, the vision of "cultural goals" that are shown in the point of view of composition and space, without forgetting that they depart from the political and ideological vie the artist had of the society in which he worked.