Brutalismo Paulista: uma estética justificada por uma ética?

PAULISTA BRUTALISM: AN AESTHETIC JUSTIFIED BY ETHICS? The concept of Brutalism in architecture is linked to the expression of the materials utilized in their natural state. This architecture is expected to enable the identification, through its appreciation, of the materials that make the architectural project concrete through building. Coatings are considered dissimulators. The Brutalist architecture reveals the utilized materials and the technique allowing its accomplishment; it tries to make clear what is gasket and what is structure. There are no selective criteria regarding what should or should not be visible. Everything is apparent. There is concern regarding the expression of materials instead of well finished surfaces. The idea of beauty is thus related to organizational truth. The construction must be honest, revealing both the materials and the adopted technique. The polemics about Brutalism as an architectural tendency linked to ethics and aesthetics instigated authors such as Banham, one of the founders of the movement. The movement’s diffusion resulted in different opinions: for some, Brutalism was concerned mainly with ethics, while for others it was concerned with aesthetics. According to Bruno Zevi, it was ethical for those who aimed at restoring the original and aggressive integrity of the modern movement and it was aesthetical to those who looked for enriching surfaces and volumes. During the first years of the 1950s in England emerged a critical movement centered on the Smithson couple, an avant-garde movement connected to art and architecture against what critics thought to be an accommodation of the Modern Movement. In 1955 Reyner Banham referred, in an article to the Architectural Review, to such attitude as New English Brutalism. Later, in The New Brutalism in 1966, Banham talked at length about Brutalism and about ethic and aesthetic features of the Smithson’s work. In Brazil the Paulista Brutalism, from São Paulo, was an architecture deeply marked by ethical discourse, that being its intersection with the New English Brutalism. The ideology of the Paulista movement, concerned with social matters and with the “truth of the material” stands by the same ethical attitude as the English architecture, which had in the Smithsons its greatest defenders. On the other hand, the formal influence is connected to Le Corbusier: the raw concrete applied to pure prisms and the search for the monovolume used by the Swiss-franc architect. Influenced by foreign tendencies, Brutalism acquired specific features in Brazil. By the similitude it maintained with its origins, it is possible to identify such features. And by developing its differences, it gained autonomy and affirmation. The present research is developed around the questioning of the ethic and/or aesthetic principles present in the Paulista Brutalism, taking into consideration the modern precepts in which a purely aesthetic attitude would be irresponsible.