Edifício dos arquitetos da Bahia: uma crítica como obra de arte

The critical analysis of art in Brazil has been understood as subjective valuation and, in erroneous illation, as arbitrary valuation, perhaps the reason of its scarcity. However, it is essential stage and, if not explicit, it is occulted underlying in the pretense objectivity of studies supported in the historical value of the architecture. Why the historiography of a source and not of another one? What it guides the choice for a set of buildings, architects, methods or principles except an aprioristic critical attitude of the researcher or your predecessor? From this situation came the necessity of bringing to surface the question: where the artistic value of the construction inhabits? In the case, for the Edifício dos Arquitetos in Salvador (BA) - the headquarters of the IAB-BA in the Ladeira da Praça -, of plural authorship, approached as work of art from a critical point of view. The text only focuses the artistic values that the construction can present, crucial question since the building is placed in sensible area of Salvador and with the recurrent controversies of the production contemporary in protected perimeters, in old urban sites. The analysis always focuses the constructed and perceived work. The starting point is the art concept as value, attributed to any human artifact (ARGAN, 1992), without the coarse dichotomy that opposed utility and enjoyment, as if contradictory, and without the elitist and useless varnish connotation. Argan (1993) observes that all judgment of work of art have a historical component, since it places itself at some moment of the global production, thus separating, for example, pioneers of epigones, visionaries of anachronistic. The intention here, however, is to try a approaching with similar premises to the pure visibilism, using the concepts of eidetic reduction derivated from phenomenology (HUSSERL, 1986); the analysis of Gestalt Theory (ARNHEIM, 1989) and Ecological Psychology (GIBSON, 1950 apud HALL, 2005). The phenomenology assists to discover, for act of conscientious research, the expressivity of things, in the perception of the perception itself. The Gestalt theory contributes with the exercise of the dynamic balance of the work of art (ARNHEIM, 1980) and the principle of prägnanz or conciseness. This principle is enough illustrated in literature with elementary figures, however it only can be applied to more sophisticated figures inside a culture - produced for a culture and taught by a culture, not being phylogenetics - to understand that it is by principles studied by Ecological Psychology that exists the learning in the perception of the cognitive standards. Finally, the approach treats to exceed the pure visibilists concepts, showing the subtle interlacement between the sensory receptors (HALL, 2005), mainly in that it refers to the importance of the paths, the serial vision (CULLEN, 1983) and of the displacements of the look. In a second moment the text presents a description of origin of the project, the construction and its transformations in the time, to complement and clarify the context for the reader, tying continent and content, and as way to illustrate better what we judge a excellent building in the set of the bahian Modernism and in the Historical Center of the city.