Clube Líbano Brasileiro em Recife: um registro dos últimos suspiros

This article aims to register, as a way of preservation, the Project of the Líbano Brasileiro Club in Recife, created by the architect Dilson Mota Neves, one of the architects who belonged to the generation of the fifties and sixties in Pernambuco. Built in a moment in which the program of the social club represented the desires of the higher classes, the Club, today, after repeated and aggressive interventions, has its demolition announced to give place to a “modern” business tower, in the manner of the present elite. The Líbano Brasileiro Club project presents a composition of the first modernism, consisting of two two arches design that sustain both sides of the building, similar to The Soviets Palace of Le Corbusier (1930). This kind of solution was also utilized by the famous and pioneering architect Luiz Nunes, in 1935, at Alberto Torres Rural School, in Recife. Following the path opened by Amorim (2007), we intend to contribute for an Obituary of the modernist architecture in Pernambuco. In the end, we raise a question about the despise to the modernist heritage. In fact, if, in on one hand this despise can be assigned to the issues of real estate speculation and the voracity of the economic increase in value of the land with higher rate of occupancy, on the other hand, isn’t it an indication of a changing in the dominating classes? Could we not say that those who in the past were elite and built the clubs, such as the Líbano Brasileiro, have been replaced by the ones who build the business towers? Due to the impossibility to answer this question now, what the present article intends is to document one more moribund, emphasizing the value which is lost. Instead of simply mourning these losses, we want to foment a reactive discussion. Among the tears and candles of the successive deathbeds some specimen might be spared. Registration as a form of survival!