Lúcio Costa

Architect, Brazil
Lúcio Costa (b.Toulon, France 1902, d. Rio de Janeiro Brazil 1988)
played a seminal role in introducing modern architecture and urbanism to
Brazil. A dedicated teacher, he often included talented younger designers
in important projects. Costa tempered modern European methods with
local materials, building techniques, and vernacular design traditions, thus
contributing significantly to the development of a modern Brazilian
expression. During his lifetime he fostered appreciation for Brazil’s
unique architectural heritage and was active in the historic preservation
movement, particularly in his later years.
As a 1924 graduate of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, he
participated in the neo-Colonial movement. His promise as an articulate designer in that
style helped secure his position as the director of the Escola in 1930 at age 28. Yet
Costa’s interests in such European modernists as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and
Le Corbusier were further galvanized by the latter’s brief visit to Rio in 1929. Costa soon
became a major force for the dissemination of the ideas of Le Corbusier and CIAM
(Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) in Latin America. His reforms at the
Escola included appointments of progressive architects to the faculty to teach modern
design. Costa hired São Paulo-based modernist Gregori Warchavchik to teach
architectural composition, and the two established a local practice from 1931 to 1933.
Although popular with students, the new appointments soon aroused the enmity of the
traditional faculty. By year’s end they forced Costa’s resignation. A six-month student
strike ensued, resulting in the retention of many reforms. With Warchavchik, Costa’s
work demonstrates a decidedly International Style flavor. Their innovative Vila Operária
apartments (1933) in Rio’s Gamboa district with its flat roofs, terraces, and facade of
angled volumes is equal to the best European work of the period.
Despite his commitment to progressive social and architectural ideologies, Costa
steadfastly held that contemporary architects had much to learn from Brazil’s colonial
heritage. Rather than simply copy the past, he sought a modern expression for Brazil’s
architecture, one taking into account the country’s climate, landscape, and unique
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melange of indigenous, European, and African cultures. Costa’s neo-Colonial designs
attested to his beliefs. His residence (1942) for Argemiro Hungria Machado in Rio,
although in a traditional style, evinced rational planning and clarity in massing. The
house surrounded a patio and garden, with internal spaces opening freely onto sheltered
external ones. Costa’s residential architecture best characterizes the continuing dialogue
in his thought between modernist theory and local building techniques and traditions.
Costa’s first major commission to draw international attention was his
collaborative design for the headquarters (1936–43) for the Ministry of
Education and Public Health. Disregarding the results of a competition
dominated by traditional architects, Minister Gustavo Capanema requested
Costa to create a design expressing the progressive agenda of his new
ministry. Costa formed a team of local architects, many his former
students, and later secured Le Corbusier’s participation as a consultant. Le
Corbusier’s three-week visit produced two projects, including one for an
alternative site. The Brazilian team (Oscar Niemeyer, Carlos Leão, Jorge
Moreira, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, and Ernani Vasconcelos) developed one
of these projects for the original site, with significant changes by
Niemeyer. Ricardo Burle-Marx designed the gardens with indigenous
plants, and Cândido Portinari ornamented the exterior with traditionalstyle
tiles. The Ministry constituted one of Brazil’s earliest and most
important modern public buildings. Its native translation of the Le
Corbusian idiom drew widespread attention from the international
architectural press and was much imitated after World War II. Costa again
collaborated with Niemeyer on the Brazilian Pavilion at the New York
World’s Fair in 1939, thus continuing the synthesis of Brazilian and
modernist forms encapsulated in the Ministry building. Costa’s designs for multiple dwellings demonstrated his concern for more comprehensive
planning. His Parque Guinle complex (1948–54) included three of six projected
apartment blocks in a verdant setting, closely following ideas suggested by CIAM in the
Athens Charter. The horizontal slab apartments, ranging from seven to eight stories,
included single- and double-level units, open communal areas on the interiors, and
parking at ground level. As usual the architect incorporated indigenous building materials
and forms, including wooden louvers and ceramic tiles. Costa’s design won the award for
multifamily habitations at the First Biennial Exposition in São Paulo in 1953.
The architect’s winning design in the 1956 international competition for the Pilot Plan
of Brazil’s new capital secured his fame as an architect and planner. The cross-shaped
organization of Brasilia carefully divided major functions into two main zones, one
official and the other mainly residential. The plan, often likened to the shape of an
airplane, both recalls and far exceeds the scale of Washington, D.C., because of its
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monumental axis. This axis terminates in the Plaza of Three Powers, encapsulating the
three branches of government. At the opposite end, government is countered by the mass
media in Costa’s television tower. The “wings” contain apartment blocks interspersed
with small shops, restaurants, and churches. A theater, bus station, shopping malls, and
hotel and banking sectors stand at the intersection of the two axes. Although much
criticized, this city of two million inhabitants presently enjoys lower crime and many
amenities lacking in Brazil’s other crowded urban centers. Costa’s unrealized design
(1968) for the Barra de Tijuca, a suburban beach resort in Rio, offered a comprehensive
development interspersing park spaces and conservation areas with private residences on
a regional scale.
Costa’s lifelong involvement with Le Corbusier has sometimes obscured his central
role in Brazilian modernism in the international arena. Although frustrated by Le
Corbusier’s efforts to take credit for ideas developed by Brazil’s young designers, Costa
remained loyal, collaborating with Le Corbusier in the design of the Brazilian Pavilion
(1956) at the Cité Universitaire in Paris and as an architectural consultant from 1950 to
1953 for the team overseeing the UNESCO seat in Paris. The lack of any major study in
English to date has impeded a broader appreciation and understanding of Costa’s
important contributions as architect, writer, and teacher in the development of modernism
in the mid-20th century.

Architect Charles Mark Correa

Architect, India
In 1958 Charles Mark Correa was awarded two commissions that would showcase his
approach to architecture: the Pavilion for the All India Handloom Board in New Delhi
(1958) and the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya, a museum and archive at Mahatma
Gandhi’s ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati River in Ahmedabad (1963). Designed
and built in six months, the temporary Handloom Pavilion consisted of a series of stepped
earth-filled platforms contained within a square enclosure of sun-dried bricks and shaded
by freestanding wood and handloom-fabric parasols. The exhibition unfolded as the visitors
in the first sequence ascended the platforms and then, in the second sequence,
descended in a spiral manner. The subtle interplay of enclosed and semienclosed spaces
brought about by a shifting axis, later to become a leitmotif of Correa’s work, also
formed the central device in the Gandhi Sangrahalaya.
The existing buildings in Gandhi’s ashram were whitewashed one-story masonry
structures with tiled roofs, some of which had a linear arrangement, while others, such as
Gandhi’s own residence, were wrapped around a small courtyard. Correa’s addition
addressed this typology in an assemblage of pavilions arranged around a central water
court, only four of which, containing archival material, were enclosed. The tiled-roof
structures were supported on a modular system of masonry columns and reinforcedconcrete
beams that also served as rainwater conduits. The result was a serene
atmosphere: alternating open and covered spaces, the dapple of light and shade, a few
carefully chosen trees in the courtyards, the reflection of the water, and the breeze from
the river. The profoundly antimonumental gesture of the Gandhi Sangrahalaya, in fact,
monumentalized the “village” idea central to Gandhi’s philosophy. It augmented a
decisive departure in 20th-century architecture from accepted canons of monumentality
and the memorialization of national heroes. These two early projects also challenged the
heroic modernism then unfolding in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad in the works of Le
Corbusier.
In over 140 projects that have followed, Correa has used a minimal set of
formal devices—the stepped platform reminiscent of wells and river ghats,
the open-to-sky space in the form of terraces and courts, the freestanding
parasol roof, the split-level space to minimize full-height walls, the
shifting axis of pedestrian movement, the square module, and the framed
view—to create a complex spatial repertoire. Although the importance of
open-to-sky space takes the form of generous terrace gardens and courts
sculpted from the sloping site and enhanced by judicious framing of the
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lake view at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal (1981), the same principle is used to
carve out double-height garden terraces and provide an environmental
buffer of verandas and service spaces in the high-rise Kanchenjungha
Apartments in Bombay (1983). In both cases it is the subtle manipulation
of the building section belying the apparently simple plan arrangements
that enabled him to attenuate the microclimate and at the same time make
sculptural statements. In the Permanent Mission of India to the United
Nations in New York City (1992) and the Alameda Park Project in Mexico
City (1994–), these spatial voids/framed views became giant “urban
windows”—his signature—that address the urban scale while offering the outsider a hint of the layered spaces inside. His formal principles apply as well for a
luxury condominium as they do for low-cost housing. As he noted in a postcolonial
manifesto—The New Landscape (1985)—both rich and poor, grand monuments and vernacular buildings,
share the same landscape.
His writings presented alternate possibilities for building practice and urban planning.
In an unusual move for an architect, he argued that the solution to the problem of socalled
Third World housing resided not in more innovative technology or new materials
or even better architectural design, but in socio-spatial equity and a great deal of common
sense. He himself, however, designed several low-cost housing schemes (e.g., Belapur,
1986) in response to what he labeled the “belligerently anti-visual” approach to low-cost
housing among architects. His “housing bill of rights” included concepts such as
incrementality, pluralism, identity, income generation, disaggregation, and the “equity
plot”—in urban areas each family should be allotted a plot between 50 and 75 square
meters. Many of his ideas seemed to ignore the complexity of urban problems, and yet he
was fully cognizant of the deep sociopolitical implication of his suggestions. In urging an
integral look at the landscape that would overcome barriers between different institutions
and experts, Correa was essentially questioning the fundamentals of eco nomic and
physical planning theory and the design process that had failed to answer housing needs
around the world—whether in India, the United States, or the former Soviet Union. Many
of his concepts have been successfully used at an architectural scale, but implementation
at an urban level remains unfulfilled. His writing displays a rare clairvoyance and
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profound belief in the possibilities of a socialist democracy and the “third option”—the
term “Third World,” he reminded his readers, was coined not to facilitate an ordinal
ranking of nations but to generate the possibility of an alternative, “one different from
Joseph Stalin’s USSR and John Foster Dulles’ USA.”
Since the 1970s, like many architects around the world, Correa has included more
features of popular culture, color, and allusion to enrich his primary architectural
vocabulary, which had already been formulated by the first decade of his practice. The
brilliant color scheme of the tourist resort of Cidade de Goa in Dona Paula (1982) that
exceeded the modernist primary palette was accentuated with trompe l’oeil to create a
“city” that was part imagined, part illusory, and part real. He has successfully used
paintings and sculptures (often in collaboration with well-known artists) to enhance the
spatial architectonics (for example, in the Kala Academy in Panaji, Goa, 1984; the British
Council in New Delhi, 1992; and the Inter-University Center of Astronomy and
Astrophysics in Pune, 1992), and in doing so has been instrumental in resituating painting
as a legitimate accompaniment to contemporary architecture. This interest in popular
sources has also been increasingly accompanied by a vocabulary that attempts to root his
architecture not just in the vernacular but in what he calls the mythic values of Indian
tradition. Not surprisingly, some of this early experimentation in vocabulary (the kudil,
“individual suite”; otla, “raised platform”; and chattai, “rush mats”) took place in resort hotels that
paid homage to ethnic chic and government patronage of India’s craft tradition. The now
ubiquitous kunds (rectangular pools) and mandalas (cosmic diagrams) appearing in Correa’s
recent projects were most flamboyantly used in the Jawahar Kala Kendra Museum in
Jaipur (1992) with its nine-square mandala plan, stone inlaid symbols of planets, and
brilliantly painted, overscaled murals. When read against the architect’s explanatory
texts, they indicate a complex negotiation between the ascribed position of a Third World
architect, who is expected to express his regional identity (as opposed to a “Western”
architect, who is not), and the desire to supersede such binding propositions.
By aligning the aesthetic inspiration from a local tradition with a universal language of
science and metaphysics, he attempts to reverse the route and the terms through which
universal principles were supposed to enter the world of modern architecture. In a
practice that has spanned four continents and a vast range of government institutions,
corporate offices, museums, hotels, and residential designs, Correa has employed an
architectural syntax that fluidly travels between contexts and serves as one of the most
convincing critiques of the principles of a universalized modernism and its Euro-
American bias.
Apart from his own ruminations on architecture, there are three monographs on Correa
and scores of articles that comment on individual projects, a complete list of which is
available in the 1996 monograph.

Inter-University Center for Astronomy
and Astrophysics, Pune, view of
courtyard facade (1992) Photo by
Charles Correa