Infinite Span: 90 Years of Brazilian Architecture

In architecture, a span is something to be conquered, a challenge to overcome. For an instance by reducing the number of supports, expanding floor slabs horizontally, tearing into the open air, and shedding more light on the ground floor. But span, or vão in Portuguese, also means a project or an action that ends in failure: something that was done in vain. In Brazil, modernization was touted as a leap over the country s history, cast as backwardness and, in the case of architecture, over the absence of two traditions: the classical and the artisanal an abysmal jump, in the face of the immense scale of its territory. And a challenge met head-on by an ambitious aesthetic avantgarde, invested in new design and remarkable engineering. Brazil is a country condemned to the modern, said the critic Mário Pedrosa, conceiving this condemnation as liberation from tradition and as a freedome to transform what could be done in vain ( em vão ) in the effective cultural conquest of the free span ( vão livre ). For Brazilian architects, the word vão is almost always a synonym of freedom. This publication assembles representative projects and works of Brazilian architecture made between 1920 and 2018. It will propose crosscutting dialogues between the presented projects and highlight the intersections between architecture, music, literature, cinema, and performing arts. The book is structured in six chronological and thematic modules with titles corresponding to outstanding songs of each period.