Uns Brutos Nordestinos: a arquitetura da administração pública entre expressões brutalistas globais e inflexões locais [1964-1985]

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation addresses the issue of understanding the development of Brutalism in the capitals of the Brazilian Northeast between 1964 and 1985, shifting the historiographical focus away from interpretations that directly associate architecture with the political regime then in power. The empirical objects of investigation are public administration buildings – headquarters of the Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary branches, as well as state agencies of indirect administration – considered exemplary as they most clearly embody the tension between the representation of state authority and the freedom of formal invention. The chosen scope stems from the recognition that these buildings constituted the most fertile ground for examining the design strategies that gave identity to the architectural production of the period. The central hypothesis posits that, in the capitals of the Brazilian Northeast, the Brutalism of public-administration buildings took shape as a particular expression of a disciplinary type in international circulation, revealing stronger formal affinities with transnational matrices than with the São Paulo–based Brazilian Brutalism. This hypothesis reframes the question from dependence to convergence of repertoires, examining whether an intellectual and formal synchronicity existed in the Brazilian Northeast with European, North American, and Asian debates on Brutalist expressiveness. Building on this hypothesis, the general objective is to analyze, through volumetric expression and compositional principles, this architectural production by identifying recurrent design patterns and critically comparing them across the nine capitals of the Brazilian Northeast. By pursuing this objective, the research contributes to broadening historiographical interpretations, distancing itself from reductionist readings that subordinate form to political causality, climatic determinism, or the presupposition of exclusive centers of diffusion. To achieve this goal, the adopted method combines a systematic survey of documentary sources – technical drawings, press archives, institutional collections, and photographic records – with an immanent analysis of the works. Drawing inspiration from Spinoza, this approach allows the buildings themselves to define the criteria of their interpretation, revealing what they express and what they withhold, without forcing them into pre-established categories. Conceptually, the research draws from Aristotle the notion of formal cause, understood here as a principle of organization that enables the interpretation of a projects’s internal logic through the synchronicity between its expressive and organizational strategies. From Lukács, it recovers the dialectic between the typical and the particular: each work is simultaneously constituted by the incorporation of ideas circulating within the disciplinary field and by the absorption of local idiosyncrasies, which particularize international repertoires in specific contexts. This conceptual triad supports an inside-out analytical approach, in which the formal logic of the works is articulated with historical circumstances and symbolic functions without being determined by them. The findings confirm the pertinence of the proposed scope and substantiate the hypothesis that the Brutalism in the Brazilian Northeast did not rely on the São Paulo–based Brazilian Brutalism as an intermediary for the ideas circulating in the Northern Hemisphere, but instead established a more direct and open dialogue with them than historiography has previously acknowledged. More specifically, the study identified a set of Brutalist buildings in the capitals of the Brazilian Northeast whose formal coherence reveals both the appropriation of widely disseminated disciplinary repertoires and their re-elaboration in local contexts. It also demonstrates that the Brutalist language was employed as a sign of state representation, yet without direct subordination to formal directives imposed by the authoritarian regime. The research further refutes the notion that climate determined the formal order of Brazilian Northeastern architecture, showing that the adopted solutions respond primarily to autonomous disciplinary logics. Consequently, the Brutalism produced in the capitals of the Brazilian Northeast between 1964 and 1985 emerges as a legitimate chapter in the history of modern architecture, whose intelligibility lies on its formal causes and on the expressive force of its works, in direct dialogue with a globally shared architectural idiom.