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 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 traditional- style 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 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.

LINDA S.PHIPPS

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.1 (A-F).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2004.

Selected Publications

Sobre arquitetura, Porto Alegre, Brazil: Centro dos Estudantes Universitários de Arquitetura, 1962

Registro de uma vivência, São Paulo: Empresa das Artes, 1995

“In Search of a New Monumentality,” participant in print symposium, Architectural Review (London), 104 (September 1948)

“Razões da nova arquitetura,” “Uma escola viva de belas-artes,” “Depoimento de um arquiteto carioca,” “Autobiografia,” in Arquitetura moderna brasileira: Depoimento de uma geração, Alberto Xavier, editor, São Paulo: Associação Brasileira de Ensino de Arquitetura, 1987

“Memoria del plano piloto de Brasilia,” in Lucío Costa, edited by Jorge O. Gazaneo, Buenos Aires: Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas, 1959

“Comments on Brasilia,” in Doorway to Brasilia, edited by Aloisio Magalhães, Philadelphia: Falcon Press, 1959

Further Reading

Bruand, Yves, Arquitetura contemporânea no Brasil, translated from the French by Ana M. Goldberger, São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1981

Bullrich, Francisco, New Directions in Latin American Architecture, New York: Reinhold, 1969

Evenson, Norma, Two Brazilian Capitals; Architecture and Urbanism in Rio de Janeiro and Brasília, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1973

Ferraz, Geraldo, “Warchavchik & Lúcio Costa,” in Warchavchik e a introdução da nova arquitetura no Brasil: 1925 a 1940, São Paulo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 1965

Guimaraens, Ceca de, Lúcio Costa: Um certo arquiteto em incerto e singular roteiro, Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumara, Prefeitura Rio Arte, 1996

Harris, Elizabeth Davis, “Le Corbusier and the Headquarters of the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Health, 1936–45,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1984

Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Latin American Architecture since 1945, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955

Mindlin, Henrique, Modern Architecture in Brazil, New York: Reinhold, 1956

Santos, Cecilia Rodrigues dos, et al., Le Corbusier e o Brasil, São Paulo: Tessela, Projecto Editora, 1987

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