The legacy of Brazilian modernism is currently the subject of intense revisionism and serves as a central reference for many contemporary works, including those that reject its principles. This course seeks to historically define the category of "the modern" within the fields of architecture and design in Brazil, understanding its emergence in the context of the formation of a national identity.
Brazilian modernism derives from the European Modern Movement, which established itself as a concept in the 1930s. The course revisits the key events and works from the period between the 1930s and 1970s, taking the Ministry of Education and Public Health project in Rio de Janeiro (1936) as its starting point. The objective is to offer a historical and critical view of the projects, actors, texts, contexts, and legitimizing bodies of the movement in the country, as well as its parity with foreign schools and organizations. The initial perspective guiding the suggested curriculum is that Brazilian modernism resulted from the direct action of a small number of individuals, and that their efforts reached a limit in the mid-1970s, at the moment when the Modern Movement began to be the subject of international study and critique.
