O Ethos de uma escola : a formação do arquiteto no Recife de 1932 a 1974

Abstract

The historiography of Brazilian architecture, for almost 80 years, highlights the modern architecture developed in Recife, highlighting the role of the Architecture course created in 1932 at the School of Fine Arts of Pernambuco in the formation of generations of architects. This modernist production from Pernambuco is often referred to as “Escola do Recife”; however, there are debates in the literature about the term and its meaning. This thesis reflects on the existence of an autonomous “school” of architecture in Pernambuco. The question arises whether it would be just a historiographical denomination or a set of foundations shared between teachers and students in the academic environment and applied in professional practice and whether such foundations can constitute a school. The investigation focuses on the course, the agents involved – managers, professors, students, etc. – and to the predominant teaching methods, based on the assumption that it is in the architecture course that the production and reproduction of ideas occurs. As a theoretical-methodological key, we approach the idea of “Ethos”, understood as a set of traits and modes of behavior that shape the identity of a collective. Thus, we studied the ethos of the Recife Architecture course. In addition, we carried out documentary research on the course's institutional collection, made available by Memorial Denis Bernardes-UFPE, in addition to interviews with 18 graduates of the course, interpreted through Content Analysis.The results made it possible to identify the elements that characterize the Recife School ethos in four categories. In the teaching ethos, the Recife course combined the standards of the Ministry of Education with the ideas of modern architecture, with concern for environmental comfort as one of the main points conveyed. The social ethos, analyzed through the profiles of the subjects involved, showed that many worked at local, regional and national levels. In terms of cultural ethos, it was observed that Pernambuco presented a favorable context for education, architecture and arts, facilitating the installation of the institution. Regarding the ethos of the place, we identified the important role of the buildings occupied by the course in shaping the group’s identity. Initially located on Rua Benfica, the course had a small school body, generating a fertile “teaching atmosphere” for the school’s formation. In the 1950s, the formation of the Faculty and the move to the Olinda Seminary Headquarters, and later to its own headquarters on Avenida Conde da Boa Vista, saw the school body mature. n the 1970s, with the university reform of 1969, and with the formation of the Department of Architecture and Urbanism and the move to the University City in 1974, a change in the constitutive ethos was observed, culminating in the extinction of the Faculty that same year. The approach to understanding the Ethos of this group, in its four dimensions, leads us to a repositioning of the debate regarding its understanding as a school in fact. We believe that from them the term school can be used, because the Escola do Recife was a group in which the process of transmitting knowledge occurs between masters and epigones, that is, between architects, artists and engineers who graduated a first generation of architects, who later become part of the teaching staff of the school, feeding back into this teaching environment, an isolated environment that contributed to the construction of a cohesive identity. Furthermore, the content discussed by this group, especially regarding the practice of modern architecture adjusted to the place, ended up altering - as studies have already demonstrated - the built environment in which the group operated.