Art and Culture 

João Vilanova Artigas, 1915-1985

Poetry in Structural Joints

Guilherme Wisnik 
30/04/2015


João Vilanova Artigas was the great master of the ‘Paulista School,’ which took the lead in Brazilian architecture starting in the 1960s, after the inauguration of Brasilia and in the course of the military regime implanted in 1964. Born in 1915, Artigas was thirteen years older than Paulo Mendes da Rocha, the architect whom in 1959 he invited to be part of the group of professors of the University of São Paulo’s Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning. A relationship was struck which proved long-lasting: eight years later they would work together on the CECAP Zezinho Magalhães Prado housing development (1967), in Guarulhos, and both were purged in 1969 by the regime, which expelled them from the university and forbade them from engaging in professional activities in the country. Artigas died in 1985, having laid the ideological and formal foundations of an architectural tradition which continues to bear fruit today, grounded on the connection between a structure-based spatiality and social commitment...


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