“Send a piece of me to the North,
To the cities of Today that I loved so much.
Send another to the South,
To the seas that the Navigators opened.
Throw another piece of me to the West,
Where all that may be the Future is burning,
Future I adore without knowing it.
And the other, the others, the rest of me,
Throw to the East,
To the East from where everything comes, day and faith”.

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) (1).

East-West Attraction

The Portuguese discovered Brazil (1500) on their way to the Far East. The first Europeans to land in China (1513), they made Macao their permanent base there (1556). Salvador da Bahia, an earlier settlement (1549) and the first Brazilian capital, was a most convenient port of call (2). Merchants mingled with artisans and missionaries under the Ming and the Qing dynasties. Some worked both in Portugal's South American colony and in the Asian empire, like the Jesuit priest Charles de Belleville, a painter and architect also known as Wei-Kia-Lou (1657–1730) (3). Jesuits and Franciscans were prominent in both countries, the Franciscans staying in Brazil when the Jesuits were expelled from the Portuguese Empire (1759). Unsurprisingly, Chinese references are abundant in the Brazilian architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Altarpieces may include lacquered panels depicting pagodas and almond-eyed figures, as if celebrating the worldwide triumph of Christendom. Clay-tiled hip roofs with curved upturned eaves can be found in both churches and plantation houses, helping to project rain further away from exterior walls, softening the hip roof's profile, and crowning the building like a hat (4). Brazil is a colonial chapter of the European infatuation with chinoiserie, and that infatuation was strong enough to give China a role in late eighteenth century Western architectural theory. In a dissertation (1785), French scholar Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849) had the tent, the hollowed-out cave, and the hut as the archetypes of Chinese, Egyptian, and Greek architectures respectively — the former deemed too light, the second deemed too heavy, and the latter praised as exemplarily balanced (5).

Chinese references reappeared in the nineteenth century, now filtered by Anglo-French supremacy and Iberian decline as the Industrial Revolution followed its course. Rio de Janeiro, which had succeeded Salvador as capital, became the seat of the Portuguese Court fleeing Napoleon's army (1808). Brazil became United Kingdom with Portugal (1815) and then an independent Empire (1822). The King brought Chinese workers to start a tea plantation in Rio's Botanic Garden (6) and French architect Grandjean de Montigny (1776–1850) to be the first Professor of Architecture at the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes (1816), officially founded a decade later in the image and likeness of the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts. Montigny, a Prix de Rome winner, called attention to the Anglo-Chinese garden featuring exotic follies, remotes in time or space (7). Unfortunately, his designs remained on paper and the tea plantation did not prosper (8). But coffee did, and the picturesque garden was implemented in Brazil by another French expatriate, botanist Auguste Glaziou, who came to Rio (1858) to be Director of the city’s Department of Parks and Gardens. His realizations include the park surrounding the Imperial Palace of São Cristóvão (1870), in which a Chinese kiosk overlooks a serpentine man-made lake. Quinta da Boa Vista, the compound, was probably visited by Chinese diplomat Yunlong Fu, a Quing Empire minister who came to discuss immigration policies (January 1889). His published report, The Illustrative Collection of Brazil, contains the first Chinese language map of Brazil (1904).

The first officially recoganized Chinese-language map of Brazil
Imagem divulgação/ disclosure image [Yunlong Fu, The Illustrative Collection of Brazil]

Brazil turned republican (November 1889) and dismissive of all things Portuguese, but Chinese references in garden elements persisted, as shown by the construction of the Chinese View Gazebo (1902–1906) at the Tijuca Forest in the outskirts of Rio, contemporary with the opening of Rio Branco Avenue in the city center, a major feat of modernization. The Academia Imperial de Belas Artes became the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes — ENBA. Information and/or commentaries on Chinese architecture could be found in the works of Maurice Paleologue, Auguste Choisy and Banister Fletcher, all of them available at the school's library, along with those of Quatremère (9). Paleologue provided excellent illustrations of Chinese buildings. Choisy made light of Quatremère's association of Chinese architecture with the tent but thought that Chinese and Egyptian architectures were incapable of evolution or perfectibility. Banister Fletcher combined the ideas of Quatremère and Choisy. In his representation of the tree of architecture, Greek- the ancestor of Western architecture- is the trunk. Chinese and Egyptian are two branches. The Greek style is classed as historical and therefore progressive. The Chinese and the Egyptian are classed as non-historical, or outside history, anachronistic. In the prevailing historicist eclecticism, both suited recreational programs, like cafés and theaters. Yet, as the Independence centennial approached, the idea of a Brazilian Colonial Revival style became appealing, and the re-discovery of the Chinese influence upon traditional Brazilian architecture did not take long. Brazilian Orientalism was presented in texts either short and monographic like that by architect Adolpho Morales de los Rios (1858–1928), or dense and wide-ranging like those by social historian Gilberto Freyre (10).

Morales, a former student of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, was the leading architect in Rio and a teacher at ENBA. One of his students was Lucio Costa (1902–1998), a rising star of the Brazilian Colonial style Revival movement who converted to a CIAM — affiliated version of modern architecture (1930). The first CIAM delegate from Brazil was Russian émigré Gregori Warchavchik (1896–1972), whose pioneer modern houses (he called them modernist, and adjective that Costa loathed for its estheticizing connotations) in São Paulo predate CIAM's foundation (1928). Costa was the elder of a brilliant group of ENBA trained Brazilian architects, such as Jorge Moreira (1904–1992), Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012), Affonso Eduardo Reidy (1909–1964) and the Roberto Brothers, Marcelo (1908–1964) and Milton (1914–1953). With the support of the Vargas revolutionary and authoritarian government (1930–1945), their designs crystallized a Rio-based school of Brazilian modern architecture that won international acclaim with "Brazil Builds: New and Old, 1652–1942," an exhibition and catalogue at the Museum of Modern Art of New York somehow correcting earlier appraisals such as The International Style by Hitchcock and Philip Johnson (1932) — for which no Brazilian work had been selected (11). Costa was also a leader in the preservation of traditional Brazilian architecture, Baroque and Neoclassical, erudite and vernacular. He was one of the directors of SPHAN, the National Heritage of Brazil (created 1937). Freyre, who revalued the racial mixture and the balance of antagonisms that characterized Brazilian culture, collaborated with the agency from its beginning (12).

Architectural communication between China and Brazil — or Portugal — had asymmetrical outcomes. The Christian churches in Macao and mainland China were irrelevant for the Chinese architectural culture. One or two summer palaces were courtly divertissements. Yet defeat in the mid-nineteenth century Opium Wars forced China to let Western powers build in the country's ports and capital. Portugal, who was not among those powers, also lost as the British got Hong-Kong and Macao ceased to be the single port open to foreigners for the China trade. Growing imperialist demands from the industrialized countries and the Qing government's powerlessness regarding them fed a nationalist reaction. China turned into a Republic (1911) one year after Portugal, who also resented the subordination to British interests. Later, the United States government offered scholarships to Chinese students as a public relations gesture. Liang Sicheng (1901–1972), Yang Tingbao (1901–1982), Chen Zhi (1902–2002) and Liang's future wife Li Huiyin (1904–1955) were among those that enrolled in the School of Architecture of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia — Louis Kahn (1901–1974) was a classmate. They studied under French architect Paul Philippe Cret (1876–1945), a graduate from the Paris Beaux Arts (who taught at Penn since 1903).

Jilin University, main building, Jilin, China, 1930. Architects Liang, Chen, Tong and Cai
Harold Kalmann, "Chinese spirit in modern strength" [Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch]

National Central Museum, Nanjing, 1948. Architects Su, Yang and Lei; Liang Sicheng consultant
Foto David290 [Wikimedia Commons]

The Liaoning Terminal of the Shenyang Jingfeng Railway, Shenyang, China, 1930. Architect Yang Tingbao
Xing Ruan, “American Beaux-Arts in Twentieth-Century Chinese Architectural Education and P [Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians]

Dahua Theater, Nanjing, China, 1934. Architect Yang Tingbao
Foto divulgação /disclosure image [Cinema Treasures]

Dahua Theater, interior, Nanjing, China, 1934. Architect Yang Tingbao
Harold Kalmann, "Chinese spirit in modern stFoto divulgação /disclosure imagerength" [Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch]

A key tenet deserves consideration. In Rio and Philadelphia, not to mention Paris, good architecture was thought to demand correct composition and appropriate character. Quatremère defined character as "the proper manner, the distinctive physiognomy that belongs to each work of art, each author, each genre, each school, each country, each century" (13). Character was the correspondence between the architectural impression and the moral impression of the program, and the program was the legitimate source of variety in architecture for Cret's mentor Julien Guadet (1834–1908), the author of Eléments et Théorie de l'Architecture, young Costa's bedside book (14). Characterization, said Quatremère, involves manipulation of the geometry and materiality of buildings, being achievable "by the forms of the plan and of the elevation; by the choice, measure and the manner of ornament and decoration; through the massing and the kind of construction and materials" (15). It implies, it must be added, activating memories through substantival and adjectival strategies: by recalling pertinent formal precedents for a given building program as statements of lineage and by recreating moods conventionally associated with a given building program as indications for behavior. Programs can be classed by purpose, rank, and type, going from eminent to humble, generically representational to utilitarian (monument to equipment, palace to house, skyscraper to cottage, and so on). Situation affects them all, observed Guadet. It relates to time in many spans (from ephemeral to everlasting, remote past to projected future) and to place in many levels (site, district, city, region, nation, continent, world). The characterization of situation in historical and geographical dimensions infiltrates the characterization of program and vice-versa.

As the design of civic monuments was a widely known concern of the Beaux Arts, neither the Brazilians nor the Chinese could avoid tackling the characterization of nationhood. Political and social construction of the nation-state was very much a nineteenth-century Western problem, inextricably linked to the twin phenomena of modernization and industrialization. Mass production demanded large markets that were culturally unified, thus calling for the identification and celebration of signals of shared heritage. Involving ideas on both tradition and modernity, characterization of nationhood pushed the Beaux Arts to look at the past from the perspective of the present with an eye on the future. Historicism did not preclude use of advanced technology. In that light, the style wars of the first half of the nineteenth century appear as attempts to convert a historical style into an emblem of nationhood acceptable by a community speaking the same language. A late follower of that course, the Colonial style Revivals in the Americas started at the turn of the century — when Guadet was proposing an alternative consonant with the international appeal and worldwide approach of the Beaux Arts. By comparing pairs of programmatically similar Classical examples in France and Italy, Guadet showed how inflected elements of an imported architectural style of international diffusion could signal national features (16). Otherwise, historicism did not preclude the use of current or advanced technology. From that viewpoint, even revivalist nineteenth-century work in the West should be termed eclectic, as it incorporates state-of-the-art means of cooking, washing, lighting, heating, cooling etc (17). Literally, eclecticism means picking out the best of different worlds. A lively interplay kept going on at the Beaux Arts between nationality and internationalism, modernity and tradition, foreignness and native birth, innovation and copying. It created a scene whose complexity detractors did not see.

For Liang, Yang, and their colleagues educated abroad, the Beaux Arts system felt fresh and up to date, a working piece of Western weaponry they were eager to cannibalize. On their return (mid-1920s) they replaced the foreigners that dominated the Chinese professional market and often discriminated against native talent and often discriminated against native talent. They came back as modern architects by all current criteria but those of CIAM (founded in 1928) and lived through a tense but productive decade before China was invaded by Japan (1937). Their work related to an evolutionary spirit instead of avant-garde tactics. Following Cret, their work testifies to the survival and modernization of Beaux Arts historicist eclecticism after the First World War (18). On the one hand, they favored the blend of overt references that the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock called eclecticism of style (features of different styles in a single building) in contrast with eclecticism of taste (different styles used contemporaneously but each building all in one style) (19). On the other hand, eclecticism of taste was still operative, as different stylistic references were often used to characterize different families of programs- for instance, colossal pilasters in civic buildings and horizontal windows in private villas.

These young men mistrusted both uniformity and originality. Passionate about their country's architectural heritage and keen on its survey, inventory, and preservation, they evoked nationhood by introducing traditional Chinese feature or proportions that varied according to program, among them columns with brackets and large roofs eventually subjected to a degree of abstraction. Symmetrical and axial compositions prevailed, but a cautious stripping down of surfaces signaled the present age by stressing constants rather than breakthroughs, honoring yesterday over tomorrow. Masonry masses punctured by windows were formed into centripetal, hierarchical compositions. Contemporary building technologies went concealed; ornament was not shunned. Colossal pilasters and pillars emphasized verticality. A degree of visual conservatism catered to bourgeois taste, but was not devoid of mass and party appeal, as like-minded Socialist Realism would show (1934). Following an indication from Costa (20), this can be called eclectic-academic architecture of the modernist variety, akin to Art Déco and sometimes incorporating bits of Streamlined Moderne, distinct from traditionalist eclectic-academic architecture (either collagist or revivalist) and built (1928–1937) before comparable programmatic opportunities appeared in Brazil (1936–1945).

For the Brazilians educated at home, the Beaux Arts was a somewhat faded given, part of a nationalized system already one-hundred-years old. Alignment with CIAM defined a distinctive camp opposite to historicist eclecticism and Colonial revivalism. No xenophobia was involved, as there were émigré professionals in those three camps, and legislation prevented foreigners from practicing on their own. Respecting Auguste Perret (1874–1954) and the Bauhaus of Walter Gropius (1883–1969), admiring Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) and enthusiastic about Le Corbusier (1887–1965), Costa and his group were CIAM members, a third generation of modern architects according to Hitchcock (21). Costa remarked:

“CIAM congregates architects of a truly modern spirit... those who, finding a fundamental discord between present building processes and the historical styles, seek to re-adjust those processes not to the dead forms of those styles but to the permanent principles of good architecture, creating thus truly works of art, as in the past” (22).

Nevertheless, Costa did not demonize the Beaux Arts, unlike Le Corbusier. For the Brazilian, the legitimate heir to the academic tradition was a strict modern architecture predicated on the skeletal frame and the reduction of primary elements — column, pillar, floor, roof, and wall — to their essential geometry, yet open to other types of structural elements — vaults, cables, even load-bearing walls — when convenient. A typology of programs related to a typology of structures. Quatremère's cave, tent and hut were integrated into a single system. Advanced, the Rio-based group called for evidencing the new building technologies of the machine age. Radical, the group asked for disciplinary regeneration. The Brazilians sided with the critic Charles Baudelaire, according to whom modernity is always transient, fleeting, contingent. It is one side of art, with the other being eternal and unchanging. Costa saw two formal conceptions meeting and matching each other in modern architecture, a Nordic Oriental beauty blossoming like a flower and a Greco Latin beauty bounded like a crystal. Formal variety could be achieved within a consistent system. As for symmetry, understood in the original sense of commensurability and balance, it meant much more than mirror images. Balanced asymmetry was allied with centrifugal, horizontally stratified composition (23).

Brazilians liked their modern architecture thin and light. The perceptual dissolution of the architectural volume in its constituent plain surfaces, blank or glazed. A hallmark of industrialization that could concurrently recall the timelessness of geometric elementalism, minimalism could also be associated with the simplicity of Brazilian vernacular architecture; the reinforced concrete frame, with its wattle and daub construction; the horizontal window with the ribbon wood frames of nineteenth century verandahs; and so on. Frankly progressive, Brazilian iconography emphasized forms suggestive of the machine age and the future it promised. Allusion replaced overt historical reference and included stylized figuration nearing abstraction to reference nature or machinery. Even communist Niemeyer was no admirer of proletarian, representative, representational, and partisan Socialist Realism (24). Indeed, regarding civic buildings, Socialist Realism's prescriptions could be exemplified by American buildings like the 30thStreet Station in Philadelphia (1927–1933) by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White or the National Gallery of Art (1935–1941) and the Jefferson Memorial (1939–1942) in Washington, the former by John Russell Pope (1874–1937), the latter by Eggers & Higgins after studies by Pope — not to mention much of Cret's work. CIAM-affiliated modern architecture was a minority affair until the design of the United Nations headquarters signaled its triumph in the West — Latin America included — together with the advent of the Pax Americana and the beginning of the Cold War.

Niemeyer and Liang met in New York (1947) as members of the United Nations Board of Design, a group of eleven architects from different countries chaired by American Wallace K. Harrison. Le Corbusier had the strongest voice, but Niemeyer's ideas surprised and convinced. The final design combined the proposals of Le Corbusier and Niemeyer. The Chinese courtyard inspired Liang’s proposal. According to the official recorder of the meetings, Liang was against buildings extending along a north south axis and wanted a walled compound (25). However, he supported Niemeyer's design, which featured a slab building along that axis and a plaza open to the street. According to scholar Tao Zhu, Liang recognized that “communication with modern architects, such as Niemeyer, Corbusier, and Harrison, was enlightening and rewarding" (26). The United Nations experience was beneficial in terms of design process and design product. He learned there from superpowers and countries in the periphery of Western civilization, like Brazil. Indeed, by 1945, when the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War were ending, Liang's view of modernism in architecture had already advanced from formal and symbolical problems to issues such as housing and urban planning. He had devised a Bauhaus-inspired curriculum for his School of Architecture.

Niemeyer and the Rio-based school of modern architecture were then in their heyday. According to historian Fernando Lara, over one hundred articles on both were published in Europe and the United States just from 1947 to 1949 (27), the year when Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China. At that time, the Chinese intellectual community was fully aware of the Brazilian architect and work. The Nanking-Shanghai Newsweek used an entire page to introduce “modern architecture” in Brazil (1948) (28). The highlight was the headquarters of the Ministry of Education and Public Health, MES (1936–1945). The MES design team was led first by Costa (1936–1942), then by Niemeyer (1942–1945); Le Corbusier was consultant for one month but had no participation whatsoever in the final design (29). The MES building was the main item in the Museum of Modern Art of New York's Brazil Builds (30). In hindsight, the 1936–1945 work of the Brazilian school of modern architecture could be considered “the fulcrum between the modernism of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and the modernism that was to emerge in the United States after World War II”, as historian and curator Barry Bergdoll observed recently (31). There was an institutional side to this: the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo inaugurated the first International Biennial of Architecture in 1951. Liang was invited but could not or did not want to go.

Ministry of Education and Public Health of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro RJ, 1945. Architects Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Le Corbusier, Carlos Leão, Affonso Eduardo Reidy and Jorge Machado Moreira
Foto divulgação/ disclosure image [CPDOC FGV]

Beijing Brasilia and the Remote Past

Diplomatic relations between Brazil and China were disrupted when China became a communist country (1949). Yet the design and building of a new capital for Brazil in the hinterland interested the Chinese as soon as President Juscelino Kubitschek (1955) announced it. The idea was ancient, and Planaltina (a provisional name and location) had made news in China (1922) (32). Bird's eye views of Rio had been published (1930) showing the Brazilian expertise in large urban projects, which included not only the Rio Branco Avenue but also the razing of Castelo Hill (33). From the urban standpoint, the MES building, which stood in the Esplanade thus created, is an equipped plaza, which simultaneously opposes and complements the perimeter blocks around it. From the architectural standpoint, its T-shaped composition creates forecourts with a low wing and tall slab making use of sophisticated axial displacements; Yang's rather austere Beijing Peace Hotel (1951–1953) will adopt a similar strategy. Complementary opposition at this level can be traced back to the Romantic Classicism infatuation for Italianate villas. Complementary opposition in the city is a very old idea, shrewdly used by Costa in the campus design for the University of Brazil (1936), slightly earlier than MES. It works there not only between public plaza and school courtyards but also between the campus itself and Quinta da Boa Vista, which retains its individuality although skillfully integrated into the master plan. Liang adopts a similar attitude in his plan for Beijing, in which a new administrative center would adjoin the preserved old city (1950). Nevertheless, Liang's plan was refused, whereas Costa won the competition for the Brasilia Pilot Plan (1956) (34).

Peace Hotel, Beijing, China, 1954. Architect Yang Tingbao
Xing Ruan, “American Beaux-Arts in Twentieth-Century Chinese Architectural Education and P [Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians]

Complementary opposition reappeared in Costa's winning entry, in which a straight monumental axis intersects a curving residential axis: the City Beautiful of the Beaux Arts meets a variant of the neighborhood unit idea by Liang's favorite Clarence Stein in a composition that is aware of but not overwhelmed by the Functional City of the dying CIAM (the last congresses were held in 1956 and 1959). Costa’s report is a rhetorical masterpiece and has been extensively examined. But it does not tell everything. Two Chinese references matter. On the one hand, Costa put the government complex at the head of the new capital, as Le Corbusier had done in Chandigarh, but gave it greater visibility with no loss of connectivity, thanks to the cruciform layout and its central void. Both architects learned from ancient Chang'an, the former capital of China’s Tang Dynasty and eastern end of the Silk Road, planned in the sixth century with the Imperial Palace as its head (35). On the other hand, Costa notes in his report that he foresaw "the application in contemporary terms of the millenary art of embankment (36)," that is, in combination with the most advanced techniques of highway engineering, and twice elsewhere he avowed that a photography book on Chinese architecture brought inspiration. Speaking about the ingredients of his Pilot Plan, Costa lists Chinese embankments, retaining walls, and pavilions as seen in that book, along with French culture, Brazilian colonial cities, English lawns, American parkways (37). Speaking about the design of Brasilia's Monumental Axis, Costa recalled as follows the book he saw on a visit to the United States:

“It so happens that during the preparation of the initial project of Brasília, I had in my hands two volumes about Chinese architecture by a German photographer — from 1904, if I am not mistaken. They were fabulous photos, showing the extensive walls, the embankments and that centuries-old architecture of incredible beauty, all accompanied by drawings and surveys of the very refined layout of the various freestanding structures” (38).

Brasilia Pilot Plan Competition Report, sketch of the Monumental Axis. Architect Lucio Costa
Imagem divulgação/ disclosure image [Acervo/collection Casa de Lucio Costa]

Profile of the Monumental Axis, Brasilia DF. Architect Lucio Costa
Imagem divulgação/ disclosure image [Acervo/collection Casa de Lucio Costa]

Costa does not mention the author's name but gives clues. A survey at the ENBA Library suggested the name of German Ernst Boerschmann (1873–1949), now regarded as an influential Western sinologist and an excellent photographer. He visited China three times, from 1902 to 1904 as Costa noted, from 1906 to 1909, and from 1933 to 1937. However, the title available at ENBA, Baukunst und Landschaft in China (39), was not a two-volume set. As Boerschmann's first publication, on architecture and religion, had been issued in three separate volumes, Costa is most probably referring to Chinesische Architektur (40), although he might have also seen Baukunst und Landschaft, which enjoyed a worldwide success. Photos had captions in German, English and French, but there were editions for the English — and the French — speaking markets (41). Those have the word "picturesque" added to the title by the editors, presumably to suggest the debt to the tradition of the pictorial travel report (42). Otherwise, given its concern with landscape, it also connected to tradition of the naturalist expedition report aspiring to scientific objectivity (43).

A typical topographical profile in the book Chinesische Architektur
Imagem divulgação/ disclosure image [Ernst Boerschmann, Chinesische Architektur]

"The beautiful charms, the sublime moves", wrote Boerschmann's fellow countryman, philosopher Immanuel Kant. Boerschmann's photos in Chinesische Architecktur stress the sublimity of the country's monuments, which Kant would call splendid or noble rather than terrifying, inducing feelings of overwhelming beauty or quiet wonder, which Boerschmann associated with a sense of religious eternity, rather than awe mixed with melancholy (44). Boerschmann was not after Orientalist picturesqueness. He avoided nostalgia and he minimized exoticism. Liang's reticence about his work is undeserved. The walls and embankments in Boerschmann's photos always face a large area of farmland or grassland, maybe a waterbody (45). There is an obvious complementary opposition between wild or cultivated nature and the artifact standing for a second, man-made nature. Architecture recreates the ground on a higher plane. Moreover, expansive embankments turn into earthen platforms for airy pavilions, generating another instance of complementary opposition. A continuous scale variation associated with topography is another essential part of Boerschmann's examples, and one that recurs in Costa's design as succeeding platforms of varying elevation and shape. Costa was clearly impressed by the splendor, nobility, and subtlety that Boerschmann documents:

“As the crossing of the axes at three levels on the road platform (was) 700 meters long, i.e. precisely the same length as the Plaza of the Three Powers (Praça dos Três Poderes) side — meant that a lot of earth had to be removed, the idea came to me to make use of it by recreating the millenary solution of embankments, to exploit the reshaping of the ground at different levels, on successive terraces: five meters above the existing ground, emerging from the savanna, a first platform, triangular and equilateral, destined for the three autonomous powers of a democracy. Then, five meters higher, another platform, now rectangular and elongated — an esplanade for the ministries — which meets the existing ground again in the cultural sectors, followed, at a clearly different level, seven or eight meters above, by the structure of the bus station; and finally, further on, on the sloping ground, the base of the TV tower (46)”.

Embankment and grassland. North gate of Sianfu provincial capital, Shensi, China
Imagem divulgação/ disclosure image [Ernst Boerschmann, Chinesische Architektur]

In Costa's emulation of China's sublime monuments as shown in Boerschmann's photos, the Telecommunications Tower and the Congressional Offices are latter-day pagodas, in opposition to the prevailing horizontality and to the depths of the artificial Paranoá Lake, created by damming the Paranoá River and separated from the Plaza of the Three Powers by expanses of virgin savanna. The multilevel combination of freeway, interchange and bus station at the intersection of Brasilia's Residential and Monumental Axes mediates between the different scales of civitas and urbs, the former represented by the government palaces and the latter corresponding to ordinary dwellings and workplaces. Indeed, the interplay of building section and topographical profile is vital in Chinese architecture’s "refined layout of the various freestanding structures" as understood by Boerschmann, always attentive to the relationship between architecture and landscape either natural or man-made (47). This second Chinese reference did not work alone. The Plaza of the Three Powers lineage includes Lisbon's Praça do Comércio and Rio's Praça 15 de Novembro, squares opening one side to the sea as a quay. The Esplanade of the Ministries, including the Metropolitan Cathedral and the National Theater, follows the example set by the National Mall in Washington D. C.

The allusion to Chang'an is topological in kind and affects the disposition of Brasilia's Government Sector rather than its form. The reference to Chinese embankments is geometric and recognizes that the precise recreation of the ground is the primary architectural task. Insofar as a city is made up of buildings and open spaces between buildings, urban design is a topographic art. Costa transforms a huge — but ordinary — cut-and-fill job into a culturally significant special operation. Moreover, Costa, like Janus, the Roman God of beginnings, was looking both back and ahead, practically and symbolically. His embankments would be built with up-to-date highway engineering technology, not with thousands of workers. Brasilia was planned as a city for motorized vehicular traffic, where palanquins and rickshaws had no place. Incidentally, the Master Plan of Metropolitan Los Angeles Freeways was adopted in 1947. Brasilia's design and implementation are contemporary with the construction of most Los Angeles freeways (1950s and 1960s). NOVACAP, the new capital's development agency, did demand some changes in Costa's competition design to implement it, like greater proximity to the lake. None of the Chinese references were affected by those changes. Niemeyer's designs for the government palaces go beyond Boerschmann and recall a corner tower of Beijing's Forbidden City, sitting on a platform surrounded by the moat called the Tongzi River. On April 21, 1960, the new capital was inaugurated, but a full transfer from Rio of the Federal Government would not happen until the mid-seventies.

North-South Distraction

The launch of the Brasilia Pilot Plan design competition was contemporary with Nikita Kruschev's denunciation of Stalin, and by extension, of the demise of Socialist Realism. The inauguration of Brasilia was contemporary with the Sino Soviet estrangement. Top Brazilian architects like Niemeyer or João Baptista Vilanova Artigas (1915–1975) paid attention. They were celebrity members of the Communist Party. It meant that they were close to the communist culture, but independent. Stylized figuration was their answer to bonding with the man in the street. They did not accept Socialist Realism. Niemeyer was quite outspoken about it when visiting Moscow (1955). He considered going to Beijing on that occasion but the length of the rail journey balked him out of it. Aware of this, the Chinese government later invited a group of Brazilian architects for a forty-day trip from Beijing to Guangzhou (1960). Costa, who was invited but could not go, was represented by his architect daughter Maria Elisa. Presumably, Niemeyer was also invited and unable to travel. Artigas, then vice-president of the São Paulo chapter of IAB, the Institute of Brazilian Architects (1959–1961), led the group (48), which had an official meeting in Beijing with Liang and Yi Chen, China's vice premier at the time. No written record of the trip survived, but the group was certainly taken to the remodeled Tiananmen Square to see the Great Hall of the People and the Museum of Revolutionary Story worked out by Design Boards defined by the Communist Party (1958–1959), and the Monument to the People's Heroes (1959) by Liang and others (1949–1958). Most probably, the group stayed at the new block of the Beijing Hotel (1953) in Chang'an Avenue. All those buildings are mentioned in a series of articles, Viagem à China, in a Rio newspaper. It chronicles the earlier and shorter trip that same year (May 1960) of a group of eight top Brazilian journalists. Invited by the All-China Journalists Association, they had an official meeting with premier Zhou Enlai (49). Remarkably, the Brazilian chronicler saw no problem in accepting those buildings as modern, despite their obvious historicism.

The Brazilian group of architects departing for China with Lucio Costa (center, with moustache), next to Maria Elisa Costa and Vilanova Artigas to the right
Foto divulgação/ disclosure image [China Daily]

Artigas (the third on the right in the first row) and Liang(the fist on the left in the first row) [Acervo/collection Maria Elisa Costa]

Liang Sicheng, second form the left, with a Chinese Delegation of Architects in Brazil in 1963, led by Yang Tingbao, third from the left
Foto divulgação/ disclosure image [Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts]

Around that time, Xiaowei Luo (1925–2020) was compiling one of the earlier Chinese textbooks on the history of foreign architecture for Tongji University in Shanghai (50). It made an essential contribution, although it was not officially published. It devotes one chapter to Brazilian modern architecture, which it illustrates more comprehensively than any textbook published afterwards. Examples include the Brazilian Pavilion at the New York World's Fair designed by Costa and Niemeyer (1938–1939) and all the entries at the Brasilia design competition (1956), with special attention to those by São Paulo — based Rino Levi (1901–1965), Artigas, and Joaquim Guedes (1932–2008) with their teams. Luo's assessment of Brasilia reflects her awareness of the negative opinions of critics such as the Italian Bruno Zevi (1918–2000) but she asked for patience. The whole plan is functionally clear and well ordered, she says. As for its emptiness, she recognizes that Brasilia was still under construction, and it was premature to evaluate it.

The People's Republic of China made her first official contact with Brazil in May 1961, in the wake of new president Janio Quadros opening to the Communist world (51). Next, vice-president João Goulart traveled to China in August. Quadros resigned while Goulart was still in China. It took him a few days to be inaugurated. Goulart's presidency looked favorably to the constitution of a bloc of Third World countries that were not automatically aligned with the Warsaw Pact or NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but opted for Brazil being — like China — an observer of the Non-Alignment Movement launched at the Belgrade Conference in September 1961. Internally, it fought for four basic reforms, namely, educational, electoral, fiscal, and agrarian. Architects were at the forefront of that fight. In July 1963, IAB promoted a Seminar on Housing and Urban Reform. In August, a Brazilian technico-scientific mission had travelled to Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France and Denmark. Anthropologist and presidential counsellor Darcy Ribeiro led it. Architect João Filgueras Lima, Lelé (1932–2014), Niemeyer's right arm, was a member of the mission, particularly interested in heavy prefabrication systems. In September, an impressive number of Brazilian architects and architecture students attended the VII World Congress of UIA, International Union of Architects, held part in Havana and part in Mexico City. There Liang and Yang met Artigas again.

Afterwards, Liang and Yang came to Brazil for two weeks. In late October and early November, they visited Rio, Niterói, São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and Brasilia along with six other Chinese architects. Niemeyer met them in Brasilia. Liang writes in his diary that Niemeyer told him that they were on the same side, politically and architecturally (52) — which should be taken with a grain of salt. Mass housing was undoubtedly a common concern, just like standardization. Niemeyer's apartment complexes of the 1950s impressed, and he was the only non-European architect invited to design an apartment house in the Berlin Interbau (1957) (53). Niemeyer and Lelé were using in situ prefabrication for several buildings at the University of Brasilia, which Liang visited. As for the use of architecture to make assertions of national identity — along with autonomy and/or power in the international Cold War stage was a generalized practice, and one that was not limited to developing or underdeveloped countries. No artifact symbolized the Pax Americana more forcefully than the sealed glass office tower that would be inhabitable without air conditioning. To complicate things, there is no bi-univocal correspondence between architectural form and the symbolic messages they convey. Cultural appropriation is unavoidable. Complaints about the embourgeoisement of the interwar period modern architecture when the Museum of Modern Art of New York labeled it the International Style (1932) just missed the point, as did complaints about the appropriation of modern architecture, if seen as the architecture of democracy, by the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s.

All the same, esthetic divergences remained. It suffices to compare the Plaza of the Three Powers (1954–960) with the contemporary Square of the Celestial Peace or Tiananmen Square (1949–1959) in the 1960s. The two monumental complexes answer to similar political, cultural and ceremonial requirements. Both sprung from the wish to celebrate the transformation of the nation- from Empire to People's Republic in one case, from coastal to hinterland occupation in the other. Both had extraordinary programs involving extraordinary rites, sites, dimensions, riches, as befits artifacts and places filled only on special occasions, but always present in the citizenry's mind: the Chinese enterprise vying with Imperial past glories, the Brazilian one vying with wild nature (54).

Tiananmen Square, aerial view, Beijing, China
Foto divulgação/ disclosure image, c. 1960 [Hunan Today]

In Beijing, the Square is rectangular and the composition hieratic. Its central north south axis coincides with the ancient Imperial Way. The ancient Tiananmen Tower and Gate, the rostrum from which Mao Zedong proclaimed the birth of the People's Republic, is its northern edge. Extending alongside the newly widened Chang'an Avenue, it displayed over its walls a giant Mao portrait, the founding father. Amid the Square proper, the Monument to the People's Heroes (1952–1958), by Liang and Lin, soars above the Forbidden City's Hall of Supreme Harmony. It features eight bas-reliefs on the base depicting eight major revolutionary episodes in the Chinese history, from the destruction of opium in the run-up to the First Opium War (1839) to the Yangtze River crossing campaign of the Civil War (1949). A ten-story-high mix of obelisk and stele that evokes the Han dynasty gate towers called que and is topped by a Tang dynasty wuduan-style roof, the monument deliberately appropriates, blocks, and deflects the Imperial Way, announcing the rise of Beijing's new east west socialist axis. Two similar buildings crossing this axis define the Square's eastern and western edges. Their symmetrical façades, of superblock length, have elaborate narrow eaves crowning the protruding central porticoes featuring colossal colonnades and end wings featuring stripped down colossal pilasters. The eastern one, whose central colonnade was flanked by pillars meant to evoke burning torches, is the Museum of the Chinese Revolution and History (1957–1959), by Zhang Kaiji (1912–2006) and others (55). The western one, whose columns were meant to evoke those at the Hall of Supreme Harmony, is the Great Hall of the People (1958–1959), by Zhang Bo (1911–1999) and others. Both Zhangs had attended National Central (now Southeast) University in Nanjing, which followed a Beaux Arts curriculum. Standing for the unity of the People, Government, and Party, the Great Hall shelters the National People's Congress, the Chinese Communist Party Conferences, and the State Banquet Hall.

Giant Mao Zedong portrait, located over it Forbidden City walls
Foto/photo Raimond Spekking [Wikimedia Commons]

Monument to the People's Heroes, Beijing, China, 1957. Architect Lin Huiyin e Liang Sicheng
Foto divulgação/ disclosure image [China Story]

Monument to the People's Heroes, detail, Beijing, China, 1957. Architect Lin Huiyin e Liang Sicheng
Foto divulgação/ disclosure image [Wikimedia Commons]

In Brasilia, the Plaza is an isosceles trapezoid whose axis runs from east to west, the composition achieves asymmetrical balance, lightness prevails. The single linear element making up the Plaza's western edge is the Congress, whose roof is topped by the twin but inverse domes of the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate on either side of the adjoining twin towers for the congressional offices. Similar glass boxes surrounded by peristyles, two freestanding buildings float north and south facing each other, the Presidential Palace and the Federal Supreme Court respectively, the former featuring a rostrum and the latter preceded by a seated figure of Justice in white granite, sculpted by Alfredo Ceschiatti (1918–1989). The three branches of government in liberal democracies are clearly manifest, their ideal equilibrium forcefully posited.

The counterpart of Liang's monument in terms of location and Zhang Bo's complex in terms of program is Niemeyer's Museum of the City (1958–1960), a bold inhabitable structure. Two C-shaped prestressed concrete beams making up a tubular room cantilever from two central pylons. The gap between the two beams echoes the gap between the twin towers of the Congress. The museum is a doubled, flattened, opaque, strongly horizontal T-shaped minimalist composition — but featuring a larger-than-life President Juscelino Kubitschek's head in soapstone by José Alves Pedrosa (1915–2002) jutting out, the counterpart to Mao's portrait on Tiananmen Gate. An underground room exhibiting a model of the city is called, Espaço Lucio Costa, to honor a second founding father. The mix of geometric abstraction and kitschy figuration introduces a dissonance regarding the ethereal palaces for the executive and legislative powers. Visitors can understand them quite well without realizing, as cognoscenti do, that the former alludes to the Palladian Basilica, recalling a civic type of Renaissance building, and the latter to the Etruscan temple as rebuilt in Villa Giulia, recalling the ancient connection of justice with priesthood along with the presumed source of Roman Law. The counterpart to the Monument to the People's Heroes is a bronze by sculptor Bruno Giorgi (1905–1993), Two Warriors, whose stylized figures honor the candangos, the workers who built Brasilia, looking at their representatives in the twin towers nearby, the sole vertical accent of the composition. A half-underground tearoom and a dovecote that recalls clothespins add ordinary notes to counterpoint sublimity.

Postal card, Bruno Giorgi’s sculpture Candangos at Three Powers Square, on background National Congress Building, before expansion [Acervo/collection Marcos Almeida]

Museum of the City, Brasília DF, 1960, architect Oscar Niemeyer. A bold inhabitable structure. Two C-shaped prestressed concrete beams making up a tubular room cantilever from two central pylons
Acervo/collection Marcos Almeida

Museum of the City, Brasília DF, 1960, architect Oscar Niemeyer. Detail show a President Juscelino Kubitschek's head in soapstone
Foto/photo Marcos Almeida

The American urban planner Edmund Bacon (1910–2005) was honest enough to publish the negative text about Brasilia's monumental sector he had written before visiting the city, and his change appraisal after going there (56). Another American historian Norma Evenson (borned in1928) praised Niemeyer's anti-monumental monumentality (57). Liang felt very uncomfortable. He wrote in his diary: "The initial impression of Brasilia is that of a desolate and half-barren land. Red clay, no trees, many buildings, especially the Palace Hotel, fell even lonelier. The roads are wide, high-grade pavements, all three-dimensional intersections, and monotonous buildings. The hotel is by the lake. The land rises flat and there is nothing to look around", Referring presumably to Niemeyer, he complained that "the host is like a ghost." He added:

“Niemeyer's game is that of a master who does not care about economy. It is innovative, formalistic, and extravagant... If this continues, inflation will be endless” (58).

Liang sided with high-profile detractors of Brasilia such as Zevi, the influential French writer Simone de Beauvoir, Bauhaus widow turned vernacular architecture lover Sybil Moholy-Nagy, even Siegfried Giedion (59), all of whom seemed to resent the fact that the city was a work in progress, a building site. Brasilia was an easy target since no foreign professionals were involved. Brasilia's Pilot Plan competition was open only to Brazilians. Among the few dissenting European voices was critic and historian Reyner Banham (1922–1988), who did not idealize the nineteenth century city of rails newly rediscovered by the European and the American East Coast intelligentsia, and who had learned to drive to know Los Angeles, vilified by that same intelligentsia (60).

In a handout for students (1979) later incorporated into a textbook published by four Chinese universities (1982), pioneer urban planner Yulin Shen (1921–2013) recognizes and approves the appropriate sequence of scenes in the monumental sector, from sublime and solemn at the Plaza of the Three Powers to grand in the Esplanade of Ministries and relatively intimate next to the Cathedral and cultural sectors. He contrasts these scenes with the residential sectors by describing the latter as neighborhood units, as if aware that Costa's plan proposed four scales, namely, the monumental, the convivial, the bucolic, and the residential (1987). But Shen feels compelled to add that

“After the completion of Brasilia, people criticized that the city, similar as Chandigarh in India, was an artificial monument mechanically shaped by the mold created by the urban planner. It was overly formal, with little regard for economy, culture, and tradition, whereas a city should be a living organism, composed of communities, varying by national culture and human life” (61).

Shen was writing after a period of mutual disinterest between China and Brazil. A right-wing coup (1964) ousted Goulart. One year later, the Chinese state newspaper, Xinhua Daily, had front-page news condemning the detention of nine Chinese citizens by the Brazilian military government. One decade later, the two countries pragmatically reestablished diplomatic relations following American president Richard Nixon's initiative (1972). The United States wanted to take advantage of the Sino-Soviet split. Brazil saw an emerging market for her soy, one of the staples of the country's economic miracle (1967–1973). Both moves happened during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which lasted less than the Brazilian military regime (1964–1985) even if the start of a democratic opening is computed (1977). By the late 1970s, the military regime had consolidated Brasilia and Tiananmen Square had been enlarged to receive the mausoleum of Mao Zedong, the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall (1976–1977), a collective project in which Yang participated. The Memorial was placed to the south of the Monument to the People's Heroes, co-axial with it and the Imperial Qiamen Gate, which became the south edge of the enlarged Square. Unwittingly or not, the mausoleum resembles Lincoln Memorial- the American President who abolished slavery. For all the manifest Chinese interest (1957–1964), Brasilia had no impact on the most important Chinese urban projects of that period, even though both Tiananmen Square and Chang'an Avenue involved developmentalism and modernization (62). Contradictions abound in the relationship between architecture and politics.

Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, Beijing, China, 1977. Architect Yang Tingbao and others
Foto divulgação/ disclosure image [Wikimedia Commons]

Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, 1922. Architect Henry Bacon
Foto/photo Martin Falbisoner [Wikimedia Commons]

Niemeyer's case provides food for thought. Demand abroad for his services had increased. He was in Israel on March 31, when the military seized power. He had problems with the Air Force, which vetoed his project for the Brasilia Airport (1965), and he was harassed by the regime's political police. It was convenient for him to open an office in Paris. There, with the help of influential friends like then Minister of Culture André Malraux, he quickly became a leader of Third World Modernism, independent from Western capitalism and Eastern socialism (63). He designed for Algiers, Israel, Lebanon — as well as Italy and France. Indeed, his most eye-catching assignment was the French Communist Party Headquarters in Paris (1966–1968), built in two phases (1968–1971 and 1971–1980). Concurrently, Niemeyer designed the Brazilian Army Headquarters (1968–1974), the widening of the Congress (1968–1972) and annexes for the Presidential Palace and Supreme Court (1975), among other projects in Brasilia (64). This Lenin Peace Prize winner (1968) lacked neither clients nor showcases for his work, the subject of major exhibitions at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs du Louvre (1965) and Centre Pompidou (1979).

Nevertheless, the more prestigious Western critics and historians proclaimed him a has-been, along with Brazilian modern architecture. Leading architectural journals and magazines from Europe and the United States boycotted Brazilian work on political and esthetic grounds. The building boom which accompanied the Brazilian economic miracle got unnoticed, but the growth of shantytowns, which resulted from the combined pressures industrialization and rural migration, was duly recorded and deplored. The most acclaimed Histories of Modern Architecture of the 1980s, soon adopted as textbooks everywhere, found Brazilian modern architecture problematic. It was derivative from the Corbusian oeuvre, at best an adaptation of original American and European work to fit local and regional circumstances. In other words, either it was an unoriginal imitation, or most of it was copy and what was not had no universal value, since adaptation implies the persistence of a substantial amount of the original in the new form. The North easily forgot how much Le Corbusier derived and adapted from the South, and how unoriginal were his so-called Five Points at face value. Paradoxically, Brasília was rapidly demonized as an apotheosis of the errors of modern architecture and urbanism in both local and international terms. Textbooks did not register the São Paulo-based and Brasilia-based development of Brazilian modern architecture advanced in the 1960s and 1970s by the generation of Vilanova Artigas, which included Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992), as well as that of Lelé, which included Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1928–2021) and Joaquim Guedes (1932–2008). Chinese architecture of the twentieth century was also ignored, whether modernist or traditionalist eclectic-academic architecture (65).

Brasilia Beijing and the Immediate Future

The present text combines features of a research report and a chronicle. The research was triggered by the awareness of bonds downplayed, overlooked, or forgotten in Brazilian and Chinese historiography on modern architecture. Its point of departure was Costa's explicitness about the Chinese inspiration of Brasilia's monumental sector. Architectural communication can happen between cultures with little direct exposure to each other's buildings and open spaces, but capable of conveying messages about these using a multiplicity of means, from different types of meetings and speeches to different types of texts and different types of images and representations. Paraphrasing Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, a work of architecture is itself and its circumstances, and this is so since Gutemberg (66). Contrary to Victor Hugo's forecast (67), the printing press did not kill architecture, it was co-opted by architecture, and so were photography, cinema, audio, and the world wide web (68). Accordingly, the research included finding and/or consulting archives, bibliographies, essays and photo-essays, drawings, models, photographs, interviews, memoirs, dissertations, monographs, textbooks, exhibition catalogues, architectural journals, newspapers, movies, newsreels, videos. Comparing the architectural work of the groups under consideration was deemed essential to map divergences and convergences. The geometry, materiality, and iconography of their buildings and open spaces were examined and related to the programs and situations they answered, even if preliminarily (69). Given the leadership of Liang and Costa as well as their common interest in theory, education, and preservation, comparing their texts was added to the list of future tasks (70). Extant surveys of Brazilian modern architecture are exhaustive, and the organization of a similar Chinese database is under way. Advantage was taken of extant close readings of Costa and Liang, even if dealing with each separately.

The chronicle format applies because the report reads as an extended account of historical events and a description of relevant architectural objects, presented in mostly chronological order. Time is of the essence in a research that unavoidably deals with modernity, modernization, and modernism. The correlation of political and architectural chronologies revealed the contemporariness of the making of Brasilia and the remaking of Beijing as capitals of the developing world, in addition to the similarities in age and education of key players behind the Plaza of the Three Powers and Tiananmen Square. Two decades separate the Brasilia Pilot Plan competition and plans for the long sides of Tiananmen Square from the near completion of Brasilia's Monumental Sector and the completion of the Mao Memorial Hall (1957–1977). Two decades separate the return of Liang, Yang, and his colleagues from the United States or the design of the Warchavchik house in Brazil from the sessions of the United Nations Board of Design attended by Liang and Niemeyer (1927–1947). Disconnection in the intervening decade can be credited to China's vicissitudes, including a Civil War (1948–1949) and the Korean War (1950–1953).

Architectural communication informs about forms. Endorsement or appropriation does not necessarily ensue. The interest of Brazilian architecture and landscaping in traditional Chinese forms disappeared at the beginning of the twentieth century. Costa rekindled it in Brasilia. Looking at ancient China allowed him to recover the archetypal splendor of a millennial civilization and simultaneously solve a practical earthwork problem. However, despite belonging to the same generation and sharing a Beaux-Arts education, Liang, Costa, and their colleagues were out of synchrony architecturally. The Liang-Niemeyer meeting in New York is a watershed. Before that meeting, the lack of synchrony can be credited to lack of architectural communication, although it is likely that the Chinese architects educated in the United States saw modern Brazilian architecture in Brazil Builds and American architectural journals, and it is also likely that the Brazilian idea of contemporary Chinese architecture came from the sets of noir movies with big stars and great directors (71). After that meeting, it is safe to say that Costa and his group did not admire Chinese modernist eclectic-academic architecture, the same being true for Liang and his colleagues regarding Brazilian CIAM-affiliated modern architecture.

The event that led to the Liang-Niemeyer meeting was itself a watershed in broader terms. As observed, the United Nations Headquarters design and subsequent building (1947–1951) signaled the decline in the West of both revivalist architecture and the two varieties of eclectic-academic architecture — the traditionalist and the modernist, along with the rise of modern architecture. The glaring exception was the socialist world. Before 1947, Liang and his group integrated into the international architectural establishment, while Costa and his group sided with the progressive minority. After 1947, the Brazilians integrated into a new international architectural establishment, while the Chinese looked reactionary to cultivated Western eyes. Concurrently, Brazil went from authoritarian to democratic and then military regime, and China went from capitalist to communist.

No formal rupture resulted from these political changes, although in all cases State patronage was the key variable defining kind and size of programmatic opportunities. There would not be a Rio-based school of modern architecture so early were it not for Minister of Education Gustavo Capanema. There would not be Brasilia were it not for the initiative of President Kubitschek. The State was a most important player in China too — public institutions like universities before the foundation of the People's Republic, the top echelons of the Communist Party afterwards. Arguably, building technology had a greater effect than political change on post-1947 formal development. The use of prefabrication counterpointed the labor-intensive practices employed in the Plaza of the Three Powers and Tiananmen Square. Air conditioning made solar control devices seem anachronic and increased exponentially the impact of services on architectural design. Paradoxically, it will prove easier to retrofit eclectic-academic architecture both traditionalist and modernist than modern buildings. Redundancy is built-in the thickness of the floors, walls, and roofs of the former, while the minimalism of the latter is ruined by dropped ceilings, exposed ducts, or ar conditioning units puncturing glass boxes, as in the Brasilia palaces.

As important as the absence of formal rupture is the persistent imprint of the Beaux Arts education. The enlarged Tiananmen Square did not cease to celebrate the revolutionary transformation of China, and it keeps doing so through basically conservative forms. They are solid, solemn, opulent, and formidable, deploying figuration and direct historicist reference, not to mention imposing Imperial remains. The incorporation of the Qianmen Gate as the Square's southern edge reinforces the central position of the Monument to the People's Heroes in the composition, now backed by the Mao Memorial, which signals the Chairman's presence in stone instead of canvas. Positioned between two relics, Tiananmen and Qianmen Gates, the Monument and the Memorial occupy the former imperial axis to assert the political and cultural reinvention of the nation stressing the role of a vanguard of heroes and Party leaders in the process. Tiananmen Square can be seen now as a giant blow-up of the traditional Chinese courtyard scheme. To the east, at the Museum, objects from the past are conserved in two containers, separating historical from revolutionary times. To the west, the future is being planned in the many rooms of the Great Hall. At the center, the martyrs of revolutionary struggles, duly supported by the Party leaders, displace and replace emperors. Although forms taken by themselves may prioritize constants rather than breakthroughs, as in Nationalist China, the composition proposes otherwise in terms of political content. In parallel, the Square signals an eclectic age, in which truly ancient fragments coexist with Chinese pastiches and stripped-down Western Classicism, blending traditional and modernizing motifs.

Tiananmen Square, aerial view, Beijing, China
Foto divulgação/ disclosure image, c. 1960 [Hunan Today]

Plaza of the Three Powers, aerial view, Brasilia DF
Foto divulgação, c. 1960 [Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal/ Brasilia Public Archive]

The developmentalist dictatorship in Brazil (1964–1985) was not uncomfortable with Brasilia and its Plaza of the Three Powers. Military-only presidents changed periodically although not by popular vote, Congress was closed on three occasions only, the Supreme Court was put under surveillance but functioned. The Plaza kept celebrating an evolutionary transformation of the national geography through basically progressive forms. These allied lightness to structural daring and geometric elementalism. Stylized figuration applied to the representation of the body politic and the equilibrium between the three powers. Traditional realism was restricted to Kubitschek's representation. Abstraction did not prevent both obvious and esoteric allusions to architectural types, archetypes, and particular works of architecture. Modern architecture was not incompatible with a camouflaged eclecticism. Versailles for the people, the Plaza heralded the Kubitschek's March to the West and Fifty Years in Five, the Brazilian matches for Mao's Great Leap Forward. Yet some unfortunate changes disfigured the original composition. The widening of the long low block of the Congress destroyed the transparency of its foyer towards the Plaza and the symmetrical disposition of the domes with respect to the roof slab's longitudinal borders. At the same time, presumably for security reasons, public access to that roof was forbidden, and a chain barred the use of the open-air ramp on the side of Esplanade of the Ministries. Finally, a one-hundred-meter-high mast for the Brazilian flag rose in the savanna which surrounded the plaza, next to the one-meter-high eastern retaining wall. An inelegant, heavy-looking cone formed by round metal tubes, it belittles the flag flying at its top. Blow-ups may turn out badly (72). The mast was the first of a series of buildings in the savanna that weakened the original contrast between the Chinese-inspired embankment and wilderness. Horror vacui seems to be at work. Many people do not want to understand that emptiness is of the essence for the open spaces of the Plaza of the Three Powers and Tiananmen Square. For better or worse, they are meant to be filled with people on civic occasions only.

Mast for the National Flag next to the Plaza of the Three Powers, Brasilia DF, 1972. Architect Sergio Bernardes [Acervo/collection Marcos Almeida]

Architects in the two countries resorted to the same kinds of characterization strategies to convey the purposes of their buildings and open spaces, even when invoking different references, with variable degrees of explicitness, to account for and reflect upon a specific historical and geographical situation. Characterization of program justified two kinds of formal variety. For the eclectic-academics, formal variety implied the contemporariness of buildings in different styles- different revivals side by side- and several styles in the same building. For the CIAM-affiliated moderns, the spirit of the age could only inhabit a single true style. For some of them, such as Costa, formal variety could be achieved within a single architectural system encompassing different kinds of structure and many materials.

The Brazilian case is paradigmatic regarding the evolution of Beaux Arts trained professionals from historicist eclecticism to CIAM-affiliated modernism. More precisely, it highlights the evolution from the traditionalist eclectic-academic architecture, whether revivalist or collagist, to what in retrospect could be called modern architecture's International Style phase (1922–1932), and then to modern architecture's post-International Style phase (1932–47), which aimed to overcome its technical and symbolic limitations, bypassing modernist eclectic-academic architecture in the process. The Rio-based school of Brazilian modern architecture posits the Beaux Arts as forerunner of modern architecture instead of categorical antagonist. Costa's texts make explicit this instance of sequential complementary opposition, anticipating in two decades Banham's understanding of the Beaux Arts as a predisposing cause of modern architecture (73).

But modern architecture co-existed in Brazil with all varieties of eclectic-academic architecture, so that the Beaux Arts was not only a parent, but also a sibling and a rival. Indeed, architectural practice since the Renaissance demonstrates that the idea of a single style for each historical age is a chimera. The idea of a single true style is problematic and might be considered a matter of taste and power (74). Hitchcock is candid: survivals and revivals bother historians because they do not furnish material for epic narratives where Virtue triumphs in the end (75). Modernity has multiple visages, and it is biased to presume that all are decadent but one. Differences in values and in the hierarchy of similar values account for oppositions that are symbolic rather than functional, resulting in eclectics and moderns denying artistic value to each other's work on principle. It is also biased to presume that a single true modernism was the intellectual property of certain countries in Europe, of the United States and of some parts of the Soviet Union, disqualifying anything else as modernisms without modernity and modernization. It is about time to counteract the prevailing narratives of Western cultural hegemony sold as world history to Brazil and China, and work towards integrating East and South milestones into West and North-based plots, instead of subordinating the former to the latter.

Brasilia was designated World Cultural Heritage by UNESCO (1987) and Niemeyer was awarded the Pritzker Prize (1988). China opened her professional market to foreign firms and went modern (and post-modern as well) in the 1980s. She started to sponsor iconic buildings by star architects in the late 1990s. Iconic was the choice word in the Western press to designate monumental buildings with strong distinctive character signaling their exceptional purposes, as Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum (1992–1997) by Frank Gehry (borned in 1929). Most Brazilian architects young and old avoided the postmodern trap — be it rationalist Tendenza, free style classicism, or deconstructivism. Brazil did not succumb to the Bilbao effect as extensively as China did, and it is only fitting that one of the exceptions is the Iberê Camargo Foundation (1998–2008) by Portuguese Alvaro Siza (borned in 1933), who later built the Design Museum (2012–2018) at the China Academy of Art Hangzhou campus, mostly designed by Wang Shu (borned in 1963). Both Siza and Wang are Pritzker Prize winners (1992 and 2012 respectively). No Brazilian was called to design in China, not even Rocha, who was also a Pritzker Prize winner (2006). Global historiography suggests that all countries in the South look to the North for guidance, and that both the North and the South look down on the South. That pattern can and should be broken. China does not need to import star architects anymore, as she can rely on homegrown talent like Wang. Brazil is not short of new talent too, perfectly at ease with the country's modern architectural tradition. Sixty years after its inauguration, thriving Brasilia has become Brazil's third largest city, vindicating Luo's pleas for patience. Times are ripe for true exchange, in which architectural communication goes both ways. After all, the Museum of Modern Art of New York has given its seal of approval to the Brazilian mid-nineteenth century legacy and to China's recent architecture.... (76).

Notes

1
Fernando Pessoa, "Dois excertos de odes (fins de duas odes, naturalmente)". In Poesias de Alvaro de Campos (Lisboa: Ática, 1944 [1914]). The original: “Uma folha de mim lança para o Norte./ Onde estão as cidades de Hoje que eu tanto amei;/ Outra folha de mim lança para o Sul,/ Onde estão os mares que os Navegadores abriram;/ Outra folha minha atira ao Ocidente,/ Onde arde ao rubro tudo o que talvez seja o Futuro,/ Que eu sem conhecer adoro;/ E a outra, as outras, o resto de mim/ Atira ao Oriente, Ao Oriente donde vem tudo, o dia e a fé...”.

2
See José Roberto do Amaral Lapa, A Bahia e a Carreira da Índia (São Paulo: Cia. Editora Nacional, 1968).

3
See Gauvin Alexander Bailey, "The Jesuits and Chinese style in the arts of colonial Brazil (1719–79)". In Linda A. Newson, ed, Cultural Words of the Jesuits in Colonial Latin America (London: University of London Press, 2020), p. 11–40.

4
Luiz Philippe Torelly, “O imaginário chinês no barroco brasileiro”, Arquitextos, São Paulo, ano 19, n. 227.02, Vitruvius, abr. 2019 <https://bit.ly/3nn6iuT>.

5
Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, De l'état de l'architecture égyptienne: considerée dans son origine, principes et son goût et comparée sous les mêmes rapports à l'architecture grecque (Paris: Barrois, 1803); Entry Chinoise, Arch. In Encyclopédie Méthodique, Architecture — tome premier (Paris: Panckoucke, 1788), p. 653-671; entry Egyptienne, Arch. In Encyclopédie Méthodique, Architecture — tome second (Paris: Agasse, 1801–1820), p. 282–320.

6
See Nicolle Jordan, “The China of Santa Cruz: The Culture of Tea in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Voyage to Brazil”, Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment, vol. 2, n. 1 (2020), p. 42–52. Graham, the wife of a British naval officer, visited Brazil from 1821 to 1824.

7
See Sir William Chambers, Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils. To which is annexed, a Description of their Temples, Houses, Gardens, &c. (London: 1757) and Sir William Chambers, A dissertation on oriental gardening (London: 1772).

8
See for instance The Project of residence and garden at Kassel for the king of Westphalia, Jérôme Bonaparte. Auguste Henri Victor Grandjean de Montigny. Wikipédia, the Free Encyclopedia, San Francisco, <https://bit.ly/2AH1Z5V>

9
Maurice Paleologue, L'Art Chinois (Paris: Quantin, 1887); Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l'Architecture. 2 vols. (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899); sir Banister Fletcher, A history of architecture on the comparative method. 4th edition (London: Batsford, 1901 [1897]).

10
Adolpho Morales de los Rios, “Resumo monográfico da evolução da arquitetura no Brasil”. In Livro de Ouro Comemorativo do Centenário da Independência do Brasil e da Exposição Internacional do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Anuário do Brasil, 1922/1923); Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande e Senzala (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1933) and Sobrados e mocambos (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1936).

11
Philip Goodwin and G.E. Kidder-Smith, Brazil Builds: New and Old, 1652–1942 (New York: MoMA, 1943); Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: MoMA, 1932).

12
Freyre will add a chapter titled "O Oriente e o Ocidente" to the 2nd. edition of Sobrados (1951) He will write for IPHAN Mocambos do nordeste. See also Germain Bazin, L'Architecture Religieuse au Brésil (São Paulo: Museu de Arte/Paris: Plon, 1956); Serafim Leite, História da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, Instituto Nacional do Livro, 1945), p. 196–196.

13
Quatremère de Quincy, Entry Style, In Encyclopédie Méthodique, Architecture. tome troisième (Paris: Veuve Agasse, 1825), p. 411.

14
Julien Guadet, Eléments et Théorie de l'Architecture, tome 1 (Paris Librairie de la Construction Moderne 1904 [1901]), p. 132.

15
Quatremère de Quincy, Entry Caractère, In Dictionnaire Historique d'Architecture. Tome premier. (Paris: Adrien Le Clerc, 1832), p. 304.

16
Julien Guadet, Eléments et Théorie de l'Architecture, tome 1 (Paris Librairie de la Construction Moderne 1904 [1901]), p. 106–110.

17
Annateresa Fabris et al, ed., Ecletismo na Arquitetura Brasileira (São Paulo: Nobel/EDUSP, 1987), p. with particular attention to Giovanna Rosso dal Brena's text.

18
Cret was prolific and influential. In the Philadelphia area, Cret designed the Benjamin Franklin Parkway (1907–1917); the Rodin Museum (1926–1929); the Delaware River Bridge (1920–1926); the Barnes Foundation Gallery (1922–1925), p. the Memorial Arch at Valley Forge (1914–1917), p. Rittenhouse Square (1913); the 2601 Parkway Apartments (1926–1939). Further afield Cret designs include the Pan American Union building (1908–1910) and the Folger Shakespeare Library (1929–1932) in Washington, D.C.; the campuses of Brown University and the University of Texas at Austin; the Detroit Institute of Arts (1922–1927); the Indianopolis Public Library (1913–1917); and the Hartford County Courthouse (1926–1929).

19
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Modern Architecture. Romanticism and Reintegration (New York: da Capo, 1993 [1929]), p. note p. 6.

20
Lucio Costa, "Ultima manifestação de sentido eclético-acadêmico". In Lucio Costa, Registro de uma vivência (São Paulo Empresa das Artes, 1995), p. 55.

21
For generations, see Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture: nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 4th edition (New Haven: Yale University Press 1977 [1958]), p. 419–420.

22
Notes on the Brazil Pavilion, Album do Pavilhão do Brasil na Feira Mundial de Nova York de 1939 (New York: H.K. Publishing, 1939).

23
Lucio Costa's essential papers include "Razões da nova arquitetura" (1936), p. "Universidade do Brasil" (1937), p. "Considerações sobre o ensino de arquitetura" (1945), p. and "Considerações sobre a arte contemporânea" (1952), p. all of them republished in Lucio Costa, Sobre arquitetura (Porto Alegre: CEUA, 1962) and Lucio Costa. Registro de uma vivência (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2018).

24
See Oscar Niemeyer, o mais famoso arquiteto brasileiro. Em Moscou aplaudido pelos russos dos quais confessa discordar. In Manchete, Jun 4, 1955.

25
George Dudley, A Workshop for Peace: Designing the United Nations Headquarters (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994).

26
Thao Zu. Liang Sicheng and His Time (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2014), p. 104–110.

27
Apud Aleca Le Blanc, "Palmeiras and Pilotis: Promoting Brazil with Modern Architecture". In Third Text: Brazil special issue, vol. 26, n. 1 (2012), p. 103–116.

28
"Modern architecture: Ministry building of Education & Health in Rio". Nanking-Shanghai Newsweek, 14 (1948), p. 1.

29
Lucio Costa, "Imprévu et importance de la contribution brésilienne au developpement actuel de de l'architecture moderne bresilienne". L'Architecture d' Aujourd'hui, n. 42-43 (1952), p. 4–7.

30
Philip Goodwin and G.E. Kidder-Smith, Brazil builds. Architecture new and old, 1652–1942 (New York: MoMA, 1943).

31
Barry Bergdoll, "Learning from Latin America". In Barry Bergdoll, Carlos Eduardo Comas, Jorge Francisco Liernur and Patricio del Real, Latin America in Construction: Architecture, 1955–1980 (New York: MoMA, 2015), p. 17–39.

32
Planaltina was a small city in the region of the future Brasilia, briefly considered as site of a new capital. "Brazil's future capital". The North China Daily (Zhang Tian timeline).

33
"The bird's eye of Rio de Janeiro". In International Newsweek, n. 37 (1930), p. 1.

34
For an in-depth analysis, see Carlos Eduardo Comas, Précisions brésiliennes sur un état passé de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme modernes d'après les projets et les ouvrages de Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, MMM Roberto, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Jorge Moreira et cie. 1936–1945. PhD Dissertation. Paris: Université de Paris VIII, 2002.

35
Marco Polo mentions in his travels a three-day trip from Changan to Kinsay (Huangzhou). Two titles of the 1930–1950 period dealing with the city were written by British historian and sinologist Charles Patrick Fitzgerald, Son of Heaven. A biography of Li Shih Min, founder of the T'and dynasty (Cambridge: University Press, 1933), p. 45, and French historian René Grousset. Histoire de la Chine (Paris: Fayard, 1942); the latter uses the spelling Tch’ang-ngan.

36
Original: a aplicação em termos atuais dessa técnica milenar dos terraplenos. Lucio Costa, "Memoria descritiva do Plano Piloto". In Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência. (São Paulo: Empresa das Artes, 1995), p. 289.

37
Lucio Costa, Ingredientes da concepção urbanismo de Brasilia. In Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência (São Paulo: Empresa das Artes, 1995), p. 282.

38
Lucio Costa, "Eixo monumental". In Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência (São Paulo: Empresa das Artes, 1995), p. 304–307. The original: “Ocorre que na elaboração do projeto inicial de Brasília tive em mãos dois volumes de autoria de um fotógrafo alemão sobre arquitetura chinesa — de 1904, se não me engano. Eram fotos fabulosas, mostrando as extensas muralhas, os terraplenos e aquela arquitetura secular de uma beleza incrível, tudo acompanhado com desenhos e levantamentos da apuradíssima implantação das várias construções isoladas”.

39
Ernst Boerschmann, Baukunst und Landschaft in China. Eine Reise Durch Zwolf Provinzen (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1923).

40
Ernst Boerschmann, Die baukunst und der religiöse kultur der Chinesen, vol. 1, 2 ,3 (Berlin: G. Reimerm 1911, 1914, 1931) and Chinesische Architektur (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1925).

41
Ernest Boerschmann, Picturesque China, architecture and landscape. A journey through twelve provinces (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1923); La Chine Pittoresque (Paris: Librairie des Arts Décoratifs, 1924). See also Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque studies from a point of view (London/New York Putnam, 1927).

42
Such as Jean-Baptiste Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil, 1816–1831 (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1834–1839).

43
Such as Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland. Le voyage aux régions equinoxiales du Nouveau Continent, fait en 1799–1804 (Paris, 1807) — not to mention Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, Viagem filosófica pelas capitanias do Grão Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso e Cuiabá, 1783–1792 (Rio de Janeiro: Conselho Federal de Cultura, 1971).

44
Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1764]), p. originally Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen. An earlier formulation is due to British Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (New York: Collier, 1909 [1757]). The Beautiful is that which is well-formed and aesthetically pleasing, whereas the Sublime is that which has the power to compel and destroy.

45
See Haode Sun, A Study on the History of Architectural Photography in China, 1844–1900. PhD dissertation (Beijing: Tsinghua University, 2018).

46
The original: “como o cruzamento dos eixos em três níveis na plataforma rodoviária — setecentos metros de extensão, ou seja, precisamente, a medida do lado da praça dos Três Poderes — impunha a retirada de muita terra, veio a idéia de aproveitá-la recriando essa solução milenar dos terraplenos, tirando assim partido do escalonamento do chão em níveis diferentes, em patamares sucessivos: cinco metros acima do terreno natural, emergindo do cerrado, um primeiro terrapleno, triangular e eqüilátero, destinado a aos três poderes autônomos da democracia.; cinco metros acima deste, outro terrapleno, agora retangular e extenso — uma esplanada para os ministérios — que reencontra o chão natural nos setores culturais, seguindo-se, em franco desnível, sete ou oito metros acima, a estrutura da plataforma rodoviária; e por último, mais adiante, no terreno em aclive, o embasamento da torre de TV". In Lucio Costa, Lucio Costa: registro de uma vivência (São Paulo: Empresa das Artes, 1995), p. 289.

47
Jun Zhao, "The Landscape of Picture: Boerschmann's Architectural Writings and the Golden Twenty Years of Weimarer Republik". Art Research, n. 6 (2019), p. 99–103. The journal is published by the Beijing Sport University where she teaches.

48
A photo of the group was published in China Daily, September 14, 1960, p. 4. 1961 is the wrong date given by Instituto Vilanova Artigas in chronology at vilanovaartigas.com. Joaquim Guedes from São Paulo and Irineu Breitman from Porto Alegre also made the trip. For Artigas position at IAB, see Paula Gorenstein Dedecca, Instituição e engajamento: Vilanova Artigas no Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil 1959–61. Risco 21 (2015), p. 135.

49
The series comprises sixteen articles by Raymundo Pimentel Gomes, "Viagem à China". Correio da Manhã, published from September 11, 1960, to October 11, 1960. The seventh, dated September 21, on Beijing streets, is illustrated with a photo of the Beijing Hotel, and mentions Chang'an Avenue, which he mistranslates as the Avenue of the Celestial Peace instead of Avenue of the Eternal Peace. The eighth, dated September 22, mentions a visit to the Museum of the Revolution at Tiananmen Square, which is The Square of Celestial Peace. The ninth, from September 24, praises the new Beijing Railway Station.

50
The reference information of this textbook: Xiaowei Luo and Bingquan Wang, The modern and contemporary history of foreign architecture (Shanghai: Tongji University, 1961).

51
"China comunista faz contato oficial com Brasil pela primeira vez". Jornal do Brasil, May 5 1961, p. 4.

52
Apud Wang Jun, The reunion of Liang and Niemeyer. China Financial Weekly, n. 26 (2012), https://wangjun.blog.caixin.com/archives/51573.

53
Mara Eskinazi and Carlos Eduardo Comas, "Niemeyer in Berlin". Arqtexto, n. 10/11; Claudia Cabral, Carlos Eduardo Comas and Airton Cattani, Niemeyer Stranger (2007), p. 92–119; Carlos Eduardo Comas, "Niemeyer e a habitação coletiva de interesse social". In Paulo Bruna, Leandro Medrano, Josep Maria Montaner, Zaida Muxi and Renata Coradin, ed., 2º Congresso Internacional de Habitação Coletiva Sustentável, vol. 1, (Barcelona: Laboratorio de la Vivienda Sostenible, 2016), p. 48–62.

54
Shuishan Yu, Chang'an Avenue and the modernization of Chinese Architecture. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012); Nancy S. Steinhardt, Chinese architecture: a history.(New York: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. 314–341; Carlos Eduardo Comas and Marcos Almeida, "Brasilia cinquentenária. A paixão de uma monumentalidade nova". Arquitextos 10, abril (2010), https://vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/arquitextos/10.119/3362; Carlos Eduardo Comas, "Brasilia: Characterizing Monumentality, 1957–1975". In Kornelia Imesch, ed., Utopie et réalités de l'urbanisme. La Chaux-de-Fonds, Chandigarh, Brasilia (Gollion: Infolio, 2016), p. 63–78; Carlos Eduardo Comas, "Brasília. Lucio Costa. The Pilot Plan and its Monuments". In Henry Francis Mallgrave, David Leatherbarrow, Alexander Eisenschmidt, eds., The Companions to the History of Architecture, vol. IV. Twentieth Century Architecture (London: Wiley, 2017), p. 407–420.

55
See Chang-tai Hung, The Red Line: Creating a Museum of the Chinese Revolution". The China Quarterly, n. 184 (Dec., 2005), p. 914–933.

56
Edmund Bacon, The design of cities (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1967).

57
Norma Evenson, Two Brazilian Capitals. Architecture and Urbanism in Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).

58
Apud Wang Jun, op. cit., see note 47.

59
For Simone de Beauvoir criticisms, see Hugo Segawa, "A Pátina do Futuro". Urbana: Revista Eletrônica CIEC. Campinas, v. 10, n. 3 [19], p. 430–474, sept. /dec 2018; Suzanne Stephens, Women of the Bauhaus: Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Architectural Record (Troy, Jun. 1, 2019), <https://bit.ly/3br8OgK>.

60
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles. The architecture of four ecologies (London: The Penguin Press, 1971) and Reyner Banham, Age of the masters. A personal view of modern architecture (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 148–153.

61
AGMAH. Authoring Group of Modern Architecture History, History of Foreign (Western) Modern Architecture (Beijing: China Architecture & Building Press, 1982), p. 163–165. Four universities are credited as authors: Tongji University (Luo Xiaowei), Tsinghua University, Nanjing Institute of Technology (Xianjue Liu), and Tianjin University (Yulin Shen).

62
Shuishan Yu. Chang'an Avenue and the modernization of Chinese architecture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).

63
The (dubious) expression comes from Duanfang Lu, ed., Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity (London: Routledge, 2010).

64
Elcio Gomes da Silva, Os palácios originais de Brasília (Ph. D. dissertation: Universidade de Brasília, 2012).

65
For a thorough analysis of the São Paulo school, see Ruth Verde Zein, A arquitetura da escola paulista brutalista. Phd. Dissertation (Porto Alegre: UFRGS, 2006). See also Carlos Eduardo Comas, "Notes on two Brazilian schools". In Barry Bergdoll, Carlos Eduardo Comas, Jorge Francisco Liernur and Patricio Del Real, eds. Latin America in construction. Architecture 1955–1980. Op. cit., as well as notes 55 and 64 in the present essay.

66
José Ortega y Gasset, Meditaciones del Quijote (Madrid: Alianza Editorial 2005 [19149]).

67
Victor Hugo, "Ceci tuera cela". In Notre Dame de Paris 1482 (Paris, 1831), p. chapitre 2, vol. 5.

68
See Carlos Eduardo Comas, "Eso no mató aquello: Fotografía y Arquitectura Moderna Brasileña". In Ruben A. Alcolea and Jorge Tárrago, eds, Congreso Internacional Inter Photo Arch. vol. 4 Intersecciones/ Intersections (Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra, 2016), p. 70–79.

69
Jeffrey W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt and Tony Atkin, eds., Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010); Harold Kalman, "‘Chinese Spirit in Modern Strength’: Liang Sicheng, Lin Huiyin, and Early Modernist Architecture in China. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch, vol. 58 (2018), p. 154–188; Christian Kammann, Liang Sicheng and the beginnings of modern Chinese architecture and architectural preservation. Ph.D dissertation. ETH Zurich, 2006.

70
See for instance, Liang Sicheng, Why Study Chinese Architecture?". In Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 73, n. 1 (March 2014), p. 8–11 or the collection of essays in Lucio Costa, Registro de uma vivência (São Paulo: Mirante das artes, 1995); also Li Shiqiao, "Writing a Modern Chinese Architectural History: Liang Sicheng and Liang Qichao". Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 56, n. 1 (Sep., 2002), p. 34–45.

71
They include Josef von Sternberg, Shanghai Express (1932) with Marlene Dietrich and The Shanghai Gesture (1937) with Gene Tierney; G. W. Pabst, Le drame de Shaghai (1938), with Louis Jouvet; Ralph Murphy, Night plane from Chungking (1943) with Robert Preston; Orson Welles, The lady from Shanghai (1947) with Rita Hayworth. Add the Charlie Chan and Dr. Fu Manchu movies.

72
Marcelo Felicetti, "Sergio Bernardes e o Monumento ao Pavilhão Nacional, Brasília, 1972”. Arquitextos, São Paulo, 18, n. 216.05, Vitruvius, May 2018 <https://bit.ly/3IgvOeZ>

73
Reyner Banham. Theory and design in the first machine age (London: The Architectural Press, 1960), p. 14–43.

74
Erwin Panofsky. Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), p. 169–235.

75
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture Twentieth and Nineteenth Centuries, p. 531–533.

76
MoMA's exhibition Latin America in construction: Architecture, 1955–1980 (2015) was curated by Barry Bergdoll, Patricio del Real, Jorge Francisco Liernur, and Carlos Eduardo Comas, a co-author of this paper; Reuse, Renew, Recycle: Recent Architecture from China (2022), curated by Martino Stierli and Evangelos Kotsioris, advised by Li Xiangning, another co-author of this paper. For additional comentary on contemporary Chinese archotecture, see Li Xiangning, "Glocalizing Themed Spaces: the creation of urban spaces in China, Asia, and other regions". In Tridib Baerjee, Anastasis Loukaou-Sideris, eds, The New Companion to Urban Design (London: Routledge, 2019); Li Xiangning, "From Experimental Architecture to Critical Pragmatism. Contemporary Architecture in China". Architecture and Urbanism, n. 546 (2016), p. 8–13; Li Xiangning, Interview. Building attitudes for Chinese Architecture. Architecture and Urbanism, n. 546 (2016), p. 156; Li Xiangning, "Broad strokes". The Architectural Review, n. 238, 1425 (2015).

About the Authous

Yu Yunlong is Post-doctoral student at The College of Architecture and Urban Planning of Tongji University, in Shanghai, China.

Marcos Almeida is Post-doctoral student by The Programa de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação e Arquitetura da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Carlos Eduardo Comas is Permanent Professor at The Programa de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação e Arquitetura at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, em Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Li Xiangning is Full Professor at The College of Architecture and Urban Planning of Tongji University, in Shanghai, China.