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Although Brazil did not evolve a distinctive building style (as New England did, for example), its tradition was ancient and honorable and is still alive. One looks out of a sky-scraper apartment-house and sees a family at work building its own house, of mud-and-twigs or mud-and-rubble, with a thatch of straw or grass, according to a model thousands of years old, old long before Brazil was discovered. These huts and houses, little stores and bars, identical all over the country, could not be simpler or poorer, and yet with their white-wash (or pink or blue wash), their heavy shutters and half-doors, their effect is very pleasing. Along the Amazon the houses are more apt to be woven of palm leaves, Indian style, and resemble beautiful basket work. Even the favelas have a melancholy and horrible beauty. Built of old boards, tin cans, bamboo, sacks, any material that comes to hand, they are light and graceful, piled against the hill sides like birds’ nests, painted in faded colors, and festooned with steps, ladders, potted plants, and the inevitable bird-cages.
The big old fazenda houses grew directly from the classical mud-and-twig huts, merely larger-scale, with thicker walls to keep out the heat and the same thatch roofs, later tile. They are not elegant; there are no halls and the rooms open one into another. There are the dark interior bedrooms where the young virgins of the family led their dreary lives. There is also a chapel and frequently a bedroom and sacristy for a resident padre. And always a room for guests, to one side of the porch, perhaps with the lock on the outside, — for although hospitality was obligatory, it was just as well to be cautious. The town houses are the same, only narrower and higher. But the plain facades, stone trims, and long concave sloping roofs (an Oriental effect, derived from Portuguese Macao) are appealing, and also the (again from Macao) ornamented ridge tiles and drain pipes carried out like trumpets above the narrow sidewalks.
By the 16th century Portugal had been de-forested and was a stone building country, and apparently it didn’t occur to early arrivals in Brazil to use wood. The churches were like the houses, and at first carved stone was imported for their facades; later good native stone-cutting emerged. The smallest, earliest churches have paved squares in front for occasions when the congregation was too big to get into the church itself; sometimes these became roofed porches. The Brazilian Jesuit style flowered in the 17th and 18th centuries, and hundreds of beautiful, modest or magnificent, churches were built: Belém, Recife, Fortaleza, Bahia, Rio, São Paulo, and, slightly later, in the last fling of the Jesuit style, the churches of Minas Gerais. There are thirteen in Ouro Prêto alone and all the half-deserted towns of Minas attest to the former wealth and devoutness of the Mineiros.
Unlike the baroque or churrigueresque of Spanish America, the buildings are fundamentally simple and solid, even severe, and over-laid with decoration that grows thicker through the 18th century, with more twisted volutes, more delicate bell towers, and more fanciful windows. The slaves built churches of their own and since the Rosary was always an object of their special devotion the church of “Our Lady of the Rosary” is the high church — often the largest and most magnificent of all, — an odd side-light on the institution of slavery in Brazil.
Most of the art and architecture of this period is as anonymous as that of the middle ages, but two master-sculptors, both mulattoes, are known by name. Master Valentim da Fonseca studied in Europe, and when he returned he was employed by the Viceroy in Rio. He helped lay out the old Passeio Público (now adjoining a section of the city called, for obvious reasons, Cinelândia). Most of his work has vanished and the park is sadly diminished, but the pair of wonderful bronze alligators still there are by “Mestre Valentim.” The other sculptor is known, even outside Brazil, as Aleijadinho, “The Little Cripple,” Antônio Francisco Lisboa (1730–1814), the son of an architect and a Negro woman. It is believed that he was a leper, at least he lost the use of his hands; but he continued to work with tools strapped to his wrists. At the same time the Inconfidentes were dreaming of independence and producing their imitative Arcadian poetry in Ouro Prêto, Aleijadinho was producing his much greater and more original, although also belated, art. Designs for churches, wood-carving, stone-carving, — so many works are attributed to Aleijadinho that one becomes sceptical, — nevertheless, his distinctive style can be traced all through Minas. His favorite material was the gray-green soapstone of the region, soft to cut but turning harder with exposure. (It is still much used for pots and pans. According to the Mineiros, nothing is as good as a soapstone pot for cooking the daily rice.) His last and most famous work is at Congonhas do Campo, the Twelve Prophets in front of the church of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos. Crude, but powerful and dramatic, they gesticulate against the white church with its bright blue doors, and against the sweep of bare ore-filled hills.
As in Portugal, the azulejos, blue and white tiles, played a great part in the decoration of churches, and sometimes in the houses of the rich. Not always confined to blue and white, sometimes in browns, yellows, and pinks, whole house-fronts were covered with them, particularly in the northern towns. This material has been revised in contemporary Brazilian architecture, and although it is not always used very tastefully, it is one solution for the serious problem of weathering in a tropical climate.
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Brazil’s appreciation of its architectural heritage came late. Many churches were lost, beginning with those abandoned after the raids of the bandeirantes, and again after the expulsion of the Jesuits. Later, churches were sometimes deliberately torn down for their materials or to make way for wider streets. 1936 when the “modern” building boom began, was a year of drastic demolition, but it was also the year in which SPHAN was set up, the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artistico Nacional, to try to save as many as possible of the historical buildings of Brazil. This service has been directed by one man ever since, Dr. Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, and his modesty and scholarship, and his absolute devotion to an almost hopeless task, have been courageous and admirable. There is little money available for such projects, and the people are indifferent, ignorant, and, as everywhere, resentful of interference with property. It is only too natural for the inhabitants of a remote village to prefer a new filling station to an 18th-century fountain.
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There was one good architect in the French Commission invited to Brazil by João I, Grandjean de Montigny, the first professor of architecture at the Imperial Academy. Most of his buildings, in French neo-classical style, have been destroyed, but his influence can be seen in many 19th-century buildings. The large dignified early 19th-century French-style houses have sunk through the pension level to that of slums; picturesque and wretched, sheltering innumerable families, they are known as “pigs’ heads,”—living quarters one step higher than the shacks of the favelas.