Sérgio Ferro – Talk at UFSC – November 04, 2010
Part I
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Help me with this because I am not really... competent.
I am thankful to you for having invited me here today. I was born in Curitiba, but always considered myself a native from here. I moved to Florianópolis when I was only three days old, and later on I lived here four more years. Despite the fact that I was really small, I am very fond of the time I spent here; it was a very happy, beautiful and inspiring time for me. Therefore, it is a return home for me, and you are the ones doing me a favor by inviting me back here.
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What I am going to tell you today is a summary of over fifty years as a student, an architect, a professor, etc. Things will seem a bit too brutal, a bit too condensed. I will try to speak as little as possible, in order not to make it unbearable for you to listen, and I will address only three subjects: first of all, why, during the sixties, a sudden interest in building sites and its relationship with architecture emerged; Second, why it is necessary to return to the origins to understand when architecture and the architects separated from the building sites; and third, I will approach a period that seems too distant for you, which is the beginning of modern architecture. Always from the point of view of the building sites.
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The history I write, and that Rodrigo [Lefèvre] and Flávio [Império] wrote for years in Grenoble is always an upside down history. Usually we look down from the architect to the realization of the work, but we try to approach architecture from an upside down angle, from what happens down at the building site up to the architect’s drawings. First, why did this kind of problem emerge during the sixties? This was not extraordinary for my generation. At that time, in the sixties, there was a worldwide climate of euphoria and excitement and leftist movements of all kinds; guerillas, revolutions, and very important social movements in Europe.
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The whole world was just boiling, fretting, criticizing. Therefore, our inquiry was nothing exceptional. What we did in the sixties… we participated in a more or less global inquiry. Second, we were in a very special moment here in Brazil, in which Brasilia was to be built – Brasília was supposed to be a symbol of multiplicity in many senses, such as integration of territories, maturing out of the dependency on foreign countries in order to develop the country’s autonomy, and to show the beauty and validity of Brazilian architecture, and so on and so son. Back in my time, Brasilia condensed…
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…a series of hopes and very important projects. I was honored and lucky enough to have studied architecture at one of the most perfect and beautiful colleges I have ever met during my life. And I know them… I lived for more than fifty years in academia both in Europe and in Brazil, and I have met many colleges. However, I could barely think of a college that is “hotter” and more fervent and keen about things than the Federal Architecture College of São Paulo at USP… Actually, it is a State University. There you could find masters such as [João Batista Vilanova] Artigas, Flavio Motta, Paulinho [Paulo] Mendes da Rocha among others teaching. Especially Artigas, who was, at that time, a beacon of light, a stunning architect, not only at drawing,
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but also a militant for the profession and an union member, who created, among other things, the Institute of Brazilian Architects (IAB), in São Paulo, and also the FAUUSP, the Architecture and Urbanism College at USP. He was a master in the broader sense of the word. When it comes to architecture, his words used to enlighten us all. He used to say something magnificent. He used to say that architecture is one of the most generous professions that may exist in a society, it is the profession in which intellectuals and literate people would devote their efforts to society’s welfare in every aspect, from housing to healthcare to urbanism and so on and so on. Us, who graduated using public money, would be, in the future, the ones who would undertake this outstanding mission
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of building the scenario, the environment, in which Brazilian society would progressively liberate itself, and its humble people and land would rise and thrive, and so on. It was a truly exciting and beautiful teaching. I can still remember how, by the time I became a professor at FAUUSP, the students often cheered and even cried moved by this enthusiasm – or maybe of sadness, because it was the time of the military dictatorship – and participated in a very affective mood. Moreover, at that time, there were less architects, so everybody could find work, not only the architects but also architecture students. Rodrigo Lefèvre, who was a brother to me, and I
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started our office in our second year of college. Obviously, we could not sign any blueprints, the Regional Council of Engineering and Architecture (CREA) would not allow that, but we had friends and colleagues who would do that for us. And I never worked so much in my life as I did that year, when Rodrigo and I built a lot of buildings in Brasilia – I will not mention any of them by name, because they are absolutely hideous, and I tried to carefully hide them in my biography – which are huge buildings that still exist and weaken the beauty of Brasilia nowadays. Also during that time, architects used to be very present in the building sites and its procedures. They would go there every week or so to check on how things were and whether the project was being followed or not,
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or if there were problems that needed to be fixed, etc. And during this period of heavy workload in Brasilia, either Rodrigo or I, practically once a month or even more often, would go there to check on what was being done, inspect, etc. There, little by little, a feeling of uneasiness arose. That enormous building site – Brasilia had not yet been inaugurated –, so big that it would be difficult even to imagine today. However, there was a sense of misery and hunger; you could see it in the faces of the skinny workers, reddish because of the the dust that floated all around. At the time, those things were not well divulged, but since we were frequently going to Brasilia, we became aware
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that the building sites in Brasilia were real concentration camps. They were surrounded by police - sometimes by the army -, the workers’ demands or attempts to initiate strikes were violently suppressed, and people were being killed; the workers were often stopped from leaving the sites during any social turmoil, the food, which was brought from different places in the country, since there was nothing in Brasilia, it was an empty place, was often rotten, and the workers – I apologize for having to speak about such vile things - often suffered from strong diarrhea becoming weak and all that. There were numerous cases of suicide of workers in Brasilia. People who threw themselves under trucks or jumped from the top of buildings. Both Rodrigo and I felt perplexed about that.
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I mean, how is it possible that in such a generous activity, an activity that is so sensitive to the needs of the people, which is going to build schools, universities, cities, houses, hospitals, etc., whose project, in the broader sense, is the welfare of people and mankind altogether, the welfare of our country; how is it possible that this very activity would get involved in the violence and barbarism and pain that we often saw in the building sites. At the first moment, while still students, it was difficult to figure that out, to associate the reasons why there was such a disparity. We delved into studying and researching – a very difficult task. I do not recommend it, but if you look into our first findings and writings, Rodrigo’s and mine, you will find quest and perplexity and anguish there,
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because we did not know well what was going on. Happily or unhappily for us, immediately we graduated from university, we became professors there. I taught former classmates, and it was a very difficult situation. We felt a lot of pressure from having graduated and returned immediately after as professors. We felt obligated to study, research, and dig to try to understand better what architecture was about and what we were doing. Then - and it was a bit easier that time - we addressed Marx and the leftist thought, where we found certain elements that began to explain that dichotomy,
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that radical separation between so generous ambitions and such an ugly reality in the realization of what was intended. We started reading things people often ignore, which is a very boring side of Marx, related to capital, economy, numbers, equations and all that. I will spare you of the details because they are terribly boring, but, at the same time, indispensable. We finally found ourselves in the chapter 13 of Das Kapital, where Marx explains, in one of the most boring and least read chapters of the book, what are collectives, manufacturing sites, industries, and how you separate them from one another and so on. Then, we skipped to the third volume of the book, to read more boring things,
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such as the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, which gets you bored just by the name. We started, bit by bit, to elaborate a theory of architecture, which you can find condensed in my little book called “Building site and Design” (O Canteiro e o Desenho), a book very difficult to read – I will tell you why is that in a moment – which, however, condenses some of our quests and anguishes. The book is under my authorship, because it was the time of the military dictatorship and censorship in Brazil, but I was already in Europe. It also contains, however, what both Rodrigo [Lefèvre] and Flávio Império thought at the time. I wrote a mysterious dedication in which I refer to them without mentioning their names, because if I had done so, they would have had problems in here. Today you can do that.
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The core of my theory is the following: architecture is neither a handmade activity, as we usually say, nor it is an industrial activity. Even today, if you go to a building site, you will see neither operation machines nor assembly lines, etc. The building site is basically what we call, according to Marx, a manufacture, a very special type of production in which the realization is human-made, even though it is assisted and seconded by some machines which are used to do the heaviest work, such as cranes, electric saws, and things like that. But there is no assembly machine, as we see in the automotive industry or
Part II
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other cutting-edge industries. That means this type of manufactured production possesses a very important feature for the economy as a whole. It gathers massive labor, a great number of workers and just a few machines. The industry, on the other hand, gathers massive machinery and little labor. In order to compare them from an economic point of view, imagine that, if you have an initial capital of, let us say, $ 100, 00, and decide to invest it in an industry, around ninety per cent of it will be invested on machinery, construction material and things like that. Only ten per cent will be used for salaries. If you opt to invest the same $ 100, 00 dollars, euros or whatever, in the civil construction manufacture,
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the money will be distributed in a different way. Around seventy per cent – am here I am using old data – goes to machinery, cement, sand, bricks or whatever, and thirty per cent goes to labor. I will not elaborate on it any further, but the rate of exploitation of labor is similar in all types of production. Imagine that a worker works half a day to pay for his own salary, and another half to pay for the profits of capital. That $ 100, 00 in the industry, that were to be divided into $ 90, 00 for material and $ 10, 00 for labor will, therefore, generate another $ 10, 00 in profit. The worker will pay for his own salary, and will generate another $ 10, 00 in profit, or, more precisely, in surplus value. The same amount of money invested in manufacturing
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generates $ 130, 00, $ 30, 00 for the workers, who will pay for their own salaries, and another $ 100, 00 in profit, that is, in surplus value. It is a very simple equation: $ 100, 00 invested in the industry equals to $ 90, 00 and $ 10, 00 shares, in which these $ 10, 00 generates profit during half a day, that is, surplus value, and pays the salaries in the other half. Therefore, in the industry, $ 100, 00 becomes $ 110, 00, and, in manufacturing, $ 100, 00 becomes $ 130, 00. This is a law of economics. Only human labor generates profit, surplus value. Machinery worns out and becomes obsolete, then are replaced, etc. What happens is that the civil construction manufacture generates $ 130, 00, $ 30, 00 of which in surplus value, in profit. Industry generates $ 10, 00. This will not be seen in the balance sheets from any big companies, it is simply not there,
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because this money is previously redistributed through balancing, which is when the generated money by manufacturing is used to fund industries. Much to the contrary of what we think, it is not the cutting-edge industry that pushes and carries out the so-called laggard sectors of the production, but the other way around. These laggard sectors of manufacturing production are the ones funding the cutting-edge sectors. We are done with the numbers, these terrible things. What happened during Juscelino Kubitschek’s years was that the country was supposed to breakthrough. He had a project, which he could not complete, named “50 years in 5”, to make Brazil take off and progress. He introduced the automotive industry and a series of other industries in Brazil.
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However, he would never have introduced these industries to develop in here if he had not favored and encouraged the civil construction manufacture to provide the “blood”, the surplus value, and the necessary money to carry out this development at the same time. Brasilia sustained the national economy to a large extent. When it comes to expenses, and thinking about Brasília, it was an outrage. As an example, Juscelino, when faced with dissatisfaction from both the Army and the Navy, decided to buy a toy for the navy, an aircraft carrier later on named Minas Gerais, whose total cost equals the total cost of the making of Brasilia. This aircraft carrier, which I do not know whether it still exists or not, was anchored in the Guanabara Bay just a few years ago, functioning as a Casino for the military,
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because it could not even leave the port due to fuel and operation costs which would exhaust the Navy budget in one single day. Not to mention there was no destroyer or any structure around to support the submarine. It shows the cost of Brasilia was not in any way exceptional; on the contrary, it was a very profitable investment for the government. Well, if it was profitable, it was because millions of workers went there to be exploited and work for very small salaries, to work at a furious pace in order to allow Juscelino to inaugurate the city before the end of his term. What Rodrigo and I saw in Brasília was a mix of all of this, and it was impossible to analyze the architecture in its own closed universe, just dropping names of architects;
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it would have been impossible to understand architecture, even if we had broadened the scope of our interests to the whole construction. It was, and still is, necessary to insert architecture into the context of the global political economy for us to understand what we do, what is our role, and why we do what we do. End of the first chapter, beginning of the second. I will now return to the Late Middle Ages in Europe, because we need to look for the origins of these things. We often forget the origins of things, where they came from, etc., and this often causes problems. As I never forget I am from Santa Catarina, architects should never forget where they come from. In the Late Middle Ages,
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beginning of the Gothic period, end of the Romanesque period, how were those wonderful churches and first cathedrals built? There were groups of workers – which were not known as “workers” by then; they were called artists – who were members of the Ars, which means, in the old sense, every qualified material activity. Therefore, the people we call workers today were known at that time as artists, and they usually gathered in groups of 20, 30 or even 40 people and, in every spring, considering they already knew which church was being built in what city of the region, they would go there and offer to work. There were fights. Each of these groups had an artist – today’s “worker” –
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known as a “bone breaker”, a big strong man, which, when there was competition among the groups, would be used as an asset. Violence was often used as a means to solve these disputes, with the strongest group ridding themselves of the weakest ones. Once they settled in the building places, their production were more or less homogeneous. There were no leaders, and most of these artist workers were versatile people who could do any and everything. Evidently, some of them would stand out in one particular area or another, but there was no technical division of labor, let alone a social division of labor. There was no planning either. They would arrive and check what was being built – sometimes there could be a mockup or a draft somewhere, just a summary – but they would carry on from what they have seen there,
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and all of these artist workers shared some savoir-faire, some expertise and empirical construction knowledge, and could perfectly carry on with the job. If you go the Chartres Cathedral and carefully check on the small stones, you will see that almost all of them are marked by either an anchor or three small dots, or something like that. These marks mean that the group, in a given year in the past, built a part of the cathedral from one point to the other; then there will be different marks, maybe an anchor, an arrow or a bow, which means another group carried out the project of the Chartres Cathedral from a previous point. That is how civil construction functioned. They did not work during the winter, because it was too hard, and they were very well paid.
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The bone breaker used in fights would not only break his enemies’ bones, but also scare archbishops, priests, etc., keeping his “strength status” in the building sites; later on this would evolve. When the Gothic period came something happened, in a very slow pace, and lasted for two or three hundred years. I will summarize it in only two or three minutes, so some things about how slowly it happened will be missed. Little by little, the cities were being formed, and many of them became small republics. The church and the cathedral are no longer ruled solely by the bishop, the archbishop, or the priest; they must obtain an authorization to build from a group of citizens
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who run this small republic, this city-state. This happened in Strasbourg. Strasbourg became a republic very early, and it was not ruled by a single person, a religious authority, but by a congregation, a council. Well, it was not possible to make oral arrangements with the council members; documents, drafts and summaries were needed. Everybody would then sign up this work contract. Because of this, it became necessary to start registering what would be done, which never happened before. Out of the building site then emerged the person responsible to produce these work contracts, which are more valuable in terms of law than in terms of architecture. Bit by bit, the drawings would become
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the documents that ran the works. I always mention an example – which, in history of art studies seems strange, but possesses a very practical meaning nevertheless – from the Middle Ages. In the illuminated drawings from the Middle Ages, we would see a bearded God holding a big compass in his hand, a one-meter compass, and this compass would be from those artist workers, because the compass was not used to draw. In a construction, it would be used to draw, in a 1:1 scale, a real scale, a window, an arc, or a door, in every detail. The compass was the working tool of the building site. God, who, in a way, played the roles of architect and worker from a building site, designed the world using this big compass,
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then created it using His power, and so on and so on. On the other hand, the citizen who goes to an office to draw a project to be realized, uses a very small compass, a desk compass, not the building site compass anymore; Little by little, this desk compass starts “dancing” - it is funny to play with it, to draw a flower or a small circle -, and because of this, the design begins to separate from the building site, neither by planning nor malice, but naturally. You need to draw, and it happens to be funny to draw small circles, curves and turns by using this compass. Once again, if you go to the Strasbourg Cathedral, you will realize that the background is very coarse and hard,
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but if you check on the façade, you will see a very small fabric in which the compass is playful and draws small cathedrals, circles, etc. It reminds me of a hammock that existed here in Santa Catarina, which was madly intertwined. The façade of the Strasbourg Cathedral is exactly like this, a very detailed fabric. Like it or not, and, again, this happened unintentionally and without any personal interference, the design began separating from the construction. Another proof of that is that the façade of the Strasbourg Cathedral, whose small details are made using this small compass, must be reconstructed practically every year. Because of this, the building site of the Strasbourg Cathedral has been open ever since the twelfth century; it was never closed, since every year there must be a repair to the small stones in the façade, which always deteriorates during the winter.
Part III
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Besides that, because these stones are thin, some small metal structures, which are not seen, are needed, but since metal deteriorates at a different rate from the stones, everything ends up by falling apart. That makes the Strasbourg Cathedral an everlasting and ongoing project. It is an eternal work, because it must be redone every year, maybe until the fifth world war blows up everything and we finally cease to talk about it. Design, naturally and unintentionally, separates from the building site. In the beginning of the fifteenth century, a strange thing happened in Florence. The manufacture I mentioned a short while ago already existed in the textile industry both in Florence and in Flanders, now Holland and Belgium,
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and in another activity fields. There was a popular uprising, one of the first, carried out by workers against the exploitation of the capital. This revolt is known as the “blue-nails revolt”, because the people who had to dye the fabric all day long in a tank filled with a blue water up to their chests in order to preserve the fabrics. They were all covered in blue, inclusive, their nails, but, at some point, they have had enough and initiated a revolt. They took over the control of Florence and ruled the city alongside some other families for a few years. Then, the powerful were reinstated to power, and fired them to restore the “normal order”, and that is the first development of the capital. These people felt very happy and decided to celebrate
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their victory against those miserable and awful artist workers – who were not, at that point, artists anymore, only workers – who dared to seize their power. They commissioned Brunelleschi’s Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, and that was symbolic, because that did not happen only in Florence, it is just one example that summarizes all others. Brunelleschi, who is considered the founding father of our métier, was a very tenacious man, who invented pivotal things not only to architecture but also to painting. I hope I can talk more about him tomorrow concerning painting. He designed the cathedral’s dome; first, he did the drawing – as of today, the critics still struggle to define as to whether it was a totally genius or a totally idiotic drawing, but it does not matter –
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of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. At that time, he was the boss, the person who hired everybody, after all; there was no labor division as there is today. However, there was a strike in the building site. The workers wanted better salaries and were complaining about his aggressiveness, and that he was never clear as to what each worker should do, and was always full of secrets and so on. He, who was a very smart man, went to a neighbor city and hired a group of workers who accepted to work at the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore for the same salaries. The Florentine workers were furious about that, but ended up by giving up and telling Brunelleschi they would work for the same salaries. Brunelleschi, then, decided to take action. First, the workers were used to climb down the dome’s scaffold, which was very high, every day at noon
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to eat an Italian pasta and drink a marvelous wine from Tuscany. Second, they were used to work in a very relaxed pace, especially in the afternoons - after drinking wine -, when they usually acted in a more lazy manner. Brunelleschi then introduced two measures: a much tighter work schedule and, above all, the building of a canteen on the top of the scaffolding, with no wine at all. All of this may seem secondary and of less importance, but from a political economy point of view, Brunelleschi introduced the two most essential things of the capital: first, the relative surplus value, and second, the absolute surplus value. Surplus value, as we saw, is that period of the day in which the workers have to work not to pay for their own salaries anymore, but to generate profit on the invested capital.
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His first measure, which is the building of the canteen on the top of the scaffolding, prevented the workers from wasting time by climbing up and down the ladder, which would allow them to work longer hours. There was no more wasting of time in climbing up and down. This is the absolute surplus value, i.e., an increasing in the duration of the worked time. If a worker needs to work for three hours to pay for his own salary, but works for six hours, he generates three hours’ profit for the capital. If he works for nine hours, he is generates six hours’ profit for the capital. That was Brunelleschi’s achievement with this very simple measure. His second measure was to control the work pace of the workers. He introduced a production rate, a type of… I will not get into details here; you can get that information by reading Vasari. But he increased the work pace, which became more intense, and that is the relative surplus value, which means that a worker who pays for his own salary by working three hours can do this in only two if he increases his work pace.
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This extra hour will be kept by the capital for itself. This is the relative surplus value. For the first time, Brunelleschi established, willingly and consciously, a new role for the architect, which is to organize and put forward a certain type of building site that favors the capital. It is not by chance the biggest manufacturing group in Florence funded the Santa Maria del Fiore. Later on, he took another action – the most important one for us architects, because it is the one that will go down in history on our behalf –, which was a change in the language. Until then, the artist workers knew, as just a few others did, how to build Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals –
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they had a talent for that, and knew exactly how to do it; they were part of the métier. Brunelleschi did what everybody knows has to be done when someone seizes power, which is to change the rules of the game. You change the law, the customs, and, above all, the most deeply rooted customs of the dominated group. It was in that moment Brunelleschi introduced what we call classicism in architecture. He started building Romanesque columns and architraves, and introducing the architecture language you all know until today. However, that had nothing to do with construction, which kept being Gothic and counting on the workers’ expertise, but on the top of that, he put this cap, like in a cake in which one puts a white cap with golden small balls and all that.
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There was absolutely no constructive, technical or structural reason for him to change the language, much to the contrary. The Roman and Greek architecture form acted as a cap over the traditional architecture. There is a very good example of that here in Brazil which I suggest you take a look at, which is the São Paulo State Pinacotheca, which was very well transformed by Paulinho Mendes da Rocha but that still preserves the building designed by [Francisco de Paula] Ramos de Azevedo with its bare and peeled walls. It is curious that the Pinacotheca is a huge brick-on-brick building
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that was sculptured with [inaudible] of columns, arcs, architraves, etc. which have no constructive function, and that are there only as a decoration laid over the original construction, which is made of bricks. This started during the Renaissance and, throughout all the classical period up to the nineteenth century, it stayed the same. A building built by using a traditional technique known by the workers, which architects don’t need to know - a secret technique, which because it is secret, deteriorates as times passes by -, with a cap, an envelope, on the top of that, which shows a different form, a different construction, a different production, which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the real construction. I cannot elaborate on it now, but in the beginning of the nineteenth century, some architects,
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such as [Jacques-Germain] Soufflot, who made the Parisian pantheon, tried to turn the classical language into a constructive language. He tried to build real columns and real architraves, etc. But he failed. I will not go into details here, because we have to move on to the next step. The third chapter, the last one, - I guess I already spoke too much -, is about the origins of modern architecture at the end of the nineteenth century, and inside which we all still are. By the end of the nineteenth century, what happened was that, in the case of France - the country in which I developed my researches, so this choice is not arbitrary -, because France was, by the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, what the U.S. is today. France was a really advanced country, a leadership, not so much from the industrial point of view, but from the cultural and worldwide influence point of view, etc.
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The whole world spoke French. The Russian Court members spoke French, not Russian, among themselves, etc. By the end of the nineteenth century, the working class, which were stopped from creating their own organizations during the entire first half of the century, due to reasons related to the French revolution I will not elaborate on… First, after the fall of Napoleon III, it became possible for the working class to create unions and other organizations. Second, because of the very fact that they were in the same position I described earlier, during the architecture’s pre-classical period, in which no building could be built unless the workers brought the techniques with themselves. They were the ones able to construct, the ones able to build a house. It was a bit different situation, a lighter one, but
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- and I apologize for this sudden movement -, I have to be somewhat of a caricaturist; especially when it comes to stones and wood technologies, the expertise, the technique, and knowing what had to be done in a roof or stairway or a wall, it was the workers who knew how to handle, without them none of that would be built at all. At the same time, the fall of the empire and beginning of the republic made possible for a strong climate of social turmoil to arise. By the end of the nineteenth century, in Europe, especially in France, during a century in which everyone including the bourgeoisie and the left and the working class was waiting for the revolution to happen at any time. That was the atmosphere. When we read Marx, Engels or Proudhon today, it is possible to realize they expected a fast transformation.
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Nonetheless, when we read texts from thinkers far from the left, it is also possible to feel this atmosphere of a changing society. This revolution climate, as I told you in the beginning, was the same climate that was created during the sixties all over the world. Everybody was agitated and all that. A revolution was expected. At that time, the working class were not as moved by the communism of Marx as they were by the anarchist position. The workers were supposed to act straightforwardly, without having to submit to any deputies, senators or even the president. They should simply act, and their actions could mean simply to stop going to work or face their employers, etc.
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They were fighting for what was called during some time by Les ateliers nationaux, the national workshops, which were simply self-managed production units, in which the workers, helped by technicians, would produce - or not, as long as they wanted to -, what they wanted to produce, and how they wanted to. That was a general understanding. We are used to think of self-management as a recent thing, mainly related to 68, but it is actually an old claim from the French workers. Period. Next paragraph.
Part IV
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On the other hand, civil construction was going through a very hard time. The second industrial revolution had already happened, and in all sectors, machinery had taken over and were producing at a frantic pace and all that, except for the civil construction. I tried to explain why civil construction should not industrialize. It is because otherwise it will not provide the gross amount of surplus value anymore. It cannot industrialize even today. We will not be able to discuss this today, but I remember the Brazilian National Housing Bank (BNH), which was the first attempt of a popular housing program; a poor bastard had the idea of industrializing popular housing based on very simple technologies using concrete and a type of grass that grows in the wilderness. She was immediately fired for her attempt at industrializing civil construction. That was impossible.
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Delfim Neto, who is not a Marxist and uses an inverse language, used to say that we should encourage industries that can absorb massive labor. That is what I said about surplus value and the 90-10 and 70-30 sharing system, and so on. This woman was fired. Now let us go back in time to the nineteenth century. Civil construction was, at the end of the nineteenth century, as much a manufacture as it was at the beginning of the century. Many things that surrounds civil construction had already been industrialized, therefore architecture was in a very difficult situation, lagging behind, as it were, in technology terms, but ultra-contemporary in economic terms. The industrial revolution is not only about machinery. By introducing machinery, you are also introducing calculations, because you need to calculate the risks of using this machinery, its functioning, the engines,
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screws, pulleys, pistons and all of that. You need to design, to realize, and to do all of this in a certain way. You need to handle equations, chemistry and physics, which means the first industrial revolution was not only about introducing machinery, but above all, as far as architects are concerned, the creation of a corpus of prescription and designers and managers who were highly educated and specialized, people who needed to have come from universities, such as chemists, physicists and mathematicians. At this moment, a large split-up happens in the productive world. Production, which until then worked as in the civil construction, with all the constructive techniques belonging to the workers, all of a sudden was simply gone. Those creatures that move by themselves, the machines, are totally out of reach for them, not only from a political point of view,
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but also from a mental, scientific, and technical point of view. The design world separates and, throughout the whole nineteenth century, a strong corpus of management starts is formed, which will, by the end of the century, end up by creating the Organization for the Scientific Management of Labor, a barbarity I will not elaborate on. Anyways, for this organization, everything is decided from the top to the bottom, and the worker must only carry out his daily precise orders. He no longer can think and reflect, none of these things at all. By the end of the nineteenth century, architecture is still a manufacturer and dependent upon human labor, in a world that is entirely industrializing and making use of corpuses of designers
Min. 4
who are powerful and sophisticated. The architecture was humiliated and weak before that and, through the very project techniques, it tried copying and mimicking what was going on in the industry. If you are patient enough to do so, take a look at the projects from the eighteenth century – there must be some of them archived in here –, and projects from the end of the nineteenth century, and you will see a plethora of details, because every little thing is minimally detailed by the architect. That is over now. No more decisions are made in the building site. No more “do it like this” or “do it like that”. Now everything is designed at a higher level, thanks to the influence of the first industrial revolution, not as much in relation to the machinery as to the centralization of the conception.
Min. 5
When you are dealing with certain materials, such as stone and wood, this is not possible. The workers were much more familiarized with these two items; this has not totally vanished, though. I followed the restauration of the Notre-Dame Cathedral and realized that, in order to cut the more delicate stones on the top, they only use this kind of people, because they are the only ones who can do that. No engineer or technician is able to precisely design how to do that. Because stone and wood technologies were left in the hands of those artist workers, who are apt and capable to do this job. This people, who were in the midst of the revolution climate I described, were also the ones who started strikes more frequently. For example, if there were a house being built, the carpenters and stone workers would shut down the building site, which would cause a huge loss and stop the work from being done.
Min. 6
If you read about the strikes that happened at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, the number of successive powerful strikes is impressive. You will also note that they were often carried out by the workers who had not been industrialized and still dominated the expertise. In the case of civil construction, mostly stone and wood. You can also check on cartography, for example, and other areas, but you will not see the same happening. Every time a worker masters a technique, he can also make use of it as a weapon in the class struggle. The capital utterly despises it, because it is annoying. They, then, also unintentionally, in a smooth way and not motivated by malice, changed the used techniques. They introduced concrete and steel instead of stone and wood. Of course, this did not happen overnight.
Min. 7
Steel and concrete had been tested and were already known since at least mid-nineteenth century. Concrete is used to really amazing things today, from flower vases to ships to, of course, civil construction. The use of steel increased much faster due to the building of railroads. If you visit a French railroad today, you will realize the steel structure is amazingly elegant, well thought and detailed. When, at the end of the century, there were many strikes happening, the architecture started shifting towards the materials in which popular wisdom is not needed. You can open the books from [Sigfried] Giedion, [Nikolaus] Pevsner, and [Leonardo] Benevolo, and every book on the history of modern and contemporary architecture, and they will all agree that, among other things, the modern architecture emerged thanks to the introduction
Min. 8
of new stone, glass and wood technologies, the three ancestors of our architecture. If you look closer, it becomes clear that this introduction did not happen through any progressive thesis from Brazilian architecture, but as a matter of fact, a reaction against the technology used by the workers. It was necessary to introduce a technology unknown to them, a technology they did not master, that even today they still have not dominated, which are steel and reinforced concrete technologies. The main evidence for that you can get through a simple empirical verification is by examining the steel and concrete buildings which preceded the inauguration of modern architecture. There are brillant works, such as the steel stations in France,
Min. 9
the [inaudible] bridges, or the [inaudible]’s domes. They are all magnificent concrete structures. When modern architects started using these materials, it was hideous. I am very fond of Tony Garnier’s industrial cities, for example, but the concrete he used is the most stupid and poorly thought concrete there is. When [Walter] Gropius, from Bauhaus, built his Bauhaus’ buildings, the steel technology he used was the most mediocre one you can think of, a very feeble wood technology, with the small crosses. It is terrible. Modern architecture, supposedly a child of new materials, started by destroying the steel technology available.
Min. 10
Again, if you compare the steel structure of a French station from the nineteenth century to the steel structures of Gropius, [Ludwig] Mies [van der Rohe], or Tony Garnier’s concrete, and you will see modern architecture is just a bastard child of this materials, who did not progressed, much to the contrary, depreciated the use of them. The aim of architecture was not to advance technology, it never was, because the architecture operates in this grey area where is necessary to maintain a certain upper gaze in order to keep things as they are. This does not mean any form of disrespect to architects. It is not them personally who are responsible for this, it is written into society’s global structure. Unfortunately,
Min. 11
we carry on with our design, a production field that is essential to the capital, because it is a field of the construction area that generates huge sums of money, which is absolutely necessary for the capital to continue existing. It did not get better; it only got worse, especially nowadays, with the shameful development of the financial capital, which demands a two-fold exploitation of the workers. This things are getting worse every day, and there is nothing more violent and stupid than works such as [Danilo] Guerri’s, for example, which look like UFOs, really strange intellectual constructs, etc., whose immediate result is a total and violent
Min. 12
separation between the workers and their works. The most caricatural example of this situation is Dubai. I could have never imagined, by the time I wrote my piece on building sites, that we would ever have so clear an example of what Rodrigo and I were trying to say. Dubai is a stool in the middle of tons of sand; there are only buildings there, there is not even a banana tree that is not artificial, or a plant that has not been brought there from somewhere else. But there, in the middle of those huge piles of sand, lots of Filipinos, Indians, and other people from the southeast of Asia, all of them confined to these isolated building sites, since it is prohibited for this ugly Asian fellow to walk on the streets under the risk of having his passport seized by the authorities. There are also those amazingly stupid and ugly towers, which arise in that paradise;
Min. 13
as for Dubai’s money, all of it comes from the building site, since they have no other source of income. Later on, they will simply sell the buildings which were built by all of those people using the most advanced technology available, evading taxes and all that, in order to create another tax haven in the world. But the local money, those huge sums which have supported Dubai, what is sold there in that city, in those edifices and buildings which can be equipped with everything they want, its base and its core, in essence, come this mountain of Asian workers completely confined to disgusting building sites and subjected to an extraordinarily violent exploitation. These things are regarded today as the financial capital’s miracles,
Min. 14
which are voiced through its self-congratulatory lullabies. I guess I have spoken too much, about too much misery, so I will stop it now. If you want, we can discuss it now.