fascism 7 (2018) 175-212 brill.com/fasc The Many Faces of a Para-Fascist Culture: Architecture, Politics and Power in Vargas’ Regime (1930–1945) Francisco Sales Trajano Filho Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de São Paulo
[email protected] Abstract This article considers key developments in Brazilian architecture which occurred under the ambiguous and contradictory Vargas’ regime (1930–1945), when it was ex- posed to both internal and external political contingencies, including the crisis of liberalism, which affected its ability to expand and consolidate itself. This situation was not unique to Brazil, since many interwar dictatorships, including the Soviet and fascist regimes, shared the same characteristics. In the Brazilian twentieth century, both during democratic and dictatorial times, whether dominated by left-wing or right-wing ideologies, architecture and the State constantly sought to take advan- tage of the relationship between them. The demands, projects and interests of both spheres set up an intricate web of relationships that shaped national identity and embodied its material representation. Investigating the place of architecture within a broader context, that of the Brazilian nation-building process, the article establishes that the architectural representation of the Brazilian state was never straight forward, combining a set of breakthroughs and setbacks, and always leaving the quest for a uniform and coherent aesthetic language unsolved. This anomalous situation has led scholarship to disregard the complex relationship between the State and architec- ture, between ideology and aesthetics and, simultaneously, to ignore the profound contradictions within Vargas’s government, both in the political and architectural field, and to underestimate the role played by the modernism of European fascism in acting as one of the poles of attraction acting on how building projects were conceived.