Advisor: Ana Luiza Nobre
Dissertation: From miracle to curse: Sergio Bernardes and Brasilia (1968-74)
Defense date: 30/05/2016
Abstract
The production of the Brazilian and native of Rio de Janeiro architect Sergio
Bernardes is as vast as unknown. Assertive and questioner, since the beginning of his
career, he presented himself against the conceptual, stylistic and projective formats.
Graduated in 1948 at the Universidade do Brasil, he worked until 1990s in the large field
of the project with abrupt change in the architectonical scale of the 1960s and 1970s.
Starting from the experimentation of more restrict and defined programs, he interspersed
a complex universe of the megastructures and headed prospective and visionary to the
territory scale. By experimenting steel as structural source of architecture, he threw
himself into the universe of the non euclidianas geometries; he hung pavilions as bridges,
houses as cable cars; tested light materials in the construction, and increased the industrial
production through the development of elements for series manufacturing. Through an
ambitious way of multidisciplined associations of knowledge, laboratorial research and
experimental investigation of the construction site, he pursued a type of systemic
idealism, based on a technological virtuousism. From architect to a “social inventor”, he
reassured his belief in the modern individual, in the power of reason, in the potency of the
project and in a preventive action of future. In the Brazilian architectonical context of the
1960s and 70s, he truly believed in the renovation of his architecture, taking advantage of
the good relationship he had with the Military, especially, during a period of “economical
force” (concentration of incomes) and the progressive development of the country during
the Dictatorship era, the “Brazilian Miracle” (1968/73). A moment in which, the architect
takes over the protagonism of the just built, Federal Capital, Brasilia. This research is
about four of the Sergio Bernardes emblematic projects for Brasilia- Instituto
Brasileiro do Café – IBC (1968/71); Ministério da Marinha – MM (1970/73);
Escola Superior de Guerra (1970/74); Monumento ao Pavilhão Nacional (1972) –
all destined to the military government and finished within the period of time
called “the miracle”, in order to understand how much of a possibility without
precedents they meant for his architecture, and at the same time, how much of this
opened the way to a curse that haunts his work since then.