The good life of modernism in Brazilian architecture: negotiation, media and modern domesticity in the pages of the Casa & Jardim magazine (1950-1970)

Abstract

The proposed research is based on the assumption that magazines like Casa & Jardim, facing a public non-specialized in architecture, worked in the manner of the negotiation between the vibrant culture of Brazil's modern architecture after World War II, in tune with values and contemporary images of what the modern dwelling, and the demand for social distinction of the Brazilian urban middle class, in rapidly process of insertion into the circuit of consumption of material and symbolic goods, caused by the ongoing development policies, albeit with limited range social, between the 1950s and 1970s. Unlike the elite "enlightened" from which they came the first of a private client architecture that found its beginnings in the State as the main driving force, these middle class, largely devoid of cultural capital necessary for the adequate intellection of modern conceptual and aesthetic refinement, demanded specific strategies of persuasion and the establishment of practices, discursive and imagery, focused on the formation of the look and the aesthetic sense of this new clientele. Strategies and practices that often involved the flexibility of modern assumptions about design from the perspective of making more accessible to the taste "middle" this architecture so often accused of hermeticism. Operating in this process, Casa & Jardim magazine, among others, played a key role along the urban middle class, yet little investigated by historians, to mediate between the expressions "learned" and the free dissemination and interpretation of formal fashion tuned with modern Brazilian architecture commonly present in the "non-erudite" and no-pedigree expressions of the "popular modernism" found on the outskirts of the Brazilian cities.(AU)