Architecture and Nature: essays by Abilio Guerra

This collection, edited by Fernando Luiz Lara and Silvana Romano Santos, brings together articles that are somehow related to a common nodule, that I believe was identified few years ago, and points to a kind of birth mark of Brazilian's architectural culture. The common nodule being the belief (that houses texts, narratives and speeches of the decades of 1920 to 1940) in an alternative project of modern action - where culture and nature have main roles -, that due its discursive efficiency metamorphoses itself in real characteristics of Brazilian modern architecture. In synthesis, the intellectual artifices turn themselves in an organic character. Thus, the understanding of the discursive assembly of Brazilian modern is, at the same time, the understanding of its efficiency in the constitution of an art and of an architecture with its own characteristics. The comprehension of such historic phenomena happens, therefore, through a speech that describes, constitutes and legitimizes itself. Finally, it won't be useless to mention that some of the selected articles are nothing more than simple registers of the architectural culture - something with partial and provisional analysis about architecture's teaching, critic or historiography -, which we must read with the same unpretentiousness that motivated them.