#modernism and hygiene and eugencies

[fatehbaz]

At the inauguration of the First Brazilian Congress of Eugenics in July of 1929, the physician and anthropologist Edgar Roquette-Pinto [...] exalted “eugenia” as the new science that, together with medicine and hygiene, would guarantee the efficiency and perfection of the race. [...] [This] agenda [...] brought architecture to the very core of the eugenics [...] movement [...]. [M]edical scientific discourses, first articulated in France, crossed the ocean [...]. [G]lobal movements, hygienics and eugenics, [...] became the dual vehicles for bringing architecture into active dialogue [...].

In Brazil, the nation was seen as a sick organism [...]. In the center of Rio de Janeiro, this mission brought together a diverse cast of characters: from the physicians and architects of the Parisian Musée Social, the early French think-tank [...], to the physicians and architects of Rio de Janeiro who formulated [...] Brazilian modernism, to Le Corbusier, who began consolidating a eugenicist ideology precisely during the months he spent in Brazil in the mid-1930s.

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In the early 1920s, [...] a dramatic event occurred in Rio. [...] [A] sanitary and urban reform [movement] [...] reached its climax with the demolition of an entire populated mountain, the Morro do Castelo, in the center of the Brazilian capital. This mountain was no ordinary mountain; it was the original site where the colonial city [...] had been established in 1567. [...] As far back as 1798, a medical report had argued for the mountain’s demolition [...]. [T]he mountain came to be seen as the very negation of modernity itself; a reservoir of vice and disease with a motley “marginal” population, including poor Blacks and formerly enslaved people who, according to the elites, invaded the center of the city [...].

The extensive territory that resulted from this demolition was immediately occupied by the 1922 International Exhibition. [...] Promoting itself as a tabula rasa, the exhibition represented a literal “triumph” over the territory - a territory now cleansed of its history and unwanted inhabitants. It’s more than 500-page catalog is striking in its complete elimination of all traces of the African and indigenous components of Brazilian culture. [...] Its images demonstrate a new alliance between beauty, health, tropicality, and modernization that Brazilian elites adopted [...].

Shortly after the exhibition, in 1922, and lasting until 1938, neo-colonial architecture was declared by the government to be the national style, mandatory for every building that would represent Brazil abroad. [...] It was not a coincidence that all this - the demolition of the mountain, the elimination of Rio de Janeiro’s original urban nucleus, the displacement of its poor residents, and the construction of the exhibition pavilions - was executed almost simultaneously with new policies and mandates such as the “white only” decree of 1921, which prohibited the immigration of Blacks to Brazil. [...] No one illustrates this connection between race and architecture better than Lucio Costa [the architect of Brasilia, the new modernist national capital city] - who, in 1928, made this racist link in a newspaper article: [...]

All architecture is a question of race. [...] Everything is a function of race. If the breed is good, and the government is good, the architecture will be good. Talk, discuss, gesticulate: our basic problem is selective immigration; the rest is secondary [...].

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When Le Corbusier traveled for the second time to Brazil in 1936, his discourses were centered on nature, death, and the racial and sexual “other.” [...] In 1936, while preparing his series of talks in Rio de Janeiro, Le Corbusier made a sketch on a piece of cardboard that distilled and concretized [...] rationales of modernity: change the environment, change the man. Written at the top is the word “Castello,” followed by the name “Lucio Costa,” the phrases “pedro aller police” and “Castello coûts clichés,” the name of architect “Carlos Porto,” and the phrase “Acheter livre Carrel.” The latter was a reminder for him to buy the new bestseller by the French Nobel prize-winning physician Alexis Carrel, Man The Unknown, an unmistakable call for the implementation of eugenics and manifesto for white supremacy. What made Le Corbusier think of Carrel while thinking of Rio de Janeiro?

It is not a mere coincidence that Castelo, one of the most significant eugenic laboratories in Latin America, is the first word that appears on the cardboard.

But Castelo was not only the name of the pulverized mountain from which thousands of “undesirable” inhabitants had been displaced, or the stage for the 1922 international exhibition with its neocolonial pavilions and its image of white Brazil, or the epicenter of the master urban plan that Agache had designed for Rio. Castello was also where Lucio Costa was designing the new building for the Ministry of Health and Education, the institution charged with developing and enforcing Brazil’s eugenic policies under Getulio Vargas’ new authoritarian regime, for which Le Corbusier had been invited to be a design consultant. This sketch links the dramatic transformation of the urban territory of Rio de Janeiro to Lucio Costa’s project and to Carrel’s vision for remaking society. [...]

In his Oeuvre complète 1934-1938, Le Corbusier included a sketch of the Brazilian Ministry of Health and Education building. This new ministry [...] later became the symbol of Brazilian modernism [...]. Gustavo Capanema, the first Minister of Health and Education, had commissioned both the building, which he called the Ministry of Man and was destined to “prepare, compose, and perfect the Brazilian man,” [...]. Capanema pondered, “How will the body of the Brazilian man be, of the future Brazilian man, not the vulgar man or the inferior man but the best exemplar of the race? How will his head be? His color? The shape of his face? His physiognomy?” [...] When Le Corbusier came back [from Brazil] to France and began collaborating with Alexis Carrell under the [Nazi] Vichy regime, his vision of a clinically inspired habitat where all human needs can be met reached a new level of specificity. [...] He was convinced that the human body, the anatomo-politics of its productivity, and the built environment should be managed by the State. In a 1941 broadcast he affirmed that "[...] The degeneration of the house, the degeneration of the family, are one."

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All text above by: Fabiola López-Durán. "Fantasies of Whiteness". e-flux Architecture. Sick Architecture series. April 2022. At: e-flux dot com slash architecture/sick-architecture/461057/fantasies-of-whiteness/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for criticism, teaching, commentary purposes.]