A Building without Doors: Vilanova Artigas and the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism Building at the University of São Paulo

The University of São Paulo was founded in 1934 with the incorporation of several independent institutions, including the Faculty of Law (1827), the Polytechnic School (1893), the Faculty of Pharmacy and Dentistry (1898), the School of Agriculture (1901), and the Faculty of Medicine (1912). Claude Lévi-Strauss numbered among the first professors of the newly created Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences, and Languages.

Although the official founding of the architecture school dated to 1948, the Polytechnic School offered courses for engineer-architects as early as 1894.¹ The school's founder, Francisco de Paula Souza (1843–1917), a civil engineer and graduate of the Karlsruhe Polytechnic, adopted a curriculum with a three-year foundational course followed by three-year specialization programs based on the German model.² Students pursued specialized courses of study in such fields as agronomy, civil engineering, and architecture.

Francisco de Paula Ramos de Azevedo (1851–1928), an engineer-architect and graduate of Ghent University in Belgium, not only directed the teaching of architecture at the Escola Politécnica but also designed and built most of the major public buildings in São Paulo during this period.³ Following the appointment of Ramos de Azevedo as dean in 1917, the school began to hire former students to teach architecture courses; among them was Luiz Ignácio de Anhaia Mello (1891–1974), one of the future founders of FAU-USP.⁴

Artigas studied under Anhaia Mello at the Polytechnic School, graduating in 1937, and in 1940 he in turn was invited to teach there. During this time, plans to grant the architecture course at the school more autonomy coincided with new discussions about the creation of an architecture school independent of both engineering and Beaux-Arts models.⁵ In Rio de Janeiro, the establishment of the National Faculty of Architecture in 1945 marked the founding of the first of several architecture schools in Brazil during these years.⁶ In 1946 the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Artigas a Latin American Fellowship to study modern American architecture.⁷ From September 1946 to November 1947, he traveled extensively throughout the United States in the company of his wife, Virginia Camargo.⁸ He visited a number of academic institutions associated with the architectural vanguard, spending two months as “guest of the institute” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also touring Columbia University, Black Mountain College, and Florida Southern College.⁹

At the same time, plans for a new school of architecture at the University of São Paulo moved ahead following the donation of Vila Penteado, a lavish 1902 art nouveau villa designed by Swedish architect Carlos Ekman (1866–1940) for industrialist Antônio Álvares Penteado. FAU-USP was officially established at Vila Penteado in 1948. With Anhaia Mello as dean and the former Polytechnic School professors and assistants (including Artigas) as faculty, FAU-USP began to develop an expanded curriculum that drew on both architecture and the visual arts.¹⁰ During the next decade the architecture school also recruited graduates from the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences, and Languages.¹¹ FAU-USP, as Paulo Mendes da Rocha observed in a 2008 interview, was “a model product of the university,” bridging the “knowledge produced on a theoretical level by the Faculty of Philosophy and, on a technical level, by the Polytechnic School.”¹²

Despite Vila Penteado's convenient location in the central neighborhood of Higienópolis, construction of a new university campus at Butantã, on the western fringe of São Paulo, beginning in 1950 made another move inevitable.¹³ Meanwhile, changes to the curriculum continued to be discussed. In 1957 a new sequence was proposed for the existing courses, and in 1962, courses grouped around departments (design, history of architecture, technology) replaced the traditional chair positions.¹⁴ The 1962 reform also integrated the fields of industrial design and visual communication into the architecture and planning curriculum. For Artigas, who participated in both initiatives, the addition of these fields resulted in “a broader vision of architecture.”¹⁵

By 1962, Artigas was already developing a design for the new FAU-USP Building at the Butantã campus. The first set of drawings at the FAU-USP library dates from 1961, although Artigas perhaps began work as early as 1960.¹⁶ The new architecture school building was part of an ambitious plan proposed by the government of the state of São Paulo, which envisioned the construction of almost a thousand projects across two hundred cities from 1959 through 1963.¹⁷ At the University of São Paulo, Artigas's design formed part of a linear arrangement of schools known as the Corredor das Humanas (Corridor of the Humanities), designed by a group of architects who came to be associated with the Paulista School.¹⁸ (Later in this essay, I discuss the importance of this group for the historiography of modern Brazilian architecture.)

In Storia dell'architettura moderna (1975), Leonardo Benevolo argued that modern Brazilian architecture gained critical momentum with the completion of the Ministry of Education and Health Building (1936–43) in Rio de Janeiro (Figure 1).¹⁹ He observed that the first “modern” house in Brazil was built in São Paulo by Gregori Warchavchik in 1928.²⁰ Yet Benevolo also argued that firms based in Rio de Janeiro dominated the period between the design for the Ministry of Education and Health and the design for the new capital of Brasília, both led by Lucio Costa (1902–98).²¹ Other key practices, according to Benevolo, were those of Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012), Affonso Eduardo Reidy (1909–64), Marcelo Roberto (1908–64), Attilio Corrêa Lima (1901–43), and Roberto Burle Marx (1909–94)—all graduates of the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (National School of Fine Arts) in Rio.²² Benevolo mentioned just two São Paulo architects, and then only briefly: Rino Levi (1901–65) and Giancarlo Palanti (1906–77).²³ Benevolo affirmed that Brasília could be considered not only the culminating point of modern Brazilian architecture but also the “closing of a chapter,” given the subsequent military coup of 1964 and the collapse of the democratic state.²⁴ Other studies of the history of modern architecture reduced the scope of Brazilian works even further: Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co's Modern Architecture (1979) mentioned only the work of Costa, Niemeyer, and Reidy, and Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture (1967) included nothing in Brazil except Costa's Three Powers Plaza in Brasília.²⁵

In contrast to these studies, Henry-Russell Hitchcock's 1955 exhibition catalogue Latin American Architecture since 1945 provided a deeper analysis of Brazil's architectural production.²⁶ Created to accompany a major show of the same title at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Hitchcock's book came just over a decade after the first MoMA survey of Latin American architecture, Brazil Builds, organized by Philip L. Goodwin.²⁷ Beyond well-known designs like Niemeyer's Canoas House (1951–54), Costa's Parque Guinle Apartments (1948–54), and Reidy's Pedregulho Housing (1947–50), Hitchcock included works by other important Rio de Janeiro architects, such as Jorge Machado Moreira (1904–92) and Sergio Bernardes (1919–2002). He also incorporated the works of major São Paulo designers, including designs by Rino Levi, a residence by Oswaldo Arthur Bratke (1907–97), and a public swimming pool by Icaro de Castro Mello (1913–86).

It was Hitchcock's introductory text, however, that made the most critical contribution to the study of Brazilian architecture. Instead of conceiving of modern Brazilian architecture in unitary terms, Hitchcock identified the “Carioca School” (Costa, Reidy, Moreira, Niemeyer) associated with Rio on the one hand and, on the other, the “Paulista architecture” of São Paulo, which he described as “less specifically Brazilian in flavor than that of Rio, more sober in design and in color.”²⁸ Hitchcock also pointed to the influence of architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, rather than Le Corbusier, on São Paulo architects like Bratke.²⁹

Henrique E. Mindlin (1911–71), a São Paulo–trained architect based in Rio de Janeiro and one of the architects included in Hitchcock's book, produced the most comprehensive survey of modern Brazilian architecture (before Brasília) in his 1956 book Modern Architecture in Brazil. This study featured the work of two designers who later became leading architectural figures in São Paulo: Lina Bo Bardi (1914–92) and João Vilanova Artigas (1915–85). Both of these architects built their own residences during the same period: Bo Bardi's Glass House (1949–51) and the Vilanova Artigas House (1949–50) (Figure 2).³⁰ While these two houses shared some elements of the Carioca School, including pilotis and glazed façades, unlike buildings in Rio they offered no brise-soleil or sun protection in the form of wooden lattices or screen blocks. The absence of these typically colorful elements rendered the exteriors of both houses somewhat neutral—in line with Hitchcock's remarks about São Paulo architecture—although color still played a significant role. Artigas's residence featured a dark-red wall and blue columns, while the Glass House boasted green wooden shutters on the windows facing into the courtyard and red roof scuppers.

Both the Glass House and the Artigas House privileged living areas in their designs, anticipating the residential layouts designed in the 1960s by other architects associated with the Paulista School. In the Glass House, Lina Bo Bardi reserved more than 200 square meters (about 2,150 square feet) for her living and dining rooms, while the living spaces of the more compact Artigas House occupied half of the building's footprint.³¹ The São Paulo residence that Ruy Ohtake (b. 1938) built for his mother, the abstract painter Tomie Ohtake, from 1966 to 1968 represented perhaps the most extreme example, with two diminutive bedrooms of 4.4 square meters (47 square feet) each—“drawer-like bedrooms” in the architect's words—opening into a much larger living room and atelier of 196 square meters (2,110 square feet).³² Perhaps the design of the living room as a “public” space for social interactions compensated for the lack of civic areas where people could congregate and—in unfavorable political conditions—speak freely during these years in Brazil.

New structural conceptions emerging in the 1950s facilitated the creation of large open spaces. Artigas sought to consolidate all domestic functions under the same roof while reducing the total number of columns. For example, the Olga Baeta House (1956–57) had only six supports.³³ Soon after, Joaquim Guedes (1932–2008) reduced the supports to four in the Antônio Cunha Lima House, built in São Paulo in 1958–63.³⁴ Situated on a steep lot, the four-level dwelling featured an expressive treelike structure, with four concrete columns at the core of the rectangular plan and diagonal braces supporting the spans. Guedes, Artigas's former student at FAU-USP, left the house's concrete structure entirely exposed. Artigas also left his concrete façade wall at the Baeta House exposed to reveal the formwork imprints (Figure 3).

The volume raised on four columns with an exposed concrete frame became the house typology of the Paulista School.³⁵ Carlos Barjas Millan (1927–64)—with whom Guedes shared an office from 1955 to 1959—developed the parti of the Cunha Lima House at the Antônio D'Elboux House (1962–64), also sited on a steep slope.³⁶ Here a smaller program and reduced floor area allowed Millan to simplify the structure further and eliminate bracing.³⁷ While the four pilotis were integrated with the perimeter masonry on the upper stories, Millan emphasized the frame by interrupting the outside stucco to reveal the concrete slabs.³⁸ Paulo Mendes da Rocha (b. 1928), Millan's contemporary at the Mackenzie Presbyterian University School of Architecture in São Paulo, reduced the design for his own residence to a single floor raised on pilotis, with parking and service area below.³⁹ For this structure, later known as the Butantã House (1964–66), concrete functioned as both structural frame and partition walls, with a folded roof slab enclosing two sides of the plan.⁴⁰ If Mendes da Rocha's design blurred the distinction between structural and nonstructural elements, it also blurred the distinction between private and public: the bedrooms, all in a row set in the middle of the house, opened directly into the living room as well as onto a veranda (both along glazed façades). Artigas's design for the FAU-USP Building shared key characteristics with the Butantã House, including its interpenetrating spaces and rigorous structural modularity.

Although Artigas did not adopt the pilotis house typology, he also used the four-column concept for a series of designs. First, at the José Bittencourt House (1959–62) he built two parallel concrete walls to support the floors, tapering to touch the ground at four points.⁴¹ Then at the Ivo Viterito House (1962–64) he rested the concrete ceiling on four pillars with neoprene joints detailed by a bridge engineer, an innovative solution to the problem of movement caused by temperature variation.⁴² Finally, at the Elza Berquó House (1965–68), four tree trunks provided natural supports for an interior concrete ceiling.⁴³

In his designs for single-family homes, Mendes da Rocha also sought to explore collective urban housing solutions.⁴⁴ The Butantã House, for example, could be reimagined as a unit in an apartment building.⁴⁵ He successfully repeated the scheme twenty-five years later, prefabricating the entire concrete frame of the Antônio Gerassi House (1989–91) and assembling it in just three days.⁴⁶ In designing a house, Mendes da Rocha was thus ultimately also thinking about the city, and Artigas had similar concerns: he shared Leon Battista Alberti's belief that cities are like houses, and houses are like cities.⁴⁷ Maybe for this reason Artigas set the living areas of his houses directly on the ground, avoiding solutions on pilotis—in this way, these dwellings more directly represented extensions of the city.

In the Ivo Viterito House, for example, Artigas broke with tradition in São Paulo by dispensing with the typical front fence. He justified this choice by arguing that the small lot in a densely built neighborhood appeared larger without the fence, and at the same time the lack of a fence suggested a closer connection between the house and the surrounding city. Artigas then turned the living area and the bedrooms toward the rear, using the two roof girders to block out the “messy” views of the neighbors on either side from the interior.⁴⁸

The FAU-USP Building's openness to the city thus recalled the houses Artigas designed in the 1960s, as a building without a front door that nevertheless, given its inward focus onto a central space, afforded its occupants a sense of isolation. The Bittencourt House featured a central patio as well, while an internal garden illuminated by a retractable skylight served as a focal point at the Berquó House.

Rino Levi's work also offered important models for Artigas, including his designs for houses with interior gardens, such as those built for Milton Guper (1951–53) and Castor Delgado Perez (1958–59).⁴⁹ Born in São Paulo, Levi studied architecture in Milan and Rome, and returned to Brazil after graduating in 1926.⁵⁰ The 1943 Brazil Builds exhibition featured his celebrated design for a girls’ school in São Paulo, the Sedes Sapientiae Institute (1940–42).⁵¹ Artigas was very familiar with Levi and his work: he lived in an apartment building designed by Levi in downtown São Paulo, and in 1944 he designed a house for Levi's brother, Benedito.⁵² In 1957, Artigas served as Levi's assistant at FAU-USP, and in 1959, when Levi took leave to teach at the Central University of Venezuela, Artigas stepped in for him at FAU-USP. After Levi quit his academic post because of his professional obligations, Artigas was promoted to professor at FAU-USP, where he taught the fifth-year design studio.⁵³

As noted earlier, Artigas trained as both an engineer and an architect. After graduating from the Polytechnic School in 1937, he worked from January to November 1938 in the São Paulo Department of Public Works.⁵⁴ During this time, he met Gregori Warchavchik, the pioneer of modern Brazilian architecture, and assisted him in preparing an entry for a design competition for the São Paulo City Hall in 1939. Their submission took second place, and, according to Artigas, this propelled him to the teaching position he attained at the Polytechnic School in 1940.⁵⁵

Artigas then formed a partnership with engineer Duílio Marone that continued until 1944. According to historian Rosa Artigas, the architect's daughter, of the fifty-two houses that Artigas and Marone built in São Paulo, “most … had no formal connection with the vanguard in architecture.”⁵⁶ In 1942, however, Artigas designed a weekend house for his family inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie House designs. Known as Casinha (Little House), it featured a hearth at its core with other spaces organized continuously around the perimeter. Two years later, the house for Benedito Levi exhibited a more “Corbusian” language, with a pronounced upper volume supported by walls and two isolated columns.

Artigas soon adopted a different approach in the Louveira Building in São Paulo (1946–49) (Figure 4).⁵⁷ Here each of two parallel apartment towers featured a central strip of glass corresponding to the living rooms, flanked by bedroom wings that featured bright-red panels. Artigas added more color by mounting bright-yellow shutters above the red panels and using pale-blue mosaic tiles to finish the concrete slabs. A leafy garden between the towers, separated from the street by only a low fence, revealed Artigas's sensitivity to the future needs of a dense urban setting.⁵⁸ Pilotis supported the first tower at the street corner. A stair crossed diagonally to access the raised entry hall. From there a graceful curved ramp led across the garden to the second tower, ingeniously separating the garden from a parking area. Of the buildings designed by Artigas, the Louveira revealed the closest links to “Carioca” architecture. But as attested by the design of the façades, the complex also demonstrated the rigorous structural modularity that critically shaped the architecture of the Paulista School. This rigor coincided with Artigas's training at the Polytechnic School; for example, he worked as an intern with Oswaldo Bratke, an architect whose 1950s house designs emphasized the clarity of their structural grids.⁵⁹

While architectural historians might argue that Artigas went through “Wrightian,” “Corbusian,” or “Brutalist” phases during his career, the coherence of his oeuvre defies such categorization. Thus, the spatial continuity of the Wrightian Casinha, the openness of the Corbusian Louveira Building to the city, and the central patio of the Brutalist Bittencourt House converged in Artigas's design for the FAU-USP Building. Yet the historiography of modern Brazilian architecture emphasizes that Artigas's mature work coincided with the rise of Brutalism: Bruno Alfieri, editor of Zodiac magazine, underscored this connection as early as 1960.⁶⁰ Of Artigas's works at that time, only the Baeta House and the Morumbi Stadium (1952–60), a soccer arena still under construction, featured exposed concrete surfaces.⁶¹ Alfieri also published Artigas's design for the Rubens de Mendonça House (1958–59), with its plan organized around a central void, and his project for the Itanhaém School (1959–61).⁶² For Alfieri, the sequence of inner spaces was the principal characteristic of the Mendonça House, offering infinite viewpoints and highlighting “the material's nudity.” As he wrote, “The façade, a protruding parallelepiped, truly becomes a manifesto of the brute architecture.”⁶³ Curiously, the Mendonça House featured no unfinished surfaces; it had parquet floors and smooth walls and ceilings painted white. A white-and-blue mural on the front façade echoed the shape of the house's red-and-blue triangular columns.⁶⁴ Artigas did not use exposed concrete as a surface for interiors until he completed the Viterito House in 1964. For Alfieri, therefore, the association of Artigas with Brutalism seemed to be related to mass (the opaque cantilevered volume) and simplicity (the plain white walls and ceilings) rather than to the actual expression of the béton brut.

In his 1971 doctoral dissertation, “L'architecture contemporaine au Brésil,” Yves Bruand analyzed the developments of São Paulo architecture in the 1960s.⁶⁵ Bruand reinforced Hitchcock's dichotomy between the Carioca and Paulista Schools, associating the former with Corbusian rationalism and the latter with Brutalism. The Brutalist trend might also be linked to Le Corbusier's oeuvre, beginning with his Marseille Unité d'Habitation (1945–52). Bruand, however, observed a distinction between the “rationalist ideal, aiming to balance functional and formal issues,” and Brutalism's “desire to display contrasts.”⁶⁶ Noting Reidy's Museum of Modern Art (1953–67) as an influence on Artigas's Itanhaém School, Bruand argued that the museum displayed typical Carioca characteristics because it was “detached” from the ground (the museum floor is raised on a portico structure), while Artigas's Paulista building displayed Brutalist features because it was “flattened” against the ground (as a single-story school with low ceilings).⁶⁷ Like Alfieri, Bruand associated the rationalist line of the Carioca School with “lightness” and Brutalism with “mass” or “weight.” Raw concrete surfaces, although in themselves an integral condition of a Brutalist work, per se were insufficient: for Bruand, the fact that Reidy's Museum of Modern Art was entirely of exposed concrete was irrelevant.

Scholars regard Reidy as the “missing link” between the Carioca and Paulista Schools, noting that his designs pointed toward a “rigorous but expressive structure.”⁶⁸ As Ruth Verde Zein observes, at Reidy's Museum of Modern Art, “the structural section practically sums up the building's overall concept,” and the same could be said of the FAU-USP Building.⁶⁹ Unlike the designs of the Paulista School, however, the design for the Museum of Modern Art was not a single block: an educational wing was inaugurated in 1958, and Reidy planned another volume to house a theater (completed in altered form in 2005). But Oscar Niemeyer also embraced the single-block parti. In 1951, he designed four exhibition halls, connected by a free-form canopy, for São Paulo's fourth centenary celebration in 1954. Located inside Parque Ibirapuera, São Paulo's largest and most famous city park, Niemeyer's complex suggested a transition between his early “fluid plan forms” and the more Platonic volumes he adopted later in his designs for Brasília.⁷⁰ While the Ibirapuera canopy, with its undulating profile, offered an urban version of the “organic” roof used by Niemeyer in his Canoas House, the exhibition halls, like the Palace of Industry (today the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion), anticipated the geometric volumes Niemeyer designed for the new capital of Brasília, especially those of the Three Powers Plaza and the monumental buildings along the Ministries Esplanade. Housing the São Paulo Biennial since 1957, the vast parallelepiped of the Palace of Industry, 250 meters (820 feet) long and 50 meters (164 feet) wide, enclosed a spectacular interior where a regular grid of columns supported free-form floors connected by ramps. In the same way, Artigas's design for the FAU-USP Building featured a rectilinear exterior that gave no hint of its complex and sophisticated interiors.

The notions of structure as architecture and architecture as urbanism reached their apex in the late 1960s with the completion of both Bo Bardi's São Paulo Museum of Art (Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 1957–68) and Artigas's FAU-USP Building (Figure 5). No longer was the “official” modern Brazilian architecture Carioca—it was now Paulista, as attested by Paulo Mendes da Rocha's winning entry in the competition for the Brazilian Pavilion proposed for Expo '70 in Osaka (1969–70).⁷¹ As we will see, Mendes da Rocha's pavilion roof, gridded and filled with glazing, directly recalled Artigas's design for the FAU-USP Building. Of the four points that Rocha used to support the roof, three stood inside mounded-earth berms, so the roof seemed to hover above the ground, with only one visible supporting column composed of two intersecting arches. If the sinuous path between the “hill supports” and the sculptural “arch-column” echoed the curving forms of Carioca architecture, the rectilinear exposed concrete slab invoked the Brutalist forms of the Paulista School.

In 1966, the music critic and historian José Ramos Tinhorão wrote a polemical piece about bossa nova, the Brazilian music style generating international success with hit songs like “The Girl from Ipanema.”⁷² Tinhorão observed, “Born of secret apartment adventures with American music—which is, undeniably, its mother—bossa nova, regarding paternity, still lives the same drama as so many children in Copacabana, the neighborhood where it was born: it doesn't know who is its father.”⁷³ One might say the Paulista School shared its DNA with the Carioca School in the same way bossa nova drew upon the legacy of American jazz. But if the Carioca School was the mother of the Paulista School, can we say that Brutalism was its father?

For Yves Bruand, “Paulista Brutalism” represented a key part of the modern Brazilian movement, no matter how different its language was from that of other local trends.⁷⁴ Therefore, unlike Benevolo, Bruand recognized a continuation of modern Brazilian architecture after Brasília—and after the fall of democracy in 1964—through the production of the Paulista School. He acknowledged the existence of a “school” in São Paulo because Artigas and his disciples were there.⁷⁵

However, I would argue that rather than a master-and-disciples ensemble, the Paulista School is more reasonably viewed as a collaborative group. For instance, the architects of the Paulista School worked simultaneously and in concert to generate new research on house typologies and structural systems. And although Artigas designed the “manifesto” of the Paulista School, the FAU-USP Building, Bo Bardi's São Paulo Museum of Art is recognized as a work of the same stature.

In the 1950s, Bo Bardi, together with her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi, director of the São Paulo Museum of Art, made significant contributions to Brazilian culture not only by curating museum exhibitions but also by establishing a design school and founding an arts and architecture magazine, Habitat.⁷⁶ In 1951 Bo Bardi and her husband organized a show on the work of Swiss artist and architect Max Bill (1908–94), then dean of the Ulm School of Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm). Bill, whose work was an important reference for the Brazilian concrete art movement, initially praised modern Brazilian architecture, writing about the “space, light and air” and the “free passage underneath the building” that distinguished the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio.⁷⁷ In 1953, however, he changed his view: in a lecture at FAU-USP, Bill criticized the “antisocial academicism” in modern Brazilian architecture signaled by the repetitive use of free-form elements, all-glass walls, brise-soleils, and pilotis.⁷⁸ His condemnation of the use of pilotis seemed to extend to modern architecture in general—or at least to its Corbusian variant. For Bill, pilotis threatened to replace the key function of the old internal courts, which concentrated pedestrian traffic and promoted a quieter environment. He suggested that modern architecture could retain “the advantages of courts whilst getting rid of their defects,” adding that this would be “a far more organic achievement” than replacing courts with “buildings in the form of ‘boxes on stilts.’”⁷⁹ Bill's criticism had an enduring impact: first published by Lina Bo Bardi in Habitat, it ended up on the pages of Architectural Review under the direction of Nikolaus Pevsner. Even Kenneth Frampton's classic Modern Architecture, first published in 1980, cited Bill's critique.⁸⁰

A decade after Bill's lecture, another European argued in favor of the patio, this time at a domestic scale.⁸¹ In “The Rebirth of the Patio,” Josep Lluís Sert (1901–83) praised patio houses arranged in clusters as an alternative to small single-family detached homes that offered less privacy. As Sert observed, “Gardens have become narrow strips between houses, and ‘detachment’ is a meaningless term.”⁸² Sert also pointed to the replacement of the heavy bearing walls of the past with light structures and large glazed areas that tended to bring outside spaces into the house, concluding that this could pose problems in urban areas, given their “unpredictable changes.” As he noted, “We should try to make the most of existing conditions by bringing inside our houses all the land we own, so that the interior space will appear as large as possible.”⁸³

Artigas often organized his designs for schools and residences around patios. In designing urban houses—as, for example, in the narrow site of the Ivo Viterito House—he encountered conditions similar to those that Sert described. But the interior atrium of the FAU-USP Building, covered with a translucent grid, represents his most successful “patio” solution.⁸⁴

Artigas, a professor, created an exposed concrete design for the FAU-USP Building that was clear and easy to comprehend. Inside, the arrangement of spaces around a central atrium, the use of glass and low partitions, and the free circulation between the floors, which were connected at half levels by ramps, conveyed a sense of spatial continuity.

The building had no front doors; to enter the structure, visitors ascended a low platform, 85 centimeters (2 feet, 10 inches) in height, which provided the only physical boundary between outside and inside. Across from the flight of steps providing access to the elevated ground floor, ramps led to the ateliers above and to the auditorium below. On the way up to the studios Artigas located doors only where they were strictly necessary: at the entrance of the library, one level above the entry, and at the entrances of faculty offices and classrooms on the fourth and sixth floors.

According to Artigas's project statement, the design parti was driven by educational concerns:

The library also had windows to the outside, as did the museum floor and the offices on the first, third, and fourth floors. But neither the design studios nor the classrooms on the upper levels had windows—an omission that reinforced the introspective character created by the atrium. Artigas employed the principle of top-lighting, illuminating the studios and seminar rooms from above with the roof's gridded skylights. The roof, 110 meters long and 66 meters wide (about 360 by 216 feet), featured a grid of triangular section beams framing modular openings, 2.75 meters (9 feet) square, that were sealed with translucent covers made of glass fiber (Figure 8).⁸⁶ Suspended over the school's central space, this gridded skylight roof expanded the inner boundaries of the atrium, which was officially named the Salão Caramelo, or the Caramel Hall, for the hue of its epoxy flooring. Salão in Portuguese refers to a large reception room, and, although this monumental space would be empty most of the time, it could accommodate the entire school body for assemblies, rallies, or lectures.⁸⁷ During the university-wide strike of 1979, a student sit-in in the Salão Caramelo suggested the democratic spirit of this shared communal space, as recorded in a widely reproduced photograph (Figure 9).⁸⁸

For Kenneth Frampton, the “spaces of public appearance in the form of atria” represented a fundamental feature of Artigas's work.⁸⁹ However, although the two schools Artigas completed prior to his work on the FAU-USP Building, in Itanhaém (1959–61) and Guarulhos (1960–62), featured entrances with no doors, neither school was organized around a single atrium. As a single-story building, the Itanhaém School had two covered spaces separated by a service area; the architects themselves called these spaces a “hall” and a “patio” rather than an “atrium.”⁹⁰ The Guarulhos School featured two landscaped courts in addition to a top-lit area with three half levels.

The aforementioned José Bittencourt House that Artigas designed in São Paulo revealed more similarities with the FAU-USP design, not only in plan but also in section. A patio stood at its center, with ramps connecting the rooms at intermediate levels. The structural side walls toward the neighbors had no windows, while the patio enclosure was completely glazed. Like Sert, Artigas recognized that most lots in urban areas were small, and he proposed a house designed as a single volume in response to the “chaotic aspect” of the suburbs, with their “habit of distributing residential programmes in pieces, with separate annexes and blocks.”⁹¹ His design suggested that a house could be “a function of its own internal space, regardless of the size of the plot of land,” creating a kind of spatial continuity that emerged, paradoxically, from its closed orientation.⁹²

The library wing of the FAU-USP Building had a distinctive association with the atrium. The library looked like a building independent of the larger structure: the wide band of windows facing the atrium was identical to the band on the opposite site opening to the exterior, while below pilotis lifted the library volume above the open entry hall (Figure 10). The library turned to the atrium as if it were an outdoor area. In fact, given the abundant natural light afforded by the skylit roof, the lighting condition of the atrium resembled that of an open-air space.

At the other side of the atrium, the concrete parapet of the museum floor, a half level up from the Salão Caramelo, strengthened the feeling of a patio enclosure (Figure 11).⁹³ However, below the library, the atrium offered unobstructed access to the exterior (Figure 12). At the end of the longitudinal axis, a sequence of transparent glass doors mediated the transition between the atrium and the outside.⁹⁴ The central atrium was therefore permeable, like the space created by the pilotis: when Oscar Niemeyer gave a lecture at FAU-USP in 1995, he referred to the atrium as pilotis.⁹⁵

Thus Artigas's FAU-USP atrium managed to unite the apparently irreconcilable entities of patio and pilotis. Although we do not know whether Artigas responded to Bill's 1953 critique of modern Brazilian architecture, his building seems immune to the questions posed by the Swiss architect.⁹⁶ It has no brise-soleil; its modularity relegates free form to secondary elements; its all-glass wall disappears when it is no longer needed in the studios and seminar rooms; and its atrium offers permeability at the ground floor provided by the pilotis without sacrificing the intimacy of a court.

The FAU-USP Building does not need a brise-soleil because the outward projection of the floors of studios and classrooms on the upper level creates a continuous overhang that protects the floor-to-ceiling windows from the sun (Figure 13). According to Fernando Serapião, Artigas admired the Alvorada Palace (1957–58), the presidential residence designed by Oscar Niemeyer, which was the first major work completed in Brasília.⁹⁷ Artigas may have referred to Niemeyer's veranda as a source for the FAU-USP Building, but contrary to the palace's tapered marble-clad concrete columns, Artigas's columns emphasize the transfer of structural loads. These concrete pyramidal columns, rotated 45 degrees in plan, extend outward to align with the walls of the massive concrete volume above them (Figure 14). We can draw an analogy between Artigas's columns and the design of classical columns, where the pyramid functions as the shaft and the top inverted triangle represents the capital. The official logo of FAU-USP, designed in 1958 by a student and future architect, Ludovico Martino (1933–2011), also invokes these classical parallels, suggesting a section of a Doric column shaft. Artigas placed the logo above the building's entry.⁹⁸

Eduard Sekler draws specific distinctions among the terms structure, construction, and tectonics:

According to Reyner Banham, “For all its brave talk of ‘an ethic, not an aesthetic,’ Brutalism never quite broke out of the aesthetic frame of reference.”¹⁰³ For Artigas, however, both aesthetics and ethics had validity. From a technical point of view, exposed concrete served contemporary needs in Brazil, and so its use represented an ethical solution. As Artigas put it, reinforced concrete construction could be realized on a large scale through the use of machines and employment of a largely unskilled workforce.¹⁰⁴ But the use of concrete did not mean dispensing with aesthetics—as Artigas observed years later: “Concrete is not just an inexpensive solution, it also reflects the need to find the means for artistic expression, using the structure of the building, its most worthy part.”¹⁰⁵

In 1959, Peter Collins praised the elegant structural solutions of Auguste Perret, in which the frame “constituted the architecture itself,” and the same could be said of Artigas's design for the FAU-USP Building.¹⁰⁶ While Artigas used concrete for nonstructural elements—the low partitions dividing the studios, for example—the concrete structural frame represented his primary interest. This contrasts with the use of concrete by other architects who generated Brutalist designs, such as Michael McKinnell, one of the architects of Boston City Hall (1962–69), who noted:

While Paulo Mendes da Rocha designed concrete sofas, tables, bookshelves, counters, cabinets, and closets for his own house in São Paulo (1964–66), exploring concrete's full potential in a way that McKinnell would have appreciated, Artigas took a more circumspect approach to the use of this material.¹⁰⁸ For the FAU-USP Building, he designed only a series of concrete benches; those placed at the entrance and in the library were finished with white epoxy, and those located in the classroom corridor were finished with caramel-colored epoxy. He also painted non-load-bearing masonry in primary colors (blue, red, and yellow) to differentiate those walls from the exposed concrete structure and thus reinforce the building's structural clarity. Construction photographs showing the atrium without its floor finishes and its gridded ceiling open to the elements reveal the space as it stands today, practically unchanged: the completion of the structure signaled the creation of the architecture (Figure 15).

Although the epoxy flooring used throughout the FAU-USP Building created a sense of spatial continuity, two interior areas featured different kinds of flooring: the entrance and the foyer to the auditorium. For these areas, where the school would meet the external community, Artigas specified a traditional Portuguese pavement design made of white and black limestone.

As noted earlier, when FAU-USP was founded in 1948, classes met at Vila Penteado. The reception hall of the villa was a double-height salão decorated with murals and mosaic floors. As Lucrécia D'Aléssio Ferrara has observed, the design of Artigas's atrium recalls the salão of Vila Penteado, suggesting a continuity between these collective spaces. Ferrara suggests also that Artigas's design for the small pond or laguinho in front of the FAU-USP Building references the fountain in front of Vila Penteado (see Figure 14).¹⁰⁹ The “organic” design of the Portuguese pavement that Artigas used at the entrance and foyer of the FAU-USP Building recalls the mosaic floor of the hall at Vila Penteado. This pavement design and a curving wall at the museum level represent the only free-form elements of Artigas's project.

Its regularity notwithstanding, the 11-meter (36-foot) structural grid of the FAU-USP Building supports floors of variable dimensions (Figure 16; see Figure 8). Artigas eliminated the central columns to create a span of 22 meters (72 feet) that could accommodate both the atrium and the circulation ramps. The columns flanking this central span have a larger diameter to support the additional load as well as plumbing chases.

For the broad ramps, 6 meters (20 feet) wide, Artigas specified rubber flooring that stopped short of either side, with borders of epoxy strips that visually connected the ramps to the landings. Visitors gradually ascend the ramps from the open entrance at the ground floor to the closed studios and classrooms higher up. As they rise, the atrium floor becomes more distant while the daylight coming in through the ceiling comes closer. Visitors thus leave the earth and ascend toward the sky, to the space of the studios, where learning and creation occur. While the main façade, including the library veranda, faces a patch of tropical forest preserved inside the university campus, Artigas's windowless studios occupy a world of their own, with no distractions or interruptions from the outside (Figures 17 and 18).¹¹⁰

In his speech to the 1964 graduating class of FAU-USP, Artigas affirmed that “Brazilian technological development” depended on “the constitution of a workforce, in growing numbers and better trained.”¹¹¹ At the same time, he stated, the architect needed to “contribute to the complex of national culture” rather than serve merely as “a professional in the building industry, an appendix of an embarrassing and terrible machine.”¹¹² Here Artigas was likely referring to the problematic conditions of the underdeveloped Brazilian construction sector. Writing soon after the fall of Brazil's democratically elected government and the advent of martial law, Artigas urged future architects to be uncompromising in their efforts to create a better world.¹¹³ His address mounted a stirring political challenge to the graduates: that they should use their architectural practice to contribute to the struggle for a “free and independent country.”¹¹⁴

Artigas attended the opening ceremony of the FAU-USP Building with Dean Ariosto Mila and University of São Paulo president Hélio Lourenço de Oliveira on 3 February 1969, when visitors experienced for the first time the ramps’ promenade architecturale.¹¹⁵ However, Artigas had only a brief period to experience the finished structure. Already in 1968 a decree issued by the military government had closed the Congresso Nacional (the bicameral legislature) and suspended the civil rights and liberties of Brazilian citizens.¹¹⁶ On 28 April 1969, the military government expelled Artigas from the University of São Paulo for his membership in the Brazilian Communist Party.¹¹⁷ Artigas did not return to the university until ten years later, when a general amnesty law was passed.

In 1981, the São Paulo state council tasked with protecting and preserving historical heritage designated the FAU-USP Building a historic landmark.¹¹⁸ In 1984 Artigas was promoted to full professor, a title he had already received before his dismissal from the university.¹¹⁹ In the same year, the International Union of Architects awarded Artigas the Auguste Perret Prize for Applied Technology in Architecture.

From the mid-1950s, Artigas's work offered an alternative to the Carioca School, and his design for the FAU-USP Building may well be considered a manifesto for the Paulista School. Its open, interconnected spaces materialized the interdisciplinary character of the school's educational proposal, serving as reference for the generations of architects who have studied there in the past fifty years. As Kenneth Frampton has observed, today “the spatially liberative Paulista spirit” that Artigas exemplified continues in the work of contemporary Brazilian architects like Angelo Bucci.¹²⁰

Despite the fragility of its exposed concrete surfaces, the FAU-USP Building continues to withstand the test of time.¹²¹ The building's design reflects Artigas's fundamental belief in an equitable and just society, even dispensing with doors in a world obsessed with both privacy and security. The unbroken continuity of the building with the world outside is consistent with Paulo Mendes da Rocha's observation that “every space is public. Private space only exists in people's thoughts.”¹²²