Those who have had the opportunity of walking along Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil, would have encountered the magnificent open plaza carved out by architect Lina Bo Bardi within the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), a private cultural institution. Such command of urban space gives architecture its social significance. The blurring of private and public space occurs with several other buildings along the famed thoroughfare and has become a signature of Paulista and of Brazilian modern architecture. Adrian Anagnost’s provocative and incisive book, Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil, takes on this spatial blurring from the perspective of cultural entrepreneurs and art producers challenging architecture’s self-proclaimed hegemony over the urban order in twentieth-century Brazil.
This is an admirable, ambitious book that threads several “needles” of Brazilian art and architectural modernism. For this, Anagnost returns to the usual suspects—all working principally in...
University of California Press