Color Clashes in the Tropics: Oscar Niemeyer, Lina Bo Bardi, and Paulo Mendes da Rocha

A Lecture by Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

In 1953, Bauhaus-trained designer Max Bill launched a crusade against the work of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, which he characterized as "utter anarchy in building, jungle growth in the worst sense." What was at stake? Niemeyer had introduced swagger, color, and playfulness into an architecture that seemed to embody the spirit of Rio de Janeiro. Bill, it was revealed, served as a proxy for the rising ethos and aesthetics of Sao Paulo (as opposed to Rio de Janeiro) practitioners.

In the years that followed, positions splintered as differing approaches to modernism developed and influential Brazilian designers imagined distinct approaches to color, light, space-making, community-making, and urban form. Lina Bo Bardi — whose own house is the closest 20th-century Brazil came to having a rival to Sir John Soane's — embraced the country's native and multi-ethnic originality, even as figures such as Vilanovas Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha developed a vigorously expressive proto-Brutalism.

This lecture will look at the vibrant formal and social experiments of Brazilian modernism in the decade-and-a-half before the coup d’état of 1964 brought two decades of military dictatorship to Brazil.

About the 2020-2021 Soane Lecture Series: Color and Light

In 1780, John Soane returned from the Grand Tour with a fresh eye for light and color — daylight streaming through an oculus, marbles aglow in amber dusk, a rich red fragment of wall plaster from Pompeii. In the years that followed, Soane became obsessed with light and the effects it could produce, deploying colored and stained glass, richly pigmented surfaces, and increasingly inventive lighting strategies throughout his interiors to generate dramatic, ever-changing scenes.

Today, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London stands as a testament to the architect’s bravura manipulation of color and light, brimming with “exquisite hues and magical effects” (in the words of Soane’s friend, the novelist Barbara Hofland) enjoyed by thousands of visitors each year. Inspired by Soane, our 2020-2021 lecture series considers the interplay of light and color across periods and disciplines, from Soane’s world to the arenas of art, architecture, and design in the twenty-first century.