Modernism and classicism in Brazil

By most measures, the classical tradition is incipient in Brazil. The Renaissance barely made a dent in the forts and small settlements built by the Portuguese in the early colonial period. The baroque was more far-reaching, spanning most of the colonial era and used in urban churches and Jesuit missions; but even though it shaped entire urban ensembles in the prosperous mining region of Minas Gerais, it never dominated the built landscape of the country as a whole. ¹ The neoclassical, brought by a French cultural mission in the early nineteenth century, gave the sheen of decorum to institutional buildings and urban plans, but it was neither widespread nor embraced as a national style. ² It became a historicist, sometimes eclectic, academicism in the turn of the twentieth century, and its claims to representing the official image of Brazil were hotly contested, first by neo-colonialists and then by modernists. ³ However broadly one defines it, and with the exception of the baroque, the classical tradition is not strong in Brazilian architecture.