Introduction

In the 1940s and 1950s, Brazil gained unprecedented prestige in the world of Modern Architecture. This new architecture was praised by architects all over the world and placed among the international avant-garde of the post-war years. Britain and the United States, and later France, looked to Brazil as the country which had inherited the progressive Modernism of the pre-war period in Europe, and which, furthermore, had initiated a new phase of the assimilation of cultural and environmental considerations.