Traveling Dome by Fernanda Carlovich

Traveling Dome Fernanda Carlovich

Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation MS Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices Master Thesis advisor: Professor Felicity D. Scott Fernanda Carlovich

Traveling Dome Fernanda Carlovich

Figure 1 Still from Maraad Trablous by Alia Farid. Tripoli, 2016 (Courtesy of the artist)

Introduction 13 Chapter 1

TALES IN FUTURE TENSE 27

The fastest growing city in the world 47

A fair in teh capital of North Lebanon 61

Chapter 2

LINES OF NON-ALIGNMENT 67

Instantiations of future 82

Niemeyer travels 101

Chapter 3

THE DOME ON THE GROUND 115

The name of the dome 133

The playground 143

Coda

TRAVELS 151

Acknowledgments 167 Notes 169 Selected Bibliography 175

Dossier

This book’s textual narrative is complemented by a collection of images that constitutes a visual dossier. The images have different origins, from historic magazines and newspapers to art photography, postcards, and video’s stills. This dossier reflects on the dome’s mediatic and physical travel, depicting different stages of construction, its various surroundings, and exploring repetition as an expression of the obsession with its form. The narrative of the text and narrative of the dome intertwine through the pages, allowing different rhythms and readings.

Figure 2 Still from Maraad Trablous by Alia Farid. Tripoli, 2016 (Courtesy of the artist)

INTRODUCTION

This thesis draws inspiration from a personal encounter with a video of a woman walking over a concrete dome. In 2016, artist Alia Farid presented Ma’arad Trablous in the occasion of the 32nd Sao Paulo Art Biennial. The video shows a performance recorded in the Rashid Karami International Fairgrounds, in Tripoli. When watching the video, I was caught by a feeling of an estranged familiarity, for the dome in Tripoli is in direct tension with an important form of the Brazilian architecture imaginary— one that not by accident also appears instantiated right outside the same Biennial pavilion. Conscious of the similarities of the Fairgrounds, depicted in the video, and Ibirapuera Park, in which it would be screened, the artist plays with dialogues between media and space, content and container. Farid’s video explores the semiotic resonance of those two sites through close-ups and carefully positioned shots that make one question whether the

Figure 3 Still from Maraad Trablous by Alia Farid. Tripoli, 2016 (Courtesy of the artist)

Introduction

scenery was familiar or not. The walk over the dome incites a familiarity to those who already know by heart the curvature of that architecture; for this author, it was almost possible to feel the texture of the dome’s curved ground under my own feet. The dome’s curve has a similar slope to the Earth’s hemisphere. When the video zooms into its volume, the screen is divided between the dome on its lower half and the rich green vegetation of large leaves that occupies the upper half entirely. Farid oscillates between fields, belonging sometimes to the concrete and at other times to the greenery. The artist traverses the dome as if walking through a winding terrain—it becomes landscape. Her moving body is the only evidence of the dome’s volume and scale. If not for her, the scene would look like a flat composition or maybe a photograph of the Earth seen from outer space. She circles around the dome twice, flowing effortlessly with long strides. While conquering the geography of Tripoli’s dome, the artist presents herself as an active and self-aware female body that contaminates the ideal feminine form, laying on the beach, that is encrypted in the curve of such architecture, or so the story goes. The video moves beyond the field of the Fairgrounds, unveiling the urban landscape—the park-facing residential buildings reveal to the Biennial visitors that that dome lies in another city, another context. Farid’s video carries back to Brazil a form that traveled to Lebanon in 1962 with architect Oscar Niemeyer. The spaces created by these domes—temples, museums, theaters, and political stages— are endowed with an uncanniness on account of their repeated form, which, I believe, have direct implications on how the domes are occupied and transgressed. It represents the last leg of a journey that began in 1954 when Niemeyer designed

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his first dome in Ibirapuera Park. This building was first planned to host a planetarium, but later it was changed to an exhibition hall. The change of program is not surprising once the dome functioned beyond the uses of its interior — its form expressed political ideas of the time, operating as a symbol of the ideology that fostered its construction in the first place. From this original site in Sao Paulo, Niemeyer’s dome went to Brasilia, becoming part of the National Congress building in 1960; then to Lebanon as the experimental theater of Tripoli Fairgrounds in 1963; then to Paris at the Communist Party headquarters in 1971 and back to Brasilia as a cathedral in the 1980s. The semiotic resonance across these iterations establishes a connection between these spaces—a horizontal dialogue that arises from architecture and also surpasses it. The dome’s travel can be read as an episode of the post-war developmentalist agenda in the Global South. Taking as its main objects of analysis the Palace of Expositions in Sao Paulo, the National Congress Building in Brasília, and the Experimental Theater in Tripoli, this thesis understands travel as the repetition of a formal solution and its mediatic dissemination, which allowed this architecture to reach territories beyond its original locations. In researching the historical background of these projects, it becomes possible both to mark out distinctions and to trace affinities that go beyond the architecture’s form, since both countries—Brazil and Lebanon—were at the time of the domes’ conception immersed in ideas of progress and development. Moreover, both of these projects—the architectural and national—were, in their own ways, interrupted. In this sense, while located in very distinct contexts, Niemeyer’s Brazilian and Lebanese domes are interconnected by ideas of progress,

Figure 4 Still from Maraad Trablous by Alia Farid. Tripoli, 2016 (Courtesy of the artist)

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Introduction

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Figure 5: Aereal view of Ibirapuera Park, c.1954. Vasclo Agência Fotográfica. (Retrieved from: http://www.bienal.org.br/post/1089) Figure 6: View of construction, Tripoli, c. 1965. Unknown photographer. (Oscar Niemeyer Foundation/gift from Ferdinand Dagher/TripoliFair.org) Figure 7: National Congress building, Brasília, c. 1960. Photographer Marcel Gautherot (IMS Archive)

modernity, colonial heritage, and nation-building. While in Brazil the fiction of democratic consolidation with the inauguration of Brasília in 1960 was postponed by the 1964 Military Coup, in Lebanon, the national development and cultural emancipation represented by the Fairgrounds was suspended by the Civil War in 1975. The resonances around and in between these domes can be understood through three different lenses, each of which constitutes a section of this study: Tales in future tense relates the optimistic media around the dome’s construction with the easily legible architecture of “open space” that this form demands— architecture predicated upon the absence of context. It discusses how developmentalism relates to the commissions, the architectural solutions, and the discourses around the projects, tracing the proximities between the projects in Tripoli and Sao Paulo as they were both international fairs. Lines of non-alignment discusses each country’s stance towards international relations at the time of Niemeyer’s Lebanese commission. It understands “non-alignment” as a political will but also as a guideline for that architecture. The fact that these countries do not want to repeat the traditions from their former colonizers drives them to search for other formal and symbolic references, coming from a south-south solidarity or even an outer-world inspiration. The third chapter, The dome on the ground, explores the afterlives of the domes though a closer look from the scale of the building—the political space of the dome and the organization of bodies that it entails. Breaking with the

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pure metaphorical interpretation of the dome, it reads these buildings in a closer scale, as a material reality that creates sites of interaction with the very real subjects that inform and respond to that political ideology. This work intends to put these three facets into dialog with one another to question and complicate narratives of success and failure; north and south; developed and undeveloped; colony and colonizer. It examines the cyclical dynamics of progress and destruction that beset developing countries: the waves of hope, the great crises, and the imminent idea of progress, which entrusts the future with responsibilities for improvement and national development. In the promise of infrastructure as a guarantor of progress towards development, architecture has been entrusted with a central function, while at the same time being closely tied to a specific state constitution capable of concentrating capital and interest for major construction works. States change faster than constructions, and the gap between the fluidity of ideologies and permanence of buildings allows that certain spaces produced through specific claims ended up being occupied with opposite goals.

Figure 8 Still from Maraad Trablous by Alia Farid. Tripoli, 2016 (Courtesy of the artist)

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Chapter one

TALES IN FUTURE TENSE

A pamphlet from 1954 shows a cut-out bird’s eye view of a growing city enveloped by a wireframe globe. At the top of the page, in bold letters, “the eyes of the world” followed by “will be facing Sao Paulo.” The booklet (fig. 10) presents the schedule for the celebrations of the fourth centennial of the city of Sao Paulo, in which Niemeyer’s Ibirapuera Park, containing his first dome, would be inaugurated. Again: “The eyes of the world will be facing Sao Paulo”. There is something curious in the language employed to describe such a grand accomplishment. It has the structure of an affirmation, a factual future, but it communicates nothing but a desire. A desire to capture the eye of the world— for attention, mediation, and engagement. This language spread beyond official announcements, appearing also in newspapers, in the speech of politicians, public figures, and architects. Embedded in the mindset of development, these discourses inform the

Figure 9 “Bring your camera! You will

hardly find more modern and audacious architecture that serves to express the modernity and audacity of a people.” Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, c. 1954.

(Image and caption from: Manchete Special

Edition IV Centenário/Avery Classics Collection)

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realization of the domes in Brazil and, in turn, Lebanon. This chapter relates the domes’ stories with the ideology of development that emerged in the countries of the so-called Third World in the Post-War era. When political economists cited ‘development’ in the 20th mid-century, they meant orderly economic growth, or better, “the steady rise in output in an environment of political stability.” Trade would be the main engine to accomplish this growth nationally and internationally. Following the model of examples from wealthy nations, this was the path to follow for the ones in the south, where this linear development “seemed as inevitable as the future itself.” If, in Latin America, this optimism emerges as incentive towards industrial growth and increased nationalism, in the Middle East, it does so in the euphoria surrounding recent independence from the countries’ colonial pasts and a search for a fresh national identity. Even with their differences in scale, Ibirapuera Park and Tripoli Fairgrounds channeled a similar mindset: a desire to establish their countries as great nations of the world, making their way along an inexorable path towards progress. In both cases, in the words of Panayiota Ioanni Pyla, “the project of development itself was not simply a technocratic framework for administrative reform and industrialization but an ideology, so too were dams and irrigation networks, highways, housing projects, or spaces of public recreation active participants in debates surrounding the modernizing dreams of progress, efficiency, and comfort.”3 This same ideology is inscribed into the built environment through

Figure 10: Boletim informativo, n. 2, Comission for the IV Centennial of Sao Paulo. 1953 (Retrieved from: http://www.bienal.org.br/post/1089)

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Figure 11: “Ibirapuera Park, the most modern venue in the world.” Folha de São Paulo, August 21, 1954. (Folha de Sao Paulo Archives)

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Figure 12: “Lebanon’s Fair in Tripoli will be the most modern in the world.” L’Orient Le Jour, February 12, 1963. (L’Orient Le Jour Archives)

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Figure 14 Celebrations of the IV Centennial. Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, 1954

(Manchete Special Edition IV Centenรกrio/ Avery Classics Collection)

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the domes’ constructions, as part of larger projects of urban infrastructure dedicated to culture and leisure that were being planned and financed by centralized states. It’s easy to spot similarities in the way these venues were conceived and publicized. They both involved the dissemination of staged photos with big white architectural models surrounded by a group of men in suits, pointing fingers; they were expected to become “the most modern constructions in the world” according to local newspapers; they shared the ideology of modernization and sought the engagement of an international audience. They also share architectural gestures: a big marquee in relation to monumental smaller units, surrounded by rich vegetation with organic paths, palm trees, and, of course, a dome. One similarity deserves closer examination: they were both created to host International Fairs. Hence, the spaces formed by the domes in combination with other units served as showcases for the progress of their cities generating real estate interest, attracting the eyes of internal and external investments, and creating symbols for the identification and consolidation of these nations. In the late 19th century, the International Fair emerged as an emblematic platform for staging the phenomena of modernity, industrial productivity, and bourgeois leisure in Europe. This original model, that has the Crystal Palace as its landmark, was associated “with the rhetoric of ‘glorious humanity’,” as suggested by Felicity Scott, “and with claims to a peaceful and progressive new world order through industrial enterprise.” This new order took advantage of the fair’s grand scale and enchanting environment, to establish “an interdependent, but distinctly hierarchical global capitalist system.” Some of the original Northern ethos of the International Fairs remains

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present in the later versions that took place in the 20th century in the Global South. Taking into account the differences between these types of events, it is curious that the countries occupying lower positions in that original hierarchical mode of organization were being inspired by that imperialistic model to claim for recognition and participation in the same capitalist system. Using an already established format, these States—such as Brazil and Lebanon, but also Argentina, Colombia, Sri Lanka, India, and Syria— found in the fair’s program a possibility to both perform and embody modernity. In Nationalism, Craig Calhoun affirms that the idea of nation is “inherently international and works partly by contraposition of different nations to each other.” It is interesting to note that the search for national identity is not an endogenous movement but, instead, strengthens with encounter, exchange, and comparison. Calhoun adds that the “Nationalist rhetoric offers a way of conceptualizing the identity of any one country that presumes the existence of other more or less comparable units.” Within the context of International Fairs, these comparable units, or nation-states, are made visible in their different pavilion designs. These fairs do not just showcase the advances of industrial production but create an organized space to exhibit the industry that constitutes and represents different nations. The existence of a common denominator—the state—establishes a foundation from which comparisons can be made, be they of size, density, wealth, or development. Fairgrounds are spaces for temporary occupation. Their use occurs in the exception and not in everyday life. On the threshold between reality and representation, this typology informed several analyzes of modern capitalism’s performativity. Timothy

Figure 13 Aerial view of construction. Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, c. 1953.

(Revista do IV Centenário de São Paulo n.1, set. 1954, p.5/Historical Archive Wanda Svevo. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo)

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Figure 15: Celebrations of the IV Centennial. Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, 1954 (Manchete Special Edition iv Centenรกrio/Avery Classics Collection)

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Mitchell’s The World as Exhibition explores ways in which the process of exhibiting can inform us about the West. By analyzing the “ordering up of the world itself as an endless exhibition,”7 Mitchell claims that the world is organized with a logic of representation and meaning, like an extended exhibition that awaits an observer to grasp its meaning through experience. Analyzing the space of the Fairgrounds through this lens, it is possible to see two complementary exhibitions that operate in the same space. First, there is the exhibition of the Fairs’ contents: different countries and their industrial achievements. Second, there is the exhibition of the Fair per se, where it is possible to experience the nation, its capacity for mediation and its representations of development. Tony Bennet, in The Exhibitionary Complex, highlights the role of world exhibitions in articulating the rhetoric of progress to the rhetoric of nationalism and imperialism, by positing an expanded cultural sphere. With the influence of modernism, this rhetoric of progress increasingly approaches an utopian statement about the future, “promising the imminent dissipation of social tensions once progress had reached the point where its benefits might be generalized.”8 Therefore, both Mitchell and Bennet give us clues of how the program of the Fair can relate to the ambitions of developmentalism. In addition, Fairgrounds are perfect breeding grounds for domes. A dome requires open space for its “landing,” or better, it demands an environment of neutral context, a plain field of green grass, the modern tabula rasa. Without any interaction with the city that exists in its surroundings, this architecture dissociates itself from the existing urban fabric to create a new landscape of simple lines, few colors, and legible geometry: a simple geometry that fits into the utopian claims and glorious tone of these events.

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Figure 16: Palace of Exhibitions. Celebrations of the IV Centennial. Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, 1954 (Manchete Special Edition iv Centenรกrio/Avery Classics Collection)

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Figure 17: Palace of Exhibitions. Celebrations of the IV Centennial. Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, 1954 (Manchete Special Edition iv Centenรกrio/Avery Classics Collection)

Figure 18 Aerial View of the Park

Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, c. 1954

Unknown author. (Manchete Special Edition IV Centenรกrio/Avery Classics Collection)

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Tales in Future Tense

But to open space is necessarily an act of displacement. In the case of Sao Paulo, Ibirapuera Park took the place of an old indigenous land that, at the time, was being used by families in informal settlements. In Tripoli, the Fairgrounds are built on top of private orange fields that were sold to the municipality for a very low price, a forced dispossession for the sake of progress. The idea of investing national capital in a space that accommodates temporary events can be seen as evidence of the inconsistency of the developmental fiction. A distance between the real demands of these societies and the projects idealized to tell a story of progress that would be established, in theory, from such constructions. This dream of development, as Arturo Escobar highlights, â&#x20AC;&#x153;progressively turned into a nightmare. For instead of the kingdom of abundance promised by theorists and politicians in the 1950s, the discourse and strategy of development produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression.â&#x20AC;?9 The two stories of this thesis are strongly marked by this nightmare that ruptured the glorious fiction of development. Both stories have as an important milestone the year of 1954, when two International Fairs were inaugurated: one in SĂŁo Paulo and another in Damascus.

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THE FASTEST GROWING CITY IN THE WORLD

Ibirapuera Park was constructed to celebrate the 4th centennial of Sao Paulo, in 1954. The slogan of the event, “São Paulo, the fastest growing city in the world,” communicates much of the city’s euphoria in the beginning of the 1950s. The construction of the park had a strong symbolic character for the city of São Paulo, which sought to resemble the great world metropolises— Ibirapuera was to be São Paulo’s Central Park. With the enormous growth in mind, one might wonder about the preservation of the big piece of land in the central Ibirapuera region. In her dissertation, Ana Barone explores the conflicts of interest in the Ibirapuera lands. Plots in the Ibirapuera floodplain, with a past of indigenous occupation, were vacant lands made public in 1891. The decision to establish a public park was taken to the City Council in 1926 but the park was only effectively implemented in 1954.10 Throughout these 28 years of waiting, several public disputes and privatizations occurred. The city of São Paulo grew around the immense terrain and much was speculated about whether or not the metropolitan park was ever to be built. Its delayed destiny was finally defined through the action and political will of industrialist Ciccillo Matarazzo. Matarazzo was known as the patron of Modern Arts in Sao Paulo, for his efforts and investments in the establishment of a cultural scene in the city. After founding MASP, the Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art, in 1948 and organizing the first Sao Paulo Art Biennial in 1951, he was invited by the Sao Paulo’s Governor Lucas Nogueira Garcez to lead the organization of the 4th Centennial celebrations as the president of the event’s committee. It was his initiative to direct 80% of the event’s funds to the construction of Ibirapuera,11 to host a significant part of the festivities and

Figure 19 Postcard of Tripoliâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

orange fields, c. 1950s (Private collection/Wassim Naghi)

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later become a metropolitan park with a series of perennial constructions. The character of Matarazzo, as industrialist and arts patron, intertwined with the nature of the event: an attempt to establish Sao Paulo as the great Brazilian center of industry and culture through exhibitions, fairs, and festivities. It was also his personal interest to build new cultural spaces in the city that could later host some of his private cultural enterprises such as the Museum and Biennial. Consequently, the second edition of Sao Paulo Art Biennial took place inside the park even before its completion. Known as the “Guernica Biennial,” the event became part of the official programming for the IV Centennial. In an episode of this Biennial, art handlers had to pull Picasso’s famous Guernica out of a truck that was stuck in mud—mud caused by Ibirapuera Park’s construction.12 This image of the great European masterpiece, another symbol of a traveling modernity, stuck in the back of a truck in the mud, is emblematic: it speaks of an abyss between discourse and execution—the fiction of growth and modernization of the city, so well-advertised, becoming impossible to handle. Matarazzo’s great influence in the consolidation of modern art in Brazil helps to clarify Niemeyer’s commission for the park’s buildings. In the early 1950s, Niemeyer already had an international reputation due to the Brazilian pavilion at the New York World Fair in 1943 and the UN Headquarters in 1948. Throughout the realization of the park project, Niemeyer lived in Rio and had an active office in São Paulo that took care of several works in the city, including many residential buildings as the famous Copan and Ibirapuera Park. Therefore, much of the details and decisions of the park’s architecture came from

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members of the IAB-SP Zenon Lotufo, Eduardo Kneese de Mello e Hélio Cavalcanti, and representatives of Niemeyer’s office in Sao Paulo Gauss Estelita e Carlos A. C. Lemos. Carlos A. C. Lemos, the head of Niemeyer’s Sao Paulo office, when asked about the design process behind the parks, explains: “It was an exercise in creativity, because we didn’t really know what the buildings we were building would be used for, how they would be occupied, how many people, etc. There would be an International Fair for the 4th centenary, but then, what?”13 The architect’s speech shows us São Paulo’s rampant impulse to build at that time—the construction itself seemed more important than planning its future uses. Ibirapuera Park’s architectural ensemble has six buildings, an auditorium, a planetarium, palaces of Industry, Nations and States and a restaurant, and a large, winding marquee that connects them, suggesting a main path through the park. The large rectangular pavilions concentrate a good part of the constructed useful area, but the dome received special attention among the architecture and construction magazines of the time, as it has the largest span of a concrete dome ever built in Brazil. The renowned magazine Acrópole, when presenting the technical drawings of the dome in its 191st edition, described it as “the most daring project ever built”14 in the country. Despite the great attention received by the small building, the dome changed function throughout the project. In the preliminary project, it appears as a Planetarium and then, in the project as executed, it becomes an Exhibition Palace. Instead of a briefing with the program’s requirements, according to A. C. Lemos, the guidelines for the project were to

Figure 20 Construction of the dome. Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, c. 1953 (Acrรณpole 191/FAUUSP Archive)

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create spaces where it would be possible to combine “everything that could amaze the world about Brazilian progress.”15 A. C. Lemos’ ironic statement can be illustrated by some of the press releases written by the centennial committee at the time of the park’s inauguration. They describe the park as “one of the largest centers of its kind in the world and which, lasting in its constitution of cement and steel, and indestructible in the beauty and harmony of its lines, will remain as a landmark of the tributes of the Paulistas to the four hundred years of their city.”16 The same heroic tone is employed when describing the international fair: “An unprecedented event in the history of Brazil, […] the 1st São Paulo International Fair will take place. It is the largest event held in Latin America, bringing together, in a pavilion that is the largest in the world, representing industry and commerce from twenty countries.”17 With a language of superlatives, the press releases set the tone for a broader media community, that publicized the grandiosity of the construction and events during the whole year of 1954. In the newspapers, the pace of Ibirapuera’s construction work was presented as evidence of the growth of Sao Paulo—a growth translated into palpable units, such as cement bags and earth trucks. One example lies in an article of Folha de Sao Paulo published on Sunday, April 18, 1954: “Spending on the construction of the Palaces and marquee no less than 235 thousand bags of cement, 34,252 cubic meters of sand, 38,569 cubic meters of stone and 7,624 tons of iron. These figures demonstrate the grandeur of the set of buildings.”18 The

Figure 21: “3000 labourers working.” Folha de São Paulo, April 5, 1953. (Folha de Sao Paulo Archives)

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Figure 22: “Two hundred and fifty thousand cement bags were used in the Ibirapuera Park construction.” Folha de São Paulo, April 18, 1953. (Folha de São Paulo Archives) Figure 23: “At a fast pace the giant Ibirapuera constructions.” Folha de São Paulo, September 13, 1953. (Folha de São Paulo Archives)

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Figure 24 Aerial view of construction. Tripoli Fairgrounds, Tripoli, c. 1965. Unknown photographer

(Private collection/Wassim Naghi)

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enormous quantity of materials is romanticized as a physical evidence of the city’s development. The article continues: “The bold idea of a handful of men, industrialists, literatures, engineers, politicians, came to life, as if by magic, in those cement and steel blocks that surprise Paulistas and those who visit São Paulo.”19 The passage reiterates the link between construction, its forms of depiction, and the ideology of development. There was, moreover, another instance of embodiment of the city’s development in the news. Much of the media around the fair highlights the effort of “tireless men,” working day and night to build the park. The same newspaper, in April 4th, reports the impressive work of 3,000 employees as an “eloquent demonstration of São Paulo’s dynamism.” Followed by: “They work twenty-four hours a day and the skeptics, gaping, see the giant concrete structures come out of the earth, which turn into architectural figures that once existed only in the imagination of those who read comic books with interplanetary adventures. All construction records are broken.”20 Nothing is said about the origin of these workers or their profile. They are impressive numbers, like those on the cement bags from the previous report. The unique architectural forms from “interplanetary adventures,” needed an extensive number of workers, who came from different regions of Brazil. The fastest growing city in the world had to account for the accommodation of its new population. Not by chance, it was in the beginning of the 1950s that Sao Paulo had its first census including favelas as a habitational type—a reflection of the city’s growing demand for housing. Many of those who worked in civil construction, inside and outside Ibirapuera Park, had great difficulty in finding affordable housing and had to settle

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in informal communities. In fact, a small instance of this new condition of living was located inside Ibirapuera wetlands. To open space for the park’s construction, 200 families were relocated to another favela, Canindé, on the outskirts of the city. Canindé was also public land but used as an exchange strategy to relocate communities. Different from favelas that emerge from unauthorized settlements, Canindé’s precarious habitational complex was created by the State. So while using the city’s growth as propaganda, the State did not address and, in fact, worsened the habitational crisis generated by this same growth. A FAIR IN THE CAPITAL OF NORTH LEBANON

While in Sao Paulo the events of the IV Centennial aimed to consolidate the fiction of an already fast growing industrial metropolis, in Tripoli, the International Fair would be the milestone for a development that hadn’t yet started—or at least this was the justification given to Tripolitan citizens forced to sell their orange fields for minimal prices to the municipality. Although the Tripoli Fair started to be idealized in the early 1960s, its history brings us back to 1954. In the same year of the 1st Sao Paulo International Fair, the Damascus International Exposition in Syria was also inaugurated. The Damascus Fair was seen as an opportunity to present the “true face of Syria” to the West. In the English-written magazine Syria, published in 1953, it is said that the inhabitants of the Western world were ignorant of the truth about the country. The fair would display Syria’s social life, the achievements of its civilization, its rapid development in all vital spheres of cultural activity, and the beautiful form that Syria was beginning to assume.21 One

Figure 25 View of construction,

Tripoli, c. 1965. Unknown photographer.

1954 Foundation/gift - SAO PAULO - IBIRAPUERA (Oscar Niemeyer from PARK PHOTOGRAPHER: UNKNOWN Ferdinand Dagher/TripoliFair.org)

FIRST PUBLISHED IN: REVISTA IBIRAPUERA

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of the characteristics of this new face of Syria is a neutralist international policy, one that benefits from an event that attempted to gather countries side by side regardless of their political inclinations. The postwar period was of dramatic political and economic transformations in Syria, for example, the country engaged in a neutralist international policy, improving relations with diverse countries. According to Kevin W. Martin, the Fair arose from Syrian elites’ anxieties about foreigners’ perception of their country—a necessity to use the Other in order to recognize the Self.22 In a similar manner, Lebanon was inspired by the “Other” neighboring country, Syria, to replicate the format of a largescale event. In 1958, during the Chamoun mandate, an Exhibition Committee was established inside the Ministry of Planning that decided to hold an annual International Fair in Beirut. The national crisis of 1958 delayed plans that would be resumed under President Fouad Chebab. In the so-called Golden Age of Lebanon, in the 1960s, president Fouad Chebab implemented a program of administrative reforms, and major construction works devoted to improve the country’s national identity that had been harmed by its recent colonial past and artificial territorial delimitations. The year 1960 marked the beginning of a Five-Year plan, a wave of reforms with a special focus on regional and peripheral development.23 In this context, Tripoli received important projects, as a port agency, a free zone within the port, a quarantine park, and the International Fairgrounds, which embodied the national spirit of the Chebabist State, combining investments in a peripheral region and the ethos of a national project—a fair as a representation of Lebanon in its integrity and totality.

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Located in the middle of the two urban nodes of old Tripoli and the littoral Al-Mina, the Fairgrounds were intended to generate a third centrality, to connect and help increase Tripoli’s urban fabric. This ambition is evident in Niemeyer’s plans for the project that go beyond the limits of the site. The International Fair, in this urban development, constituted “a center of attraction—of a cultural, artistic and recreational interest—of the utmost importance.”24 In fact, along with its construction in the 1960s, many residential buildings arose neighboring the unfinished site. The resulting design for the fair reflects the expectation on the city’s growth: with seven intricate structures spread over a gigantic site, the Fairgrounds were designed for a future Tripoli that hasn’t yet come to be. The free dome on a large field speaks of the lack of connection between this architecture and the existing city (rejecting context, localism, roots). It also indicates the inconsistency of the fiction that justifies its construction with the real condition of life in these cities. The Fair aspires to a kind of Global alignment, but inevitably triggers internal dynamics—generating forces of attraction, as in Tripoli real estate speculation, or the relocation of less-valued bodies as in the favelas of Sao Paulo. The fictional discourse around those spaces and events not only contributed to an illusory idea of how progress would evolve but also helped undermine essential needs that were not aligned with the expected narratives.

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Figure 26: “Ibirapuera is born” Ibirapuera Park, sao Paulo, c. 1953. (Revista do IV Centenário de São Paulo n.1, set. 1954, p.5/Historical Archive Wanda Svevo. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo)

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Figure 27: “The future has sprung for the earth” Ibirapuera Park, sao Paulo, c. 1953. (Revista do IV Centenário de São Paulo n.1, set. 1954, p.5/Historical Archive Wanda Svevo. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo)

Figure 28 Amid the beaten ground of freshly scrubbed earth, a lady takes a boy by the

hand to the Palace of Exhibitions. Sao Paulo, c. 1965. Photograph by German Lorca.

(Revista do IV Centenรกrio de Sรฃo Paulo/

Jornal Estado de SP Archive)

Chapter two

LINES OF NON-ALIGNMENT

The Non-Aligned Movement within the Global South during the 1960s was an initiative to organize and create bonds of solidarity between the countries of the so-called “Third World” that shared similar struggles.1 In this chapter, Niemeyer’s Tripoli commission—from the disseminated images of recently inaugurated Brasília in the Lebanese press, to the architect’s travel to Tripoli—will be interpreted as an example of solidarity between “Souths.” More than a political current, Niemeyer’s project carried a search for a new aesthetic non-aligned to — but still in dialogue with — hegemonic cultural references. Nonalignment is, therefore, both the political stance of those involved in the architect’s commission and a guideline for the architectural solution itself. Niemeyer’s commission took place as a diplomatic negotiation between two nations that were engaged in independent foreign

1954 - SAO PAULO - IBIRAPUERA PARK PHOTOGRAPHER: UNKNOWN FIRST PUBLISHED IN: REVISTA IBIRAPUERA RETRIEVED FROM: REVISTA IBIRAPUERA

Figure 30 View of construction,

Tripoli, c. 1965. Unknown photographer. (Oscar Niemeyer Foundation/gift from Ferdinand Dagher/TripoliFair.org)

Lines of Non-Alignment

relations. The repetition of form within a new context seems to establish a network of solidarity as if the collection of domes set a global space of acknowledgment between these nations. In this chapter, I want to relate the form-making architecture that was being developed by Niemeyer with his own politics as practitioner. Rather than contributing to a heroicization of the architect, I want to understand his role as an agent of many intricate political relations that took place in between the inauguration of Brasília, his travel to Lebanon, the Brazilian military coup and his other travels afterwards. For Niemeyer and many of his contemporaries, architecture could work as a platform for more significant changes involving social justice and equity between nations. This discussion’s great conundrum is the gap between architecture as a metaphor for a new reality and architecture as effectively creating spaces with the power for change. Who would occupy this new architecture? Who would pay for it? Who would construct it? Who would be displaced by it? To what extent would the creation of a new aesthetic lead to the creation of a new society? These common questions for modernist architecture become evident through the case studies at hand. The “most modern spaces in the world” were deflated of their political ideologies from the moment that their foundations—legislative, administrative, economic—entered into crisis. But before diving into the conditions and results of this deflation, it is necessary to understand the political context that justified and supported the projects’ emergence in the first place. The 1961 the Non Alignment Movement (NAM) convened for the first time in Belgrade. Orchestrated by three key heads of states: Josip Broz Tito, the president of Yugoslavia; Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt; and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first

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prime minister of India, the conference gathered leaders from 27 member nations, including Lebanon, and 3 observers, including Brazil.2 The Belgrade Declaration, published at the event, summarizes the main goal of the NAM: to react to a current crisis generated by a reordering of the world “from an old order based on domination to a new order based on cooperation between nations, founded on freedom, equality and social justice for the promotion of prosperity.”3 The Movement was set as a direct response to the division of the “spheres of influence” defined by the major world forces after WWII and the formation of the two blocks during the Cold War.4 Countries from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America that shared diverse configurations of a colonial past were now facing similar challenges in the post-war context. The first step to guarantee power for these nations, according to the Declaration, was to radically eliminate “the domination of colonialism-imperialism and neo-colonialism in all their manifestations.”5 With that, the participants in the Conference would take efforts to resolve the economic imbalance inherited from colonialism and imperialism. They considered it necessary to accelerate economic, industrial and agricultural development to close the “ever-widening gap in the standards of living between the few economically advanced countries and the many economically less-developed countries.”6 Nonaligned nations believed that development would be the engine to reduce social inequality and improve life in non-wealthy countries. Our case study countries, Brazil and Lebanon, took part in the event in substantially different ways. While Brazil’s timid participation might be attributed to closer relations to the USA,

Figure 29 Aerial views of construction.

Tripoli, c. 1965. Unknown photographer.

(Ferdinand Dagher Archive/TripoliFair.org)

Lines of Non-Alignment

Lebanon was one of the members of the movement from the beginning. Lebanon’s participation in the Non-Aligned Conference and Movement relates to the post-independence ethos characterized substantively by the National Pact of 1943. Historian Fawwas Traboulsi explains that the Pact was made to supplement and correct the Lebanese constitution concerning questions of identity, international relations, and the Muslim participation in the power structure. It was an unwritten agreement formed between Maronite and Sunni leaders in the occasion of the Lebanese independence.7 Among other claims, the National Pact defined Lebanon as a “country with an Arab profile that assimilates all that is beneficial and useful from Western civilization”, and, as a major principle of foreign policy pledged that “Lebanon shall not be a base or a passageway for colonialism.”8 The recognition of Lebanon as a mediator between East and West that could benefit from the qualities of both sides became a strong feature of Lebanese identity after independence. There was also a need to create relations that stretched beyond those reminiscent of the French mandate. Fifteen years after independence, Fouad Chebab’s government was still strongly influenced by the ideas of the National Pact and applied it, for example, to the Counseil de Grands Travaux, the agency responsible for organizing large-scale constructions across Lebanon. The five-year plan organized by President Chebab to develop the country through the construction of transnational infrastructure and public buildings counted on foreign expertise from urban planning, to delineation of road, and urban design. In the case of the Tripoli Fairgrounds, the organizers of the event consulted a Czechoslovakian expert in the organization of

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fairs, in 1959, and received suggestions from the director of the International Fair of Hannover, in 1962.10 Thus, the hiring of Niemeyer in 1962 fits into generous welcoming to international expertise characteristic of the Chebabist era, which was met with criticism from parts of Lebanese society. In 1963, Saba Shiber published an article in the newspaper Le Soir entitled “After Oscar Who?” criticizing the extensive dependency of foreign expertise in Lebanon.11 Who would be the next ‘Niemeyer’ to visit the country and give their opinion on how Lebanon should advance? Chebab’s government failed to reconcile the demands and skills of Lebanese professionals with the desire to absorb technological advancements brought from foreign contexts. Even with his international recognition and essential role in Brazilian architecture, Niemeyer’s invitation in the name of President Chebab to design the cultural center in Tripoli is intriguing, as is the travel of the dome to this new context. There is not enough evidence to outline a causal justification for the commission, but it is possible to trace a network of correlations. In 1955, Niemeyer was hired to design the new Lebanese Club in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte.12 The Lebanese community in Brazil was already large in the middle of the century, with Niemeyer’s own family descending, among other countries, from Lebanon.13 In Tripoli, the director of the Fair Committee, Amado Chalhoud, was also part of the Lebanese-Brazilian diaspora. He was born in Brazil and may have influenced the commissioning of a compatriot. Furthermore, Niemeyer iconized a modern architecture detached from but still in dialogue with the colonialist bias of the developed world. He was a perfect fit to the ideologies of the National Pact, bringing together the will to create new bonds with

Figure 31 View of construction,

Tripoli, c. 1965. Unknown photographer.

(Ferdinand Dagher Archive/TripoliFair.org)

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Lines of Non-Alignment

other countries and the denial of colonial roots. As a member of the Brazilian Communist Party, he represented, at least in theory, the endorsement of a political ideology in addition to the aesthetic ideals of modernism, being thus harmonious with the Lebanese commitment to Non-alignment and the Left oriented government of Chebab during the 1960s. The commission of a communist architect in the context of the Lebanese Golden Age also relates to efforts of Tripolitan Prime-Minister Rachid Karami, whose name would be used to title the Fairgrounds later on. Lastly, our evidence most deserving of scrutiny: the inauguration of Brasília in 1960, two years before Niemeyer’s Lebanese commission. The next section will discuss some of the reasons why this project was so important for Niemeyer’s professional and political identity. INSTANTIATIONS OF FUTURE

Brasília was designed and built within the five-year mandate of president Juscelino Kubitchek. Similar to president Chebab, Kubitchek embedded developmentalist ideas into his plans for Brazilian progress. The inauguration of the new capital marked the completion of Kubitchek’s economic policy defined by a Program of Goals, that combined objectives within six large areas of interest: energy, transportation, foodstuffs, basic industry, education, and the construction of Brasília, the synthesis goal:14 a synthesis because Brasília was created imagery to represent Kubitchek’s lemma of and ambition to development and order. With its monumental buildings, circulating images and myths, the city was a powerful nationalistic symbol and publicized abroad as a mark of the unity of the Brazilian State. Thus, it was well-suited for the Lebanese government to

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search for inspiration in the image of a country that was also undergoing a developmental Golden Age. Niemeyer and Kubitchek had a long relationship before Brasília. They were introduced by the Minister of Education Capanema in the late 1930s, when Kubitchek was mayor of Belo Horizonte and Niemeyer part of the design team for the Ministry of Health and Education in Rio de Janeiro. This encounter led to Kubitchek commissioning Niemeyer’s first large scale public design and a crucial moment in his career: the Pampulha Ensemble in Belo Horizonte, in 1940. The project was an opportunity for formal experimentation with a variety of public buildings located around the Pampulha Lagoon. In his dissertation, Rodrigo Queiroz notes the similarities between the plan of one of these buildings, the Ballroom, and Le Corbusier’s Ville Savoye, demonstrating the influence of Corbusian principles in Niemeyer’s architecture.15 Pampulha Ensemble displays Niemeyer’s first individual attempt to combine a national expression with Corbusian theories and European modern architecture. The project, with its tiles of baroque inspiration and organic forms, was widely criticized abroad. The postwar European and US architectural circles accused Niemeyer of a “formal degeneration and capricious license, an exuberant spirit that was easily transferred to a cultural one.”16 Another example was Max Bill’s critique published in the magazine Manchete: “Niemeyer, despite his evident talent, designed it [Pampulha] out of instinct, out of simple love for form per form.”17 This criticism guided Niemeyer through a negotiation between the plastic intentions of his work and matters of functionalism and unity—a personal quest to assimilate and respond to international

Figure 32 National Congress building, BrasĂlia, c. 1960. Photographer

Marcel Gautherot (IMS Archive)

Lines of Non-Alignment

Figure 33: Le Corbusier’s Ville Savoye Plan. Figure 34: Oscar Niemeyer’s Pampulha Ballroom Figure 35: Pampulha croqui. Images retrieved from: Rodrigo Cristiano Queiroz, “Oscar Niemeyer e Le Corbusier: encontros” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2007), https://doi. org/10.11606/T.16.2007.tde-27042010-135104.

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criticism that reveals a desire to fit into a global architecture milieu. Many of his reflections were published in the magazine Módulo, co-directed by Niemeyer, and an important media for the dissemination of his own designs and writings, as well as from his colleagues of the so-called Carioca School. Edited in Portuguese, English, German and French, the publication targeted an international audience, a requirement, according to the editorial board, “for a magazine that considers itself modern.”18 Niemeyer would later use this platform to redeem himself with the international audience. When unveiling Brasília’s National Congress Building in the 9th issue of Módulo, in 1958, more than a decade after Pampula’s commission, Niemeyer broadcasted a clear response to his critics, in an important self-analysis named “Depoimento = Testimony.” He wrote that the works in Brasília marked a new stage in his professional activities, “characterized by a constant seeking for conciseness and purity, as well as greater attention to basic architectural problems.” This new stage “sprang from a cold and frank review” of his work as an architect. After reflecting on the critiques, he became “interested in compact solutions, simple and geometric: problems of hierarchy and of architectonic character: the fitness of unity and harmony amongst the buildings, and further, that these no longer be expressed through their secondary elements, but rather through the structure itself, duly integrated within the original plastic conception.” The National Congress Building is an example of this new guideline: “an immense esplanade, in contrast to the two administrative blocks, marks the horizontal line of composition, whereon the two plenaries stand out; and these, with the other elements, create the play of forms and shapes which make architecture what it is...”19

Figure 36 National Congress building, BrasĂlia, c. 1960. Photographer

Marcel Gautherot (IMS Archive)

Lines of Non-Alignment

The architecture of the new capital, more austere than his previous works, still played with the formal possibilities of reinforced concrete but aiming at a formal synthesis. It is in this context that the dome, previously seen in Ibirapuera Park, is brought back by Niemeyer to an emblematic place in the architecture of Brasília. The dome represented an ultimate outcome of Niemeyer’s long research with the plasticity of reinforced concrete. It was not only a form imbued with ideas of the “future,” but it was also a complex structure to build; it had a technological ethos both as symbol and practice. Niemeyer, thus, finds in the dome a synthesis of a futuristic ethos, technological labor complexity, the grand scale and the romantic discourse behind this “form-giving” architecture; this was a nationalist claim of identity with a modernist register, easily relatable abroad. His work was, then, politically compelling for both the Brazilian and Lebanese States searching for representations of progress, modernity, and nationalism. You might also comment on Niemeyer’s concept of purity to think through how this linked form-making with political ideology in his mind. Nevertheless, building Brasilia was not just an architectural enterprise. The images that traveled the globe to spread new forms of Brazilian capital had their own graphic expression, and greatly influenced the reception of this architecture. Here, the FrenchBrazilian photographer Marcel Gautherot had an important role. At the beginning of the 1960s, Gautherot was commissioned by the Brazilian government to photograph the construction of Brasília.20 His work addressed not only the plastic expression of that specific moment in Brazil but was also an inventory of the stages of construction, the condition of the workers’ housing, and the monumentality of the buildings.21 Gautherot’s images were

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used by the government as propaganda, publicizing the image of construction works as an image of the country’s development. At the national level, the official magazine Brasília published the photos next to an update of the construction’s progress month by month.22 They were also used in Módulo magazine, and in mainstream national media vehicles. Even in his abstract compositions, Gautherot kept traces of the environment’s materiality, often translated through the appearance of a human figure between the plans, with details and textures that characterize the concrete or even including the shadow that comes from the photographer’s silhouette against the sun. The abstract compositions were an expression of Gautherot aesthetic that, similar to Brasília itself, was highly influenced by the 1920s European modernism. Guetherot’s and Niemeyer’s aesthetics thus fused to create of an aura of Brasília that adds to more than the plastic expression of its buildings or their photographic register, presenting it, at least at a distance, as the epic realization of the modern utopian city. In The visible and the invisible in Brazilian architecture, José Lira links the achievements of modern Brazilian architecture to its wide connection with “the arts of technical reproducibility—specially photography, but also film and graphic arts—, with significant investments in modern networks of image within the press and advertising.”23 The historian argues that the translation of architecture into visual manifestos and public narratives was the reason for the consolidation of certain design attitudes, poetics and rationales that would define modern architecture in Brazil. . His theory confirms the strong connection between architecture and photography that is evident in the case of the domes. Hence, Niemeyer’s dome—and its reproducible images—

Figure 37 Construction workers climing to build the National Congress dome, BrasĂlia, c. 1960. Photographer

Marcel Gautherot (IMS Archive)

Lines of Non-Alignment

Figure 38: Cover of Brasília magazine n.15, March 1958. (Fundo NOVACAP, custodiado pelo Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal – ArpDF)

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can be understood as a technical and aesthetic synthesis of an exportable image of modern Brazilian architecture. In his dissertation, Patricio del Real argues that Niemeyer and, more broadly, the Carioca School acted as a representation of the modern architecture of Latin America to an international audience. This metonymic drive, as the author suggests, “found its full potential in Brazil because the images of its architecture offered an idealized space and time.”24 This quality would not only make Brazil “operate as a representative of Latin America, but as an ideal toward which all Western nations should aspire.” 25 Del Real also suggests that the bi-polar context of the Cold War was conducive to the emergence of the cosmopolitan architect’s figure, one who “could negotiate this complex and dangerous political and cultural geography.”26 Convincingly, then, the ideal conditions of space and time which are seen in Brasília’s contextless architecture and underscored by Gautherot’s abstract photography stretched beyond Latin America to inspire Lebanon and countries in the Middle East and North Africa, to where Niemeyer travels throughout the 1960s. Brasilia’s abstract imagery referred to an ideal space and time and, most importantly, a new space and time. The originality of the capital’s forms sold the idea of a new future, and that is why it enchanted so many nations that were going through the process of building their own independent image.

Figure 39: “The construction march” Brasília magazine n.15, March 1958. (Fundo NOVACAP, custodiado pelo Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal – ArpDF)

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Figure 40: “The construction march” Brasília magazine n.15, March 1958. (Fundo NOVACAP, custodiado pelo Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal – ArpDF)

Figure 41 Construction workers, National Congress building,

BrasĂlia, c. 1960. Photographer

Marcel Gautherot (IMS Archive)

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NIEMEYER TRAVELS

The inauguration of Brasília marked the end of Juscelino Kubitchek’s mandate and the beginning of a period of political instability in Brazil that culminated in the Military Coup of 1964. Jânio Quadros was elected to replace Kubitchek but, in eight months, after a still mysterious resignation, was substituted by João Goulard. Quadros and Goulard governments opposed Kubitchek’s foreign policy. While Kubitchek relied strongly in Brazil’s relations with the United States—being a key figure in the negotiation of the Alliance of Progress— Quadros was seeking a more comprehensive foreign policy, expanding Brazil’s relations with several countries, and participating in the first Non-Aligned summit. The so-called PEI (Independent Foreign Policy) was a government initiative for the freedom of relations between Brazil and other countries, regardless of their political inclinations.27 On that occasion, Niemeyer was still in charge of NOVACAP, the public agency responsible for the construction works in Brasília. As a public employee, the architect watched the end of Kubitchek’s mandate and the years that followed the fading optimism of his government. Quase Memórias: Viagens [Almost Memories: Travels]28 is a sort of diary in which the architect narrated not only his travels during the 1960s but also the political context in Brazil right before, and in the first years, of the Military Coup. In the book, Niemeyer praises the new neutrality of Brazilian international relations in the Quadros and Goulard government. Even with the lack of attention given to construction works in Brasília at the time, Niemeyer honors Quadros’s foreign Figure 42: “Mr. Oscar Niemeyer arrived and went straight to Tripoli.” L’Orient Le Jour, July 29, 1962. (L’Orient Le Jour Archives)

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Figure 43: “Images of Brasilia.” L’Orient Le Jour, August 11, 1962. (L’Orient Le Jour Archives)

Figure 44 Model of the Tripoli Fairgrounds’ project, c. 1962.

(Módulo n. 30, oct. 1962, p.22 /Avery Classics Collection)

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policies, saying that the president “had such an ease in dealing with international affairs, that we forget his disinterest in the city, supporting him unconditionally; even going on strike on the day when, against the will of the people, he was forced to resign. We were excited about his foreign policy, which in our view is much more important than our architecture.”29 Shortly after the episode, Niemeyer received a telegram from Beirut. It was the Brazilian Ambassador Bolivar de Freitas who, on behalf of the Lebanese government, invited the architect to design the Tripoli Fairgrounds. A. C. Camargo, an architect in Niemeyer’s office, travelled to Lebanon in advance to collect data, construction areas and all the elements that would serve as basis for the project. Niemeyer arrived in Beirut a couple of months later, in July of 1962. His arrival was reported by the press, which defined him as the great creator of Brasília. After spending less than one day in Beirut, he travelled to Tripoli to work with Camargo and the fair’s committee to produce an overall plan for the site with drawings, a small descriptive text, and a physical model. If Brasília appears in the geometric center of the country—to nurture a national network—in Tripoli, the Fairgrounds occupy an agricultural territory between two consolidated urban nodes, in an attempt to create a greater connection at the scale of the city. The similarity of the gesture, although dealing with entirely different scales, inspired an article in the Lebanese newspaper L’Orient Le Jour, in 1962. “On the sidelines of Niemeyer’s Lebanese stay - Images of Brasilia” was published in the occasion of the architect’s arrival in Lebanon. The Lebanese newspaper was one of the landing grounds for Gautherot photography, showing different state buildings in the Brazilian capital.

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The architect described the beginning of the process with the organization of the fair: “After the first contacts with Amado Chalhup, Director General of the Fair, I felt that everything was yet to be defined. The program established only the necessary areas for pavilions and complementary buildings: administration, customs, Lebanon pavilion, entrance porch and rest hotel. From the indispensable buildings to the entertainment and cultural sectors nothing had been established. And I realized that my first job would be to define the whole of the Fair, on which my architectural plan would be based.”30 After the two months living and working in Tripoli, the team travelled to Beirut to explain the proposal to the Counseil de Grands Travaux authorities. The initial commission of the work was already ambitious, and it reached a whole other level with the architect’s design. Niemeyer conceived the project as an urbanization plan, containing residential buildings, commercial areas, tourist zones, parks, gardens, schools, shops, clubs, cinemas, churches and mosques. In his words: “We gave the fair a completely new solution, unlike anything that has already been done in this regard, a solution that found the greatest receptivity in everyone.”31 Soon after returning to Rio de Janeiro, the architect uses once again the medium of Módulo to publish a summary of the project’s intentions. The article, in its entirety, is translated and published again in several architectural magazines worldwide, including L’Architecture D’ajourdhui, number 105, 1963. In both magazines, the same text in French, Portuguese and English describes the Experimental Theater: a white dome, where the most widely varying performances will be staged: plays, arena, ballet, music.32 In justifying the decision of the overall design, the architect adds: “The choice of these elements aimed to bring

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Figure 45: Tripoli Fairgrounds’ project, c. 1962. (Módulo n. 30, oct. 1962, p.1/Avery Classics Collection)

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Figure 46, 47: Tripoli Fairgrounds’ project, c. 1962. (Módulo n. 30, oct. 1962, p.12-13, 8-9/Avery Classics Collection)

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Figure 48 Model of the Tripoli Fairgrounds’ project, c. 1962. (Módulo n. 30, oct. 1962, p.6 /Avery Classics Collection)

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visitors to the themes that are passionate about the contemporary world: spatial experiences full of beauty and mystery, the evolution of housing and its perspectives, theater, music, cinema, etc., and yet, Lebanon’s pavilion, showing that country, its tradition and progress.”33 Lebanon was the first of a series of travels that Niemeyer made across the Middle East and North Africa. Perhaps inspired by the new Brazilian foreign policy, or because other countries were organizing themselves towards a non-alignment scenario, the beginning of the 1960s marked a period of extensive travel for Niemeyer. In Quase Memórias: Viagens, he romanticizes this moment of his career, depicting himself almost as a hero who relinquishes comfort and privacy to spread the “beauty of architecture.” The architect speculates that his valuable experiences abroad—perhaps “never lived by another architect” before— were not just trips of a professional character but “an architect who, aided only by his assistant and model maker, traverses the world, projecting the most diverse themes, in record times, without taking into account comfort and personal feeling, concerned only with satisfactorily solving the jobs that are presented successively.”34 Niemeyer shows the intention of connecting the Fairgrounds in Lebanon with the major themes of the contemporary times, a way of associating the importance of that space with an comprehensive world logic. At the beginning, the main drivers for the trips were commissions and invitations, which probably came from the architect’s international reputation following the inauguration of Brasilia, but after 1964, his travel became a survival strategy for the communist architect, struggling to fit into the Brazilian political scenario after the 1964 military coup. Throughout the

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period, Niemeyer had designed projects for newly independent nations, leftist leaders and governments challenging US interests, as the projects in Lybia, Saudi Arabia and, of course, Lebanon.35 One exception is Israel, where the architect also spent 6 months designing housing towers, a relationship that, from the beginning of its negotiation, infuriated some Lebanese sectors due to the Lebanese Israeli boycott.36 Not surprisingly, the dome will reappear, in some iterations of designs in Algeria and, finally, at the Community Party headquarters in Paris, a city that hosted the exiled architect from 1967. The period of travel by the architect and the Lebanon project in 1962 coincides with the breakdown of Brasilia’s fate with the military coup of 1964. It is an intricate period for both the architect and for Brazilian politics. Through this chapter, I sought to trace a path to interpret the period’s political events and their translation into the formal abstraction of Niemeyer’s architecture. The purism of form is also the purism of the architect’s ideology, which is tainted by the conflicts that permeate Brazil and Lebanon’s histories in the years following these commissions.

Chapter three

THE DOME ON THE GROUND

Brasília is constructed on the line of the horizon. Brasília is artificial. As artificial as the world must have been when it was created. When the world was created, a man had to be created specifically for that world. We are all deformed by our adaptation to the freedom of God. We don’t know how we would be if we had been created first and the world were deformed after according to our requirements. […] No matter how close one gets, everything here is seen from afar. I couldn’t find a way to touch. But at least I had this in my favor: before I got here, I already knew how to touch from afar. I never got too discouraged: from afar, I would touch.1 Novelist Clarice Lispector visited Brasilia for the first time in 1962. On the occasion, she wrote “Visions of Splendor,” a short essay

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Figure 62 Kids climbing Oca. Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, 2008. Photograph by Ciro Miguel (Courtesy of the author)

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that would become emblematic of her career and also of her first bodily confrontation with the new capital’s architecture. Lispector affirms that it is impossible to touch Brasília. By doing so, the writer poetically expresses the discomfort that lies in the threshold of Brasília as a material reality and Brasília as a developmentalist fiction. No matter how close one gets, it is impossible to touch the fictional Brasília—the Brasília that exists in an ideal space and time. This uncomfortable feeling of confronting reality is not just hers, but appears behind many different aspects that characterize the afterlives of Brasília, Ibirapuera Park, and the Tripoli Fairgrounds. The dome on the ground explores the fate of the domes though a closer look into the scale of the building—the political space of the dome and the organization of bodies that it generates. I want to break with the pure metaphorical interpretation of the dome, as a symbol of a political thought, to read it as a material reality, that creates sites of interaction with the very real subjects that inform and respond to that political ideology. The formal efforts of Niemeyer’s architecture worked as an instantiation of an idea of development that haven’t taken into account the major social and economic problems of these societies. Hence, the failure of this narrative is predictable—it is intrinsic in the mindset that generated it in the first place. The years that followed the conception of these projects dealt with several forms of interruption. After the opening of Ibirapuera, in 1954, its many buildings were left empty without defined use. The park was conceived, built and managed by the Commission for the 4th Centennial of São Paulo. With the end of the year of celebrations, the transition to a new management was extremely chaotic.2 A report in the newspaper A Gazeta

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[Figure 50] shows the deplorable situation in which the buildings were in the years that followed its inauguration. Some years later, in 1964, the promise of democracy with Brasília in 1960 was postponed by the Military Coup. For many years, and throughout the military dictatorship, Ibirapuera Park had its many buildings occupied with various sectors of public services. Without access to the population, the buildings were subdivided into small offices. The dome, one of the only buildings with public access, became a museum for the Aeronautics. In Tripoli, the process of construction of the Fairgrounds extended to 12 years, with constant rescheduling and imminent financial breaks, and even then was never completed. The newspapers reported new inauguration dates over and over throughout the 1960s. In the beginning of the 1970s, a return to laissez-faire markets deferred the feasibility of the project. As Adrian Lahoud posits: “Lebanon’s political leadership was no longer willing or able to secure the conditions in which the project was supposed to operate.”3 The project would only be able to operate within the condition of a centralizing state, focused on nation-building projects with ambition to establish a Lebanese national identity. In 1975, with the rise of the Lebanese Civil War, the site was walled and suddenly transformed into a military base, following the invasion of its premises by the Syrian Army. The Tripoli Fairgrounds were the first site occupied by the army in Tripoli. It was a fitting space for storing war tools, parking tanks and other vehicles, and even for the Syrian Army’s housing. Looking at the cross section of the dome in Niemeyer’s drawings [Figure 56] it is possible to see, repeatedly, floating eyes that suggest points of view. Eyes that, separated from a body, are refunctioned as icons for sight. This little eyes could work as

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Figure 50: “Ibirapuera in a deplorable state” A Gazeta, July 12, 1959. (Historical Archive Wanda Svevo. Fundação Bienal de São Paulo)

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Figure 51 Tanks in front of the

2008 - SAO PAULO - IBIRAPUERA National Congress, c. 1964. PARK PHOTOGRAPHER: CIRO MIGUEL

Photographer unknown (Arquivo CORTESY OF THE AUTHOR

PÃºblico do Distrito Federal)

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Figure 52: “The Tripoli Fair will be inaugurated in 1964.” L’Orient Le Jour, August 15, 1962. (L’Orient Le Jour Archives) Figure 53: “Karame announces: Tripoli fair will be completed in 1969.” L’Orient Le Jour, March 8, 1967. (L’Orient Le Jour Archives) Figure 54: “The Tripoli International Fair will be inaugurated in 1971, at the same time as the autostrade.” L’Orient Le Jour, June 11, 1968. (L’Orient Le Jour Archives)

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Figure 49 Kids climbing dome in Tripoli, 2015. Photographer Iwan

Baan (Retrived from Baan website)

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evidence of how the architect imagined a touch-less interaction with the space in two registers: locally, with the visitors of the fair having an experience that focus primarily on vision; and also globally, understanding the floating eyes as camera lenses, that register that architecture to be seeing worldwide through photography, as part of an internationalist claim. This disembodied mediation is so different from the way people interact with the dome in any of its instances. There is something about these domes, the ambiguity between wall and roof, the slope, scale, and materiality… that somehow incites touch. From leisure to artistic explorations; political protests and celebrations, the domes are sites for collective assembly. Maybe this is why Alia Farid’s work is so striking to me. While conquering the geography of Tripoli’s domes, the artist presents herself as this female active and self-aware body that somehow contaminates the inspirational laying-in-the-beach body that exists encrypted in the curved ground of the concrete dome. The dome is, according to Adrian Lahoud, “an enduring form whose resistance to transformation makes it particularly qualified to reflect the immutability of sacred and profane images of the cosmos.”4 But there are some formal features that make Niemeyer’s domes different from the others that we see, for instance, in temples or state buildings. First, it is a semi-buried and opaque building that touches the ground instead of floating over a celestial interior, thereby fusing itself with the ground and acquiring a character of topography. Second, the shape is wider than a perfect sphere, a curvature that is only possible thanks to the construction technique of reinforced concrete and the large availability of unskilled labor to materialize it. These two characteristics are important to a phenomenon that occurs

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Figure 56: Floating eyes in cross section. Tripoli Fairgrounds’ project, c. 1962. (Módulo n. 30, oct. 1962, p.1/Avery Classics Collection)

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Figure 57 Kids climbing Oca. Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, 2008. Photograph by Ciro Miguel (Courtesy of the author)

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in all instances of the dome: climbing. This unsettling nexus of development, politics, conflict and geometry has led to multiple re-programmings of Niemeyer’s domes, formal and informal, including the fact that the domes have been claimed and climbed upon. Their shells exist as separators of two spatial ambitions: one that is continuously trying to organize bodies within a mode of architectural space (inside), and another that accommodates bodies in unexpected ways and triggers transgression of architectural surface (outside). Climbing the dome can be read as an act of transgression in itself; more specifically, it is an act of transgression with respect to architectural typology, since it shifts cover to floor, and transgression of use, as it changes the function of the buildings. I’ll look at the two emblematic cases as a way of describing the infinite possibilities of interactions with a building, semantic and programmatic. I hope that these cases illustrate, to borrow from Anna Tsing, the “multiple futures” that “pop in and out of possibility” to contrapose “assumptions that the future is that singular direction ahead.”5 As a way of denying this history and reorganizing the political bodies that interact and influence architecture, this thesis seeks to highlight the other bodies that replace the architect as a central figure in the development of the building and occupy important spaces in this narrative. Some of these actors are: the workers who sculpt and build the domes, the users of the spaces, the soldiers who occupy the fairgrounds in Lebanon, the artists who interact with this unusual architecture, the children who see the dome as a playground. From now on, these are the bodies that will lead this narrative.

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THE NAME OF THE DOME

São Paulo is a region marked by intense extermination and violence against its native peoples. The history of the city created heroes, called bandeirantes, who were settlers brave enough to climb the mountain range and enter the Brazilian territory, founding cities and decimating peoples. Many of São Paulo’s streets, squares and avenues are named to honor these pioneers. Interestingly, many other roads, rivers, and neighborhoods in the city have kept the original indigenous name in Tupi. Tupi-Guarani is a collection of more than 50 languages across South America. One of them, the Old Tupi, is predominant within indigenous peoples from the Brazilian coast, including the region of Sao Paulo. Growing up there, I have learned a few words in Tupi-Guarani at school: Ybirá - tree; Peró - Portuguese, Abá - Indian; Mirim - small; pitanga - child; Taba - village; Oca - house. Despite this, I got used to memorizing the place’s names without ever questioning their meanings. Later I learned that those terms in Old Tupi are small descriptions of the nature of each location. In the year 2000, a big—and problematic—exhibition took place in Ibirapuera Park to celebrate five hundred years of Brazil. Named “Re-discovering Brazil,”6 the show used the dome to present on the theme of Brazilian indigenous cultures. In the words of Edemar Cid Fereira, President of Brazil 500 Years Association: “We have decided to include a new revolutionary element that would definitively change the history of exhibitions in Brazil: instead of presenting artworks in a traditional museological manner, we have decided to transform each one of the exhibition’s modules in an authentic scenographic module, giving the greatest emphasis on the beauty of the works exhibited and the understanding of its content.”7 Thus, the immersive experience

Figure 58 End of dictatorship

National Congress, Brasília, 1985. (DA Press/Diários Associados)

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of the exhibition recreated—in a generalizing and anachronistic way—textures, materials, sounds and images that referred to indigenous life in Brazil. Or rather, to a pre-colonial indigenous life in Brazil. The catalog of the exhibition describes the ambitions for the dome’s exhibition, they were to show “12,500 years of occupation of the Brazilian soil, as the underground encloses the modules of human evolution and of archeology.” Combining historical objects from the Portuguese occupation in Brazil and indigenous arts and crafts, the exhibition aimed to establish “a lively dialogue between the historically parted poles.” The Brazilian public would be presented, for the first time, “with the uninterrupted temporal thread of the people who welcomed the Europeans.”8 The use of the word welcome in this context is by itself troublesome, as is the gathering of those different artifacts in a single narrative—as if they could share the same history, peacefully. After the exhibition, Sao Paulo’s population started referring to the dome as oca. Oca, a Tupi-guarani term for house, is associated with a specific typology of indigenous hut that has a circular, axial form. Oca is a well-known indigenous residential typology in Brazil, one of those you learn at school. It is one of the units that form the villages. Built generally of straw and wood, without internal partitions, it is a space for collective living and for the development of daily tasks, such as the production of food and handmade objects. The fact that the word oca is translated as a house and its space has a collective use, says a lot about the way of life of the original Brazilian populations. There is no mention of this term in the curatorial statement of the exhibition nor historical evidence that architect Oscar Niemeyer

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was inspired by them—even though some historians still make the mistake of crediting this “hommage” to the architect. Sao Paulo’s population collectively shifted the symbology of the dome from a futuristic quest to a historical revisitation, and until today this is how the building is called. On my last visit to Ibirapuera Park I encountered an old sign exposed to the weather that commands: “it’s prohibited to climb the oca” over the drawing of a dome with a small figure on top of it. By studying the issues of settler colonialism a little deeper, the act of naming this modernist building with an indigenous term seems to be not just naïve and misguided but extremely violent. Especially knowing that the word means “house,” and that the building is located on land that had previously been a residence for native communities. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s text, “Decolonization is not a metaphor” seems to offer useful ways to think about this situation. As they wrote: “When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization, it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocence to the settler, it entertains a settler future.”9 They refer to the easy use of the word “decolonize” in situations of social injustice that do not apply to settler colonialism. Even so, interpreting the building’s naming as a celebration or tribute to the original peoples seems to be another way of using this metaphor, ignoring the history of that place and the current problems that the original peoples face today. In Ibirapuera Park, there are two different stories of placemaking in old tupi. The name of the park and the name of the building. I believe there is an essential difference between the two cases. The park recovers the name of the community that lived in that same place. It safeguards the history of the territory

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Figure 59: Ibirapuera Park Map from 1954. Dome described as â&#x20AC;&#x153;exhibition pallace.â&#x20AC;? Retrieved from: parqueibirapuera.org

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Figure 60: Ibirapuera Park Map from 2019. Dome described as â&#x20AC;&#x153;Oca.â&#x20AC;? Retrieved from: parqueibirapuera.org

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Figure 61 “It is prohibited to climb Oca.” Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, 2020. Photograph by the author.

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together with the information that the Tupi term carries in itself: Ibirapuera, from the Old Tupi, means “rotten tree,” revealing the wetland property of the region.10 The building, in contrast, simplifies the use of the term oca through a formal approach. This second mode of appropriation seems to fit neatly to the “move to innocence”11 concept explored in Tuck and Yang’s text. An innocent simplification that could led to the usage of the word oca as every kind of building that resembles its original shape. At the same time, a park designed for a white middle class only reinforces the power roles and structural violence of that society.

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THE PLAYGROUND

The second case of reappropriation became evident during my visit to Lebanon, amid the popular uprising that took place in late 2019. Without being able to access historical archives, my research took a new path from the contact with several people who shared with me their stories. One of them, Mira Minkara, makes a living taking tourists to see Niemeyer’s abandoned masterpiece. She told me that her brother used to play inside the Fairgrounds during the Syrian army occupation. A couple of months later, Adel Minkara (AM), Mira’s brother, agreed to talk to me (FC) about that time:12 FC: I don’t have specific questions, I just wanted to hear a bit about your personal relation with the site, and the dome, what do you remember from your childhood, the interaction with the soldiers inside the fair… AM: I call it a park, the park. See, in the 1990s in Tripoli we used to play all in the streets, with the groups of friends, it was a very safe city, different from Rio or (where are you from again? Sao Paulo). But we didn’t have a Ibirapuera Park or Paulista, like in Sao Paulo. Tripoli back in the days had no outdoor activities, you just went to school and home and that’s it. We could only play on the streets. And there was this place that was next to our home and we could see it from all the building’s balconies because it’s very big. And there was no buildings after ours. It was something easy and reachable for us. It’s not a coincidence that Adel used to see the dome from his window; the construction of the fair generated a node of attraction for Tripoli’s real estate development in the 1960s. The

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Figure 49 Kids climbing dome in Tripoli, 2015. Photographer Iwan

Baan (Retrived from Baan website)

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huge line of buildings that overlook the fair was one of the things that struck me the most on the visit--all the balconies awaiting their privileged view. I asked him how they used to enter to the park. AM: We used to go play in the street so we knew about the structure, we didn’t know anything about it but we know it was prohibited to enter, because of the Syrian army. We didn’t care, we wanted to go there all the time. We use to climb the fence or sometimes there were some spaces where the fence was broken so we could slip into. And we use to go inside and play football, climb in that huge structure, the dome. Actually, we used to play football up there. FC: On top of the dome? AM: Yes! Up! I remember that we use to get yelled by our mothers because we used to always go down there after school. Go to the theater and play there. The problem was that there was always an army following us. It was Syrian army, not Lebanese. They used to shout at us. One time they put us in a hole, just to stay, make us scared of the whole think. But we didn’t care and we kept going there. And it wasn’t like now, I don’t remember it as green as know. I remember there were tanks inside. FC: Do you remember if the dome was being used for anything at that time? AM: There was nothing happening inside the dome. It was abandoned as it is today, same as it is now but it was much dirtier. It was full of things, wreckage. It wasn’t that easy to go inside. The Fair, we didn’t know what it was, because it was really forgotten. Politically, Tripoli was abandoned,

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even in the war. Everything was centralized in Beirut. It was always forgotten. No one gave any shit about the Fair. They just wanted to survive the war. But there were no clashes between Lebanese. Syrian army was fighting with communist in the north. (Palestinian and Syrians, and Syrians and the communists) FC: You know that I used to climb the dome in Ibirapuera Park too? AM: Oooh. But our dome is much easier because it is a little broken at the end on the other side.There is a place, that is a bit broken, I think they should shot there with guns there because there are some places where the cement is gone, so you could put your leg and climb easily. I don’t know maybe they’ve murdered people there, it was horrible to see the things that they did there… There is a place where the cement is wrong. There are these holes, I remember there were holes for us to grab so it was easier to go up. After finishing the call, I went quickly through my photos of the travel and found one that shows the small holes Adel was talking about. They look like a staircase carved in the concrete. Through a detail as small and haunting as a bullet hole, the political imaginaries are pushed back to the scale of the body. The dome, the bullet hole, and Adel’s climbing are complementary evidence of a continued history, one marked by cycles of hope, collapse, conflict, and transgression.

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Figure 65 Bullet marks at the dome. Tripoli Fairgrounds, Tripoli, 2019. Photograph by the author.

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Coda

TRAVELS

A dome can’t travel by itself. The movement of a traveling architecture is the movement of many other things: drawings, measurements, letters, contracts, photographs, techniques… traveling dome is a traveling architect—in our case, someone who worked as an agent of a political ideology that, by the 1960s, would link different continents and contexts. But a traveling dome is also the travel of a researcher who, as with the history covered in this thesis, was marked by many forms of interruption. The duality of the comparison between Brazil and Lebanon that becomes evident with the instances of domes in both places is also present in the duality of repeating Niemeyer’s travel today. By doing so, this thesis emphasizes the connections that can be drawn between two distinct spaces and two separate times. I write this coda in the context of a world pandemic, when, from one hour to the next, the possibility of moving between

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Figure 66 Inside the dome.

Tripoli Fairgrounds, Tripoli, 2019. Photograph by the author.

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countries seems to be suspended. Right before it began, I had the chance to visit Tripoli and Sao Paulo. I went to Lebanon in November, two weeks after the eruption of what became the popular Lebanese uprising or, as I heard many times from people in Beirut, the Lebanese Revolution. In the context of a nationwide protest, museums, libraries, universities, and archives were closed. The research took new paths and got defined by the restrictions—not diminished but definitely marked. When traveling from Beirut to Tripoli in an Uber (all bus routes were closed), I found myself having to justify the reason for my travel to several protesters blocking the roads: “I’m researching a building in Tripoli. I’m a student from Brazil.” A route that would typically take one hour and a half took us five. When I finally got to Tripoli, the Uber driver dropped me at the entrance of the city and signalled the way to the Fairgrounds. I walked the path of that new city with caution. Some roads were blocked, it was possible to hear loud voices and percussion. At the gate of the Fairgrounds—that, different from Niemeyer’s plans, is now protected by a tall concrete wall—a security guard welcomed me, troubled: “What are you doing here?” He meant: “What are you doing here now?” Trying to explain myself, I mentioned the name of the tour guide, Mira, who would meet me in the afternoon. He let me in. You need to have contacts to access the Fairgrounds today. Going through the entrance gate felt exactly how I had imagined; the sensations of Alia Farid’s work came back instantly. Something about those buildings makes me feel at home. The spaces, proportions, and materials are so familiar to me that I explored it as a visitor of yesteryear, barefoot. I investigated the dome in every way: I screamed inside to test the echo of its large void; I tried to follow and reason all

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the marks upon it; I took several turns around it and decided to climb it—what a scene! I can say that it is more complicated than I imagined, or rather, it is more complicated than I recall from my childhood in Sao Paulo. The most meaningful experiences I had in Lebanon took place on the streets rather than inside an archive. The context of my visit sparked heated discussions about politics and history. I learned that much of today’s revolutionary claims relate to the measures adopted by the National Pact, more than seventy years ago, and the agreements made at the end of the Civil War in the 1990s. I was able to understand the connection between the historical events that I was studying and the raw reality of the country, which, as I write this conclusion, is erupting against an unjust and segregational system. In 2018, curators Karina El Helou and Anissa Touati held an exhibition among the bare concrete structures of the Tripoli Fairgrounds entitled “Cycles of Collapsing Progress.” The show presented twenty projects by artists from Lebanon and Mexico that discussed this idea of cycles of hope and collapse that beset developing countries. The idea of a cyclical condition influenced me a lot when visiting Lebanon and, also, Brazil. My visit to Ibirapuera Park was somewhat melancholic. With the dissolution of the Ministry of Culture at the beginning of President Bolsonaro’s mandate, in January 2019, and the almost nonexistent support for cultural activities, I found an empty Oca. Unlike the dome in Tripoli, Oca is finished and white—although not as white as I remember from previous times. Upon arriving at the building, I was greeted by an employee who explained to me: “There is no exhibition, but you can visit the building.” It

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Figure 66 Tripoli Fairgrounds Tripoli, 2019.

Photograph by the author.

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Figure 67 Inside the dome.

Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, 2020. Photograph by the author.

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Figure 68 Inside the dome.

Ibirapuera Park, Sao Paulo, 2020. Photograph by the author.

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was ironic to realize that the only inhabitants of that building were the properly positioned fire extinguishers, as a museum requires, but that nothing was to be shown at the museum. Lebanon and Brazil are countries with very different histories. The Tripoli Fairgrounds and Ibirapuera Park are also significantly different spaces. But both of my travels, for some reason, were marked by absence. Spaces that havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fulfilled their intended function and, at the same time, seem to be waiting for the next occupation, the next cycle of hope. But we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need to guide our narratives through promises and failures. Buildings come into existence in a complex reality and change through the frictions and roughness of the lived experience. The linear future sought by the design of these projects is displaced by multiple futures of social appropriation that physically and politically re-signify the traveling domes on the ground.

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AKNOLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank prof. Felicity D. Scott, for the precise guidance, attention to detail, and for introducing me to the essence of being a historian. I would also like to thank prof. Alexandra L. Quantrill for the patient support and prof. Mark Wasiuta for rephrasing my jumbled thoughts into beautiful sentences. We have many critics throughout the year. These were crucial to the development of the thesis: Zeynep Celik Alexander, James Graham, Marina Otero, Pelin Tan, Anthony Vidler, and Mark Wigley. Thank you, Sylva El-Chaër, for welcoming me in the L’Orient Le Jour archives amid the Revolution. Thanks, Chloe Kattar, Mira and Adel Minkara, Anahid Simitian Gondo, and Yasmin Mussallam Al Masri. I’ve learned so much from my peers in the CCCP: Alex Tell, Chenchen Yan, Emma Macdonald, Francesca Johanson, Jumana Abbas, and Zoe Kauder Nalebuff. I was lucky to have met the brilliant Isabelle Tan and my Latin American mate Jose Luis Villanueva. For those who made this possible: Vera, Silvia, Georgette, Jamile, Riba, Tiê, and Lucas.

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Notes

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FOOTNOTES: TALES IN FUTURE TENSE

1. Mike Mason, Development and disorder : a history of the Third World since 1945 (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1997), 17. 2. Ibid, 19. 3. Panagiōta Pyla, ed. Landscapes of Development: The Impact of Modernization Discourses on the Physical Environment of the Eastern Mediterranean (Cambridge, Mass: Aga Khan Program of the Graduate School of Design, 2013), 7. 4. Felicity Dale Elliston Scott, Outlaw Territories : Environments of Insecurity/ Architectures of Counterinsurgency (New York: Zone Books, 2016), 59. 5. Craig J. Calhoun, Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 93. 6. Ibid, 93. 7. Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 2 (1989): 218. 8. Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations; London, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 95. 9. Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development : The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 4. 10. Ana Claudia Castilho Barone, “Ibirapuera: parque metropolitano (1926-1954)” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2007), 19. https://doi. org/10.11606/T.16.2007.tde-31052010-143819. 11. Fernanda Araujo Curi, “Ibirapuera, metáfora urbana. O público/privado em São Paulo. 1954-2017” (text, Universidade de São Paulo, 2018), 78. https:// doi.org/10.11606/T.16.2019.tde-09012019-113200. 12. Ibid, 79. 13. Ibid, 24. 14. “Palácio das Exposições,” Revista Acrópole 191 (1954): 493. http://www. acropole.fau.usp.br/edicao/191. 15. Carlos A. C. Lemos, “Oscar Niemeyer in Sao Paulo” In: Oscar Niemeyer Classics and Unseen, org. Lauro Calvacanti (São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2014), 90. 16. Typescript of press release Histórico da Comissão do IV Centenário e suas Realizações, 1945, Folder 47-8, 01-00410, Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo,

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Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. 17. Typescript of press release Histórico da Comissão do IV Centenário e suas Realizações, 1945, Folder 47-8, 01-00410, Arquivo Histórico Wanda Svevo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. 18. “Duzentas e cinquenta mil sacas de cimento empregadas nas obras do parque Ibirapuera,” Folha da Manhã, April 18, 1954. 19. Ibid. 20. “O conjunto arquitetónico do Ibirapuera espelha o progresso da nossa engenharia,” Folha da Manhã, April 4, 1954. 21. Kevin W. Martin, “Presenting the ‘True Face of Syria’ to the world: Urban disorder and civilizational anxieties at the First Damascus International Exposition,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 3 (2010): 391. 22. Ibid, 406. 23. Chloe Kattar, “Chronology and facts on the Rashid Karami International Fair,” In Cycles of Collapsing Progress: Visitor’s Guide, Karina El Helou and Anissa Touati Corporation eds. (Beirut: Beirut Museum of Art, 2018), 8-16. 24. Oscar Niemeyer, “Feira Internacional e Permanente do Líbano em Trípoli,” Revista Módulo 30 (October 1962): 4.

FOOTNOTES: LINES OF NON-ALIGNMENT

1. David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (New York: Zed Books, 2012), 11. 2. NAM website history 3. “Declaration of the Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, Belgrade, September, 6, 1961,” Documents on American Foreign Relations (Boston: January 1, 1961): 6. 4. Vijay Prashad. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. (New York: New Press, 2007), 95. 5. “Declaration of the Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, Belgrade, September, 6, 1961,” Documents on American Foreign Relations (Boston: January 1, 1961): 6.

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6. Ibid, 13. 7. Adrian Lahoud. “Fallen Cities” In The Arab City : Architecture and Representation, Andraos Amale (ed.) (New York, NY: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016). 8. Fawwāz Ṭarābulsī, A History of Modern Lebanon [Electronic Resource] (New York: Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillian, 2012), 111. 9. Eric Verdeil. Politics, Ideology and Professional Interests: Foreign versus local planners in Lebanon under president Chebab. 10. Chloe Kattar, “Chronology and facts on the Rashid Karami International Fair,” In Cycles of Collapsing Progress: Visitor’s Guide, Karina El Helou and Anissa Touati Corporation eds. (Beirut: Beirut Museum of Art, 2018), 8-16. 11. Eric Verdeil. Politics, Ideology and Professional Interests: Foreign versus local planners in Lebanon under president Chebab. 12. “Obra / Arquitetura | Niemeyer,” accessed April 30, 2020, http://www. niemeyer.org.br/obra/pro039. 13. Oscar Niemeyer, Minha Arquitetura : 1937-2005 = My Architecture : 19372005 (Rio de Janeiro: Petrobras, 2005). 14. Boris Fausto and Sergio Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, Cambridge Core (Cambridge University Press, August 2014), 249. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9781139567060. 15. Rodrigo Cristiano Queiroz, “Oscar Niemeyer e Le Corbusier: encontros” (PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2007), https://doi. org/10.11606/T.16.2007.tde-27042010-135104. 16. Patricio del Real, “Building a Continent: The Idea of Latin American Architecture in the Early Postwar” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012), 20. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8736Z1J. 17. Flávio de Aquino. “Max Bill critica a nossa moderna arquitetura.” Manchete (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), (June 13, 1953): 38. 18. Oscar Niemeyer. “Depoimento = Testimony,” Módulo, Rio de Janeiro, n.9, p.4-6, fev. 1958. 19. Oscar Niemeyer. “Depoimento = Testimony,” Módulo, Rio de Janeiro, n.9, p.4-6, fev. 1958.

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Notes

20. Lima, H. E. R. (2011). Monumentalidade e sombra: a representação do centro cívico de Brasília por Marcel Gautherot. Tese de Doutorado, Escola de Comunicações e Artes, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo. 21. Sergio Burgi in: Gautherot, Marcel. Brasilia. Sao Paulo, Brazil: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2010: p. 14. 22. “Revista Brasília – Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal,” accessed May 3, 2020, http://www.arpdf.df.gov.br/revista-brasilia/. 23. José Lira. The visible and the invisible in Brazilian architecture p. 260 24. Patricio del Real, “Building a Continent: The Idea of Latin American Architecture in the Early Postwar” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2012), 12. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8736Z1J. 25. Ibid, 12. 26. Ibid, 18. 27. Boris Fausto and Sergio Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil, Cambridge Core (Cambridge University Press, August 2014), 249. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9781139567060. 28. Almost memories: Travels. Times of Enthusiasm and Revolt. 1961-1966 29. Oscar Niemeyer, Quase Memórias: Viagens, Tempos de Entusiasmo e Revolta--1961-1966 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1968), 16-17. 30. Ibid, 19. 31. Ibid, 20. 32. Ibid, 12. 33. Ibid, 21. 34. Ibid, 4. 35. Farès El-Dahdah (org.), Oscar Niemeyer in Abu Dhabi (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Oscar Niemeyer, 2015). 36. L’Orient de Jour, July 1962

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FOOTNOTES: THE DOME ON THE GROUND

1. Clarice Lispector, “Visions of Splendor.” In The Complete Stories (New Directions Publishing, 2015), 574. 2. Fernanda Araujo Curi, “Ibirapuera, metáfora urbana. O público/privado em São Paulo. 1954-2017” (text, Universidade de São Paulo, 2018), 110. https://doi.org/10.11606/T.16.2019.tde-09012019-113200 3. Adrian Lahoud. “Fallen Cities” In The Arab City : Architecture and Representation, Andraos Amale (ed.) (New York, NY: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016), 105. 4. Ibid, 106. 5. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World : On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. (Princeton University Press, 2015), viii. 6. Mostra Do Redescobrimento (São Paulo, SP, Brasil: Associação Brasil 500 Anos Artes Visuais, c2000). 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, p.3 10. Levino Ponciano, Bairros paulistanos de A a Z: pequeno dicionário histórico e amoroso (Senac, 2017): 40. 11. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012. p.4 12. Interview held by the author in February 21st 2020.

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Selected Bibliography

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

On Modern Architecture of the South Andrade, Mário de. O Turista Aprendiz. Brasília: IPHAN, 2015. AHRA Annual International Conference (9th : 2012 : London Metropolitan University). Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence. New York: Routledge, 2014. Bergdoll, Barry. Latin America in Construction : Architecture 1955-1980. New York, New York: distributed in the United States and Canada by ARTBOOK/D.A.P, 2015. Bullrich, Francisco. Arquitectura Latinoamericana, 1930-1970. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1969. Del Real, Patricio, and Helen Gyger, eds. Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories. New York: Routledge, 2013. Del Real, Patricio. “Building a Continent: The Idea of Latin American Architecture in the Early Postwar.” Columbia University, 2012. https://doi. org/10.7916/D8736Z1J. Lira, José, Leonardo Finotti, and Reinaldo Botelho. O visível e o invisível na arquitetura brasileira. DBA, 2017. Naves, Rodrigo. A Forma Difícil, ensaios sobre arte brasileira. São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1996. Tafuri, Manfredo. Modern Architecture. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1979. Oscar Niemeyer Aquino, Flávio de. “Max Bill critica a nossa moderna arquitetura.” Manchete, June 13, 1953. Cavalcanti, Lauro, org. Oscar Niemeyer: classics and unseen. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2014. Goodwin, Philip L. Brazil builds: architecture new and old, 1652-1942. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1943. Niemeyer, Oscar. “Depoimento = Testimony.” Módulo, February, 1958. Niemeyer, Oscar. “Forma e função na arquitetura.” Módulo, December 1959.

176

Selected Bibliography

Niemeyer, Oscar. Quase memórias, viagens. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1968. Niemeyer, O., and S. Papadaki. Oscar Niemeyer: Works in Progress. Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1956. Niemeyer, Oscar. Minha Arquitetura 1937-2005. São Paulo: Revan, 2005. Niemeyer, Oscar. The Curves of Time : Oscar Niemeyer Memoirs. London: Phaidon, 2000. Petit, Jean. Niemeyer, Poète d’architecture. Lugano: Fidia edizioni d’arte, 1995. Queiroz, Rodrigo Cristiano. “Oscar Niemeyer e Le Corbusier: encontros” . PhD diss., Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de São Paulo, 2005. Wisnik, Guilherme. “Bossa nova beat: the bymbiosis between Brazilian archiecture and music.” The Architectural Review, October 11, 2019. Wisnik, Guilherme. “Saltando sobre o atraso: de Niemeyer a Artigas.” In Infinito Vão, edited by Fernando Serapião and Guilherme Wisnik. Matosinhos: Casa da Arquitetura, 2019. Ibirapuera Park Barone, Ana Cláudia Castilho. “Ibirapuera: Parque metropolitano (19261954).” PhD diss., Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de São Paulo, 2007. Fausto, Boris, and Sergio Fausto. A Concise History of Brazil. Cambridge Core. Cambridge University Press, August 2014. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9781139567060. Barone, Ana Claudia Castilho. “Ibirapuera: parque metropolitano(1926-1954).” Text, Universidade de São Paulo, 2007. https://doi.org/10.11606/T.16.2007. tde-31052010-143819. Curi, Fernanda Araujo. “Ibirapuera, metáfora urbana. O público/privado em São Paulo. 1954-2017.” Universidade de São Paulo, 2018. https://doi. org/10.11606/T.16.2019.tde-09012019-113200. “Mostra Do Redescobrimento: Brasil 500 Anos / Fundação Bienal; Nelson Aguilar (Org.). | Acervo MIS.” Accessed May 8, 2020. http://acervo.mis-

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sp.org.br/livros-catalogos/mostra-do-redescobrimento-brasil-500-anosfundacao-bienal-nelson-aguilar-org. Brasília Espada, Heloísa. Monumentalidade e sombra: o Centro Cívico de Brasília por Marcel Gautherot. São Paulo: Annablume Fapesp, 2016. Braga, Milton. O Concurso de Brasília : Sete Projetos Para Uma Capital. São Paulo, Brasil: Museu da Casa Brasileira, c2010. Tschiptschin, Ilana Schlaich, and Luis Antônio Jorge. “Retratos de Brasília - Os horizontes dos significados: de Doorway to Brasilia a A idade da Terra.” 2018. “Revista Brasília – Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal.” Accessed May 3, 2020. http://www.arpdf.df.gov.br/revista-brasilia/. Lispector, Clarice. The Complete Stories. New Directions Publishing, 2015. Madeira, Angélica. “The itinerancy of artists: the construction of the visual arts field in Brasília (1958-1967).” Tempo Social; Sao Paulo 14, no. 2 (2002): 187–207. Tripoli Fairgrounds Arbid, George. Architecture from the Arab World 1914-2014 (a Selection). Published and distributed by the Ministry of Culture in collaboration with the Arab Center for Architecture, Beirut, Lebanon, 2014. Bennett, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations; London 0, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 73. El-Dahdah, Farès. Oscar Niemeyer in Abu Dhabi. Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Oscar Niemeyer, 2015. El Helou, Karina and Touati, Anissa, org. Visitor’s Guide: Cycles of Collapsing Progress. Beirut: BeMA, 2018. Haugbolle, Sune. War and Memory in Lebanon. Cambridge Middle East Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Isenstadt, Sandy, and Kishwar Rizvi, eds. Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Studies in Modernity and National Identity. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.

178

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Lahoud, Adrian. “Architecture, the City and Its Scale: Oscar Niemeyer in Tripoli, Lebanon.” The Journal of Architecture 18, no. 6 (December 1, 2013): 809–34. Lahoud, Adrian. “Fallen Cities.” In The Arab City: Architecture and Representation, edited by Amale Andraos and Nora Akawi, 103-116. New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016. Mollard, Manon. “Rashid Karami Fairground: In Lebanon’s Second City, the Decaying Structures of a Microcosmic Brasilia Might Still Be Reactivated as an Egalitarian Vision of Urban Culture.” Architectural Review, February 2019. Niemeyer, Oscar. “Feira Internacional e Permanente do Líbano em Tripoli.” Módulo. Rio de Janeiro, October, 1962. Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 31, no. 2 (April 1989): 217–36. Ṭarābulsī, Fawwāz. A History of Modern Lebanon [Electronic Resource]. New York: Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillian, 2012. On development and post-colonial studies Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Castro-Klarén, Sara, and John Charles Chasteen, eds. Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Washington, D.C. : Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press ; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Calhoun, Craig J. Nationalism. U of Minnesota Press, 1997. Craggs, Ruth, and Claire Wintle. Cultures of Decolonisation : Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945-70. Studies in Imperialism. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016. Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012. Knauft, Bruce M., ed. Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

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Pyla, Panagiōta, ed. Landscapes of Development: The Impact of Modernization Discourses on the Physical Environment of the Eastern Mediterranean. Cambridge, Mass: Aga Khan Program of the Graduate School of design, 2013. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, and Maria Paula Meneses. Epistemologias do Sul. Coimbra: CES, 2010. Scott, Felicity Dale Elliston. Outlaw Territories : Environments of Insecurity/ Architectures of Counterinsurgency. New York: Zone Books, 2016. Mason, Mike. Global Shift: Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1945-2007. Montreal: MQUP, 2013. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World : On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.