Brutalist Brasil

Municipal school, Santos, designed by Decio Tozzi, 1967

I was walking down around the streets of the old historic quarter of Santos, imagining what the town must have looked like at the peak of the coffee boom when the air was filled with the aroma of roasting beans and the streets filled with busy suited businessmen, streets vendors, dockers and stevedores loading the ships bound for Europe. It’s former prosperity can be seen in the grand neo-classical town hall in the Praça Mauá, but the coffee barons are long dead and buried and the surrounding streets have largely fallen into ruin with rows of colonial era buildings waiting for someone to invest. There are a few survivors like the tiled chrome Carioca coffee house that has been serving espressos for ever, and down the road sits the Pelé Museum opposite the cast iron Santos-Sao Paulo train station built by British engineers over a century ago. The tourist tram trundles on in an attempt to rekindle former glories and there are plans afoot to regenerate the area, but it has struggled to survive the three-pronged assault of economic decline, shopping malls and the pandemic. That said there is no shortage of money to be had. A stone’s throw away from the centre lies the biggest container port in Latin America home also to colossal ten storey cruise ships. Everyone is waiting for the torch paper to be lit and to see Santos docks transformed in the same way as in Rio and Belem. I turn the corner past one of the ubiquitous cafes serving deep fried savoury snacks and sugar cane juice, and there like an abandoned interstellar cargo ship sits a fantastic example of Brasilian brutalism. For the admirers of reinforced concrete, Brasil is a treasure house. There is much to choose from. Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, the béton brut of Paulo Mendes da Rocha, and probably my favourite, the wonderful ramped open plan Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Sao Paulo designed by Vilanova Artigas. The gem above is smaller in scale but built in the same era. A municipal school by Decio Tozzi, it sits on an elevated platform one and a half metres above the street. Composed of a sequence of concrete porticos and ‘amphitheatre’ classrooms, it won the Bienal Internacional de Arquitetura in 1967 and has now been listed. The Town Council have promised to restore and reopen it, but as yet, nothing has happened. Like many other concrete buildings from this era it is at risk, as much from public disinterest as the appetites of property speculators for whom modern architectural history is of little interest.