The Amnesia of Architectural History

Largely unseen, and seldom heard, building workers and the history of the construction labour process are rarely more than a footnote to the history of architecture. These iconic photographs taken by Marcel Gautherot show the new capital city of Brasilia under construction (1959) and are the first exhibit in a new show at the Museu de Arte Contemporâneo in São Paulo, dedicated to the work of Sérgio Ferro, architect, artist, writer, political activist, and along with Flavio Império and Rodrigo Lefèvre one of the founders of Arquitetura Nova in the 1960s. It was whilst on a trip to Brasilia as a student in the late nineteen fifties that Ferro was struck by the immense gulf between Niemeyer’s evocative and elegant drawings, and the precarious reality of working life for the city’s builders who had migrated from across Brasil to labour in the hot inhospitable red earth dust. Forced to climb rickety scaffold and to hang on circus trapezes in order to construct the parabolas, many died and were seriously injured. Later in 1970 when Ferro and Lefèvre were imprisoned by the military regime for their involvement in the armed struggle, they met several of the same workers inside the Tiradentes prison who told of their unimaginable suffering building the picture postcard icon of modern architecture and Brasilian democracy. Far away from their families they lived in semi-militarised labour camps. Dysentery and workplace accidents were part of daily life and so were suicides, with numerous incidents of despairing workers throwing themselves under lorries. The radical disjuncture between architectural history and the reality of building production, along with the critique of the capitalist foundations of modern architecture, form the backbone of Ferro’s book Arquitetura e Trabalho Livre“ (2006), “Architecture and Free Labour,” the main body of which has recently been translated into English by the London publishers MACK. I share Ferro’s preoccupations and have always found the amnesia of architectural discourse as  absurd as it is politically reactionary. Sadly however, architectural education remains largely silent with regards to any serious discussion about construction history and labour. Buildings are made by magic and the only thing that is really important is a magazine worthy image, a fetishistic negation of social reality crowned by the worst conceit of all, the expression; “the architect X built this.”