It is not necessarily so

Have you ever heard of Vilanova Artigas?

Abstract

This article aims at a critical review of some historiographical ongoing assumptions about the professional work and career of João Baptista Vilanova Artigas (1915-1985). He was one of the most prolific and prestigious Brazilian-Paulista modern architects. When architects become personages, the complexities and contradictions of their lives and works tend to be reduced by some frozen discourses. To the problem of the obscurity surrounding buildings designed by a talented architect, another one is added: that arising when a scholarly-grounded acknowledgment turns into an enthusiastic but shallow celebrity status. The deserved national, and more recently, international recognition of Vilanova Artigas has reduced his extensive production to a limited collection of canonical buildings overshadowing the complexities of his professional life and work due to an old-fashioned, folkloric, leftist discourse. In order to properly ensure the understanding of the importance and quality of his work without hastily endorsing the current ideological interpretations of his life and time, it is necessary to review how Artigas has been understood, interpreted and addressed by successive critics and historians that helped to construct his contemporary “persona”.