Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

In an article written in 1951 entitled “Depoimento de um arquiteto carioca” [Testimony of an Architect from Rio de Janeiro], Lúcio Costa describes Le Corbusier’s visit to Brazil in 1929, his plan for the city’s urban layout, and what he [...]

In this lecture, Lúcio Costa discusses the crisis facing contemporary art as a result of the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. He explains the intense nature of the reproduction and circulation of a work of art and discusses its audience [...]

This document is a technical description of the architectural solution put into effect by the implementation team working on the Ministério da Educação e Saúde (MES) project designed by Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso [...]

This text by Lucio Costa discusses the “unpredictable” nature of Brazilian architecture. In it, Costa develops a far-reaching theory of modern art and architecture to which the visual form is the sine qua non. The visual-formal component [...]

Lúcio Costa discusses Max Bill’s lecture, the text of which was published in Habitat magazine. It was a controversial article that prompted a great deal of discussion at the time. Costa highlights the differences he sees in modern Brazilian [...]

A poetic essay expressed in a manifesto style in which the author, Lúcio Costa, calls for a new kind of architecture derived from innovative construction techniques. He describes the current period as transitional and notes that while proletarian [...]

This is the architect and urban planner Lúcio Costa’s report on his pilot plan for the new capital city of Brasilia. He explains that it is a schematic proposal based on a solution that occurred to him “fully formed,” although it is an idea [...]

In this article, Lucio Costa discusses the changes he believes are necessary to facilitate an understanding of modern architecture: changes that while not necessarily rejecting the past do not conform to the academic point of view. The article [...]