Modernist Ruins: National Narratives and Architectural Forms

Abstract

R io de Janeiro is a city that enacts a continuous dialogue between its architectural constructions and natural surroundings. The sheer exuberance of the tropical vegetation casts into perspective architectural aspirations and contrasts to the neglect of its urban infrastructure. The vitality of Rio's urban culture is mirrored not only in monumental stone but also in the constant creation and recreation of musical forms, dance rhythms, bodily configurations, and new artistic expressions. Yet at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the tourists that visited what was then the federal capital from the backlands of Brazil were only moderately concerned with the tropical scenery. Instead, they were eagerly purchasing postcards that depicted the emblems of national progress. 1 Postcards of trolley cars, monuments, and technical installations embedded with the mythologizing force of the modern were sent to relatives and friends stranded in the remote and provincial expanses of a largely unexplored Brazil. 295 Public Culture 11(1): 294-312 R This essay is a modified English translation of a version that was published in Portuguese as "Ruí-nas Modernistas," Lugar-Comum 1 (1997): 99-115.

Rhythm and Noise: The City, Memory and the Archive

“…The materiality of ruins, the haunting material traces of the past that remain part of the urban fabric and the evocative power of the past to engage active subjects, are all issues that have been raised within recent urban studies attentive to questions of cultural memory (see Jaguaribe, 1999; Hetherington, 2002; Edensor, 2005). So too has been the issue of the sensing body and the idea of embodied spectatorship (see Pile, 1996).…”

“…We have seen some of this as a minor theme within discussions of heritage and cultural memory in the past. It has long been there in an interest in the evocative power of ruins (Edensor, 2005), in seeking out the uncanny and ghostly traces of the past hidden within the present of the city (Jaguaribe, 1999), in the 1960s Situationist approach to psychogeography (see Debord, 1989; Coverley, 2006), the derive or drift and other latter days forms of the Flâneur, and it is there in the Benjamin inspired approach to cities as archives of the past and dreamscapes in which surrealist inspired juxtapositions, chance encounters and shocks of recognition might produce an awakening onto a different vision of the past and what it might say to the present about the future (Breton, 1960; Aragon, 1971; Benjamin, 1985).…”

Queer Space in the Ruins of Dictatorship Architecture

“…In that moment, the Amazing Show becomes a living snapshot of the cultures of the world, but its transnationalism is tethered to a local image of "what was once the future projection of (the city's) present." 60 In the closing number of the Amazing Show, the Film Center becomes hypervisible, if only as a projection, and it becomes apparent that the Amazing Philippine Theater and its performers are not simply taking advantage of an abandoned site but asserting its value and taking their place in the history it represents. In this scene, the age of the Film Center is not lost.…”

Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity

“…More pertinent to my focus here is a surge of interest by both artists and scholars in ruins elsewhere in the world (Hosagrahar 2005;Rodríguez-Hernández 2007;Taneja 2008) and in the ruins of modernity or the physical remnants of state modernism and the architecture of industrial capital (Bissell 2001;Edensor 2005;Jaguaribe 2001). These are the intellectual equivalents of the UrbEx movement.…”