Hugo SEGAWA

Abstract:

After de World War II, Brazil became a leading country in Latin America. One of the main undertakings that launched an astonishing image of the South American nation was the transfer of its capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília. The main core of the city started to be built in the central highlands in 1957 and inaugurated in 1960, after a city planning competition won by the architect Lucio Costa. It was the crowning of a 19th century geopolitical desire of occupying the open and empty territories of central Brazil. In the same period, from 1955 to 1960, a company town was built in the Amazonian region, now the State of Amapá, an association of an American and a Brazilian steel companies for manganese mining exploration. Vila Serra do Navio was a 2,500-inhabitant town planned by the architect Oswaldo Bratke, 200 km away from the seacoast, deep inside a rainforest unpeopled land. It was a strategic base to uphold the mining infrastructure. Brasília and Vila Serra do Navio are two enterprises that, through urbanization efforts, distinguishes the adventurous modernization of Brazil during the mid-20th century. They induced migration mobility and environmental change and affected the living patterns of thousands of Brazilians, including food consumption and distribution patterns, bound to new and unexplored surroundings, where nature and culture were references? in permanent challenge.

Hugo Segawa is an Architect and Professor at the History of Architecture Department of the Faculdade  de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de Sao Paulo (FAU-USP). He delivered graduate lectures in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, and undergraduate lectures in Panamá and Japan. He is the Brazilian coordinator of the ODALC – Observatório de Arquitectura Latinoamericana Contemporánea (Contemporary Latin America Architecture Observatory), a research joint network between University of São Paulo (Brazil), Universidad Nacional (Colombia) and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Mexico). He has published several articles in national and international journals, and authored and co-edited various books, including among the international publications, Architecture in Brazil 1900-1990 (New York: Springer, 2013) and Arquitectura Contemporánea Latinoamericana (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2005). He was the coordinator of the project of website creation that discloses in digital format, with indexed access, the complete collection of the Brazilian architectural magazine Acrópole (1938 -1971) <http://www.acropole.fau.usp.br>.