Architecture and Nature: essays by Abilio Guerra: 1 (Latin America: Thoughts)

This collection edited by Fernando Luiz Lara and Silvana Romano Santos brings together articles that are somehow related to a common nodule that I believe was identified few years ago and points to a kind of birth mark of Brazilians architectural culture.The common nodule being the belief (that houses texts narratives and speeches of the decades of 1920 to 1940) in an alternative project of modern action - where culture and nature have main roles - that due its discursive efficiency metamorphoses itself in real characteristics of Brazilian modern architecture. In synthesis the intellectual artifices turn themselves in an organic character. Thus the understanding of the discursive assembly of Brazilian modern is at the same time the understanding of its efficiency in the constitution of an art and of an architecture with its own characteristics. The comprehension of such historic phenomena happens therefore through a speech that describes constitutes and legitimizes itself. Finally it wont be useless to mention that some of the selected articles are nothing more than simple registers of the architectural culture - something with partial and provisional analysis about architectures teaching critic or historiography - which we must read with the same unpretentiousness that motivated them.