Modern forms in picturesque gardens: correlations between Bratke's houses and the (sub) urban development of Paineiras do Morumbi neighborhood

Abstract

This article examines three correlated works of architect Oswaldo Bratke: the urban development plan for Paineiras do Morumbi neighborhood, outlined in the late 1940s, and the designs of Morumbi (1951) and Oscar Americano (1952) residences. Both houses were built simultaneously to the formation of the neighborhood and were placed on delimited sites of the plan’s delineated glebe. Applied to some regions of São Paulo since the 1910s, the garden suburbs model inspired by the picturesque landscape of the garden city theorized by Howard was a reference to the urban pattern proposed by Bratke. On the other hand, the Morumbi and Oscar Americano residences, exemplars of the architecture idealized to that zone, are recognized as important modern Brazilian architecture works: the first was featured in the catalogs of Hitchcock (1955) and Mindlin (1956), while the latter was highlighted in relevant journals of the period such as Acrópole (1957) and Habitat (1957). Although these publications underline the harmony between the houses’ architecture and context, they do not examine the neighborhood’s urban development plan, or mention the decisive and active participation of Bratke, who acted as architect-entrepreneur in the real estate business operation. This article initially demonstrates, through a sequential analysis of the neighborhood model and the houses’ projects, certain common design principles, which sought a coherent relationship between architecture and landscape. On the urban scale, however, it was verified that Bratke had not predicted to apply sophisticated strategies of landscaping on the neighborhood’s plan. Instead, the architect just followed some urban design strategies already disseminated in São Paulo, which essentially intended to convert the landscape into a capitalization instrument. Similarly, it is argued that such attitude also seems to have been reflected in the visual appeal evident in the two houses, which incorporated the immediate landscape, indicating, from the architecture itself, the elite families’ traditional way of life to which they would still accommodate. Based on previous studies about Bratke’s career, this paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of these projects, which are relevant designs of Bratke’s work and, until now, have been treated separately by the history of modern architecture.