Cada peça em seu lugar: recorrências e particularidades na configuração espacial de casas modernas em Fortaleza - 1960 a 1976

Abstract

This research aims to identify how principles of the Modern Movement affected the spatial configuration of single-family houses designed between 1960 and 1976, in Fortaleza, revealing expectations of change concerning certain domestic codes. Space Syntax theory (Hillier and Hanson, 2005 [1984]) was applied to a sample of 36 modernist houses with built areas between 159m2 and 643m2 . These buildings – designed by five architects – exemplify a time period architects started being commissioned to design residences. They are located in urban expansion areas that were attracting middle and upper-classes investments. The period also coincides with the arrival of professionals graduated in other cities to start their practices in Fortaleza, where they helped to create the first course in Architecture and Urban Planning in the state. Four of the architects that designed the houses used as case studies in this dissertation were born in Fortaleza, one of whom graduated in the first class of the local school. Although the houses have varied sizes, have been built in a 16-year period and have been designed by architects with different backgrounds, they show similarities in their spatial configuration, indicating that social codes have been crystallized in the built form. The houses present recurring spatial characteristics found in the Brazilian domestic architecture – especially in its north-eastern guises – that amalgamate traditional and current spatial relations whereas pointing out to a continuous transformation process. Design trends that may be related to authorial decisions as well as local characteristics, not present in samples explored by other researchers elsewhere, were also unveiled. However, more emphatic than the clear delimitation and separation of sectors, affiliated to the logic of functionalist architecture, is the separation of spaces occupied by dwellers of different social status, reflecting within the domestic realm, the deeply unequal character of the Brazilian society.