Arquitetura de grife: profissionais e práticas contemporâneas

Abstract

From the second half of the twentieth century, architecture and urbanism watched to scenery changes that reverberated into professional practice. The modernist thought received severe critics, awakening the rethinking on issues like the rationalism and the excessive functionalism, as well as the distancing from the arts. In addition, the global economic reconfiguration has stimulated the transposition of corporate strategic planning into the urban sphere. A new way of city management, which gave a new centrality to the urban and architectural icons. Both conjunctures are admitted in this research as influences on the consolidation of the contemporary branding architecture – and its public recognition –, characterized by aspects of exclusivity that permeate all the stages of its production. Although the bibliographies on the theme are in constant renewal, updating concepts, pointing out the name of the architects and their works that promote the urban spectacle, as well as analyzing the urban developments that followed their construction, there is still a lack in the study of those responsible for the production in question, specifically to the aspects of education and the characteristics that define the practice developed by them, about which, we ask: what common elements stand out in the formation processes and in the performance strategies of those responsible for the spectacularization of contemporary architecture that allow us to understand the conduct they adopt in the face of the changes observed in projects thinking and in the market? The main objective of this study is to verify common elements in the education experiences and performance of brand architects that contribute to the assimilation of the role they undertake in the face of the most recent changes in the discipline of architecture and urbanism. For this, the methodological procedures performed were mainly bibliographical and documentary research, from which the names of the 37 architecture offices that support the analyzes, as well as the information about them, were extracted; in sequence, the elaboration of a database allowed comparing all trajectories, showing their similarities and differences.