A Touch of Brasília

Looking at the Kongresshaus in Biel, designed by Max Schlup, it is impossible not to think of Brazilian modern architecture. Inaugurated in 1966, the monumental ensemble combines a 14-storey administrative tower, an auditorium and an indoor swimming pool. Celebrated as an architectural icon and a highlight in Schlup’s career, it has nonetheless been described as “quelque chose de pas vraiment suisse.”¹

In Biel, the Kongresshaus stands out with its unique architectural idiom, reminiscent of the futuristic and photogenic forms of Brasília’s official buildings, designed by Oscar Niemeyer for Brazil's new modernist capital. The affinities are not only formal but also conceptual. In the postwar period, both projects were heralds of modernity, built under the slogan “city of the future,” and mobilized as expressions of progress. Brasília at a territorial scale, and Biel at the urban scale, were imagined as development projects sponsored by public authorities, driven by modern architecture and planning.

While most studies focus on cultural transfers from Europe onto Latin America, such as the impact of Swiss architects Le Corbusier and Max Bill in Brazil, this article proposes a narrative in the opposite direction: the long-standing influence of Brazilian architecture in Switzerland. If the Swiss architectural historian Siegfried Giedion excitedly proclaimed in the 1950s that “on the outskirts of civilization (…) the wonder of Brazilian architecture is spreading like a tropical plant,”² these seeds seem to also have sprung in the hearts and minds of the Swiss.

This influence was not always explicit. For example, when the Kongresshaus was published in Bauen+Wohnen in 1967, no connection to Brazil was mentioned. It was only decades later that Max Schlup, when talking about the project, underscored the importance of his visit to Brasília’s construction site in the late 1950s: “[je suis allé] au Brésil, au début de la construction de la nouvelle capitale. J'ai même, en compagnie d'Oscar Niemeyer, dans la même voiture, pu faire un tour où il a expliqué ses projets.”³ On his return to Europe, inspired by Niemeyer’s experimental work, Schlup scrapped his original competition entry for the Kongresshaus. The new proposal was radically different, as if it had been produced by another architect. The rather conventional section for instance, which had initially followed a traditional grid, gave way to inventive spaces of bent columns, cantilevers, generous openings and a suspended roof.

Schlup this testimony saying: “Mais cela n’intéresse personne.”⁴ The indifference of his colleagues to his South American experience calls to mind Max Bill’s well-known criticism of Niemeyer as a formalist whose “gratuitous forms”⁵ lacked structural discipline. Schlup, together with architects such as Fritz Haller, Hans Zaugg, Franz Füegg and Alfons Barth, formed the so-called Solothurn School, known for its rigorously composed modular steel buildings. Niemeyer’s expressive approach was the opposite of what this group believed modern architecture ought to be.

However, the lack of interest mentioned by Schlup among his inner circle does not reflect the popularity of Brazilian modern architecture in Switzerland at the time. In 1954, the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich hosted the traveling exhibition Brasilien baut, which had originally been organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Rio in 1952, as an update to the highly successful 1943 Brazil Builds exhibition at MoMA New York. Anyone visiting the Museum für Gestaltung today, is immediately struck by the Brasilien baut exhibition poster designed by Mary Vieira, a Brazilian artist based in Zurich who regularly collaborated with Max Bill. Employing the vocabulary of Swiss graphic design, the abstract image features a playful composition of white volumes on large green and blue surfaces. Vieira thus imagined modern architecture transferred to a tropical landscape, creating an eye-catching image for the Swiss audience. The poster was awarded the prestigious Diplôme d’Honneur du Département Fédéral de l’Intérieur, as the best of the year in Switzerland. She also designed the show’s catalogue, which, records show, sold many copies.

Brasilien baut was the first major show in Switzerland that offered a broad overview of the architectural production in Brazil. It featured 200 large-format photographs of recent works by architects such as Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, Abelardo de Souza, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Gregori Warchavchik, Henrique E. Mindlin, Jorge Machado Moreira, M. M. M. Roberto, Sergio Bernardes, among others. Organized by the Cultural Division of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the exhibition had previously been shown in London, Stuttgart, Lisbon, Vienna, Rome, Barcelona, Madrid. In Zurich, there was a slight difference. In an effort to connect the exhibition with the local Swiss scene, the museum selected a number of ongoing projects in Switzerland that were considered modern and progressive to be shown alongside the Brazilian projects. Visibly less prolific than their Latin American counterparts, Swiss architects, the museum argued, were being held back by difficult conditions, citing “outdated building laws or resistance from the client, the financier, the colleagues, the building authorities, and the public.” The impression this framing left was that Brazil was at the forefront of design, architecture, and urbanism, offering possibilities for experimentation that were being denied to architects working in Switzerland.

The show was a success. It had an unexpectedly large attendance of 10,000 visitors, and enthusiastic reviews across newspapers, radio and television. Bauen+Wohnen wrote positively about the exhibition: “We stand fascinated before the phenomenon of modern Brazilian architecture, in its consistency and purposeful logic. It represents the worldwide ideas of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Gropius, adapted in a land of the tropics with specific climatic and intellectual conditions…Brazil’s greatest merit lies in having realized modern ideas on a grand scale. Its intellectual contribution to architecture extends to the integration of painting and sculpture, to the development of ornament, and to the generosity and unencumbered freshness of expression. The greatest importance is attributed to external appearance, to the plastic quality of architecture, measured against models of modern sculpture and the art of building.” Echoing Max Bill’s famous critique which sparked a controversy among Brazilian architects after being published in a popular illustrated magazine, the author of the Bauen+Wohnen piece added: “Therefore the danger of formalism is present.”⁶

After Zurich, the exhibition travelled to Basel, and if Max Schlup did not attend it in either city, he would most certainly have at least heard, read, or seen images about it during his preliminary studies for the Kongresshaus between 1955-1957. This was the period when the so-called Brasília phenomenon started to emerge in European mass media. As the German photojournalist Michael Friedel, one of the first to visit the construction site of the new capital, recalled: “at the end of the 1950s, everyone was talking about Brasília.”⁷

The curiosity about Brasília in Switzerland was intensified by the activities of the Brazilian ambassador in Bern, the diplomat, writer, and modernist poet Raul Bopp. On August 21, 1958, Bopp opened an exhibition titled Brasilia at Zurich’s Helmhaus in the presence of politicians and local media. The Swiss public television (Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen) produced a short newsreel for cinemas offering a glimpse of what was on show: models, a large-scale print of Lucio Costa’s urban plan, construction photographs of the earthworks, as well as Oscar Niemeyer’s first official buildings, the Alvorada Palace and the Brasília Palace Hotel. Like Brasilien baut, Brasilia had graphics by Mary Vieira. The catalogue has a white square on a large green surface, referencing the common description of Brasilia as a modernist city built from scratch in nature.

Besides the Brasilia show, the Cultural Division of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also organized debates, publications, and acted as a press agency by distributing photographs and texts to Swiss newspapers and magazines. The scale and reach of this propaganda program was impressive: three hundred posters advertising Brasilia were installed in fourteen cities in Switzerland, attracting 5,000 visitors to the eighteen-day exhibition. 1,000 copies of the catalog were distributed to the public, including 400 sent to press, radio, television, public institutions, schools of architecture, renowned professors, architects, and artists in Switzerland. According to official Swiss statistics, sixty articles were published about the new capital in newspapers and magazines, reaching 6,500,876 readers, while 4,619,380 listeners tuned into a radio program about Brasília on Swiss national radio. Furthermore, the film coverage of the Brasilia exhibition was seen by 1,176,000 moviegoers and 17,580 television viewers. In this environment flooded with photographs, drawings, films, models, and stories of Brasília, it is no wonder that architects such as Schlup, or photojournalists such as René Burri, were curious about visiting the new capital under construction. The experience proved pivotal for Schlup’s Kongresshaus project “[L'influence du Brésil s’est fait] de façon directe, par cette visite de chantier.”⁸

Once built, Brasília lost much of its appeal, receiving fierce criticism from the architectural community worldwide. Four years after its inauguration, a military coup sealed its fate for the decades that followed. Frequent displays of power for the cameras–together with censorship, propaganda, and surveillance– redefined Brasília’s image. It no longer conveyed collective participation but rather its absence, reinforcing Brasília’s reputation as a monumental and authoritarian city. As historian Zilah Quezado Deckker put it, Brasília came to represent the “swan song”⁹ of the international acclaim of Brazilian Modern Architecture.

To borrow Giedion’s image of a tropical plant, after decades of hibernation, the seeds of Brazilian architecture began to take root again. In 2001, the future ETH Zurich Prof. Annette Spiro published a precise and delicate book about Paulo Mendes da Rocha,¹⁰ a prolific architect and professor from São Paulo who had long been ostracized by the military junta for many years. With the help of Ticino architect Luigi Snozzi, a long-standing admirer of the Brazilian architect, Spiro convinced a Swiss editor of the importance of disseminating his work abroad. The book has indeed been fundamental in introducing the buildings and writings of Mendes da Rocha to the international community.

It is no coincidence that five years later, Mendes da Rocha would receive the 2006 Pritzker Prize. As architect and FAU USP Professor Angelo Bucci wrote: “the eyes of the world would turn to what Annette Spiro's eyes had seen before.”¹¹ Not only Mendes da Rocha's career was reinvigorated as a result of this recognition, so were the careers of his contemporaries Vilanova Artigas, and Lina Bo Bardi, but also those of a new generation of architects from São Paulo, former students and collaborators of Mendes da Rocha students and collaborators, such as MMBB, Alexandre Delijaicov, and Angelo Bucci. In Zurich, Annette Spiro continued to teach and promote Brazilian architecture to first year students and established an exchange program with FAU USP in São Paulo.¹²

In 2009, the presence of Brazilian architecture in Switzerland was reinforced when the Swiss structural engineer Andrea Pedrazzini, partner of Ingegneri Pedrazzini Guidotti, commissioned Angelo Bucci to design an apartment building in Lugano. This transatlantic collaboration produced the six-storey Casa Pico. Its unique character within the context of Lugano derives from how the project takes advantage of specificities of the Swiss regulations to propose a building with elements of the Brazilian architectonic vocabulary, such as an audacious tectonic expression and generous spaces open to the city. Walking on Via Pico, and seeing locals crossing the permeable ground floor, it is hard not to think of Brazilian architecture.

As in Schlup’s case, the images of Brazilian buildings, public spaces and infrastructures, disseminated more recently in exhibitions such as S AM’s Access for All: São Paulo’s Architectural Infrastructures (2021),¹³ Architekturforum’s Vilanova Artigas: Drawing Models (2022), and through social media, continue to intrigue contemporary Swiss architects. Recently, inspired by Mendes da Rocha and Artigas, pool Architects developed a bold concrete structure for the VBZ bus garage facility. Guillermo Dürig, from Dürig AG, used Casa Butantã as a reference for their apartment building SBS16 in Zurich, and Conen Sigl cited Lina Bo Bardi’s Teatro Oficina in their winning competition proposal for the renovation of the Renens Performance Hall.

The gta Archive at ETH Zurich, holds a few photos by Swiss photographer Walter Binder of Max Schlup’s Kongresshaus. Some of them, depicting everyday scenes of the indoor swimming pool, connect the building less with the symbolic architecture of Brasília but more with the popularity and intense use of SESC 24 de Maio, a multipurpose community center by Paulo Mendes da Rocha and MMBB. Similar to SESC’s broad program which mixes culture and sports, these images resonate with my own photograph of Sesc that captures hundreds of people enjoying the rooftop swimming pool on a sunny day in downtown São Paulo. Mendes da Rocha's well-known statement, which he used for many of his projects, could be a perfect description for Schlup’s building: “architecture is just a support for the unpredictability of life.”