Modos de ler, modos de desaprender: os livros e o ensino de arquitetura no Brasil

Abstract

If unequal power relations created in the colonial period continue to be maintained and updated in institutional Brazil, in the field of Architecture they are often normalized by the university and by History as a scientific and universal narrative spread by the edition and publication of books. Authorities in the transmission of scientific knowledge, these books present history to us as a consensus – and not as a dispute –, making other, non-Western architectural practices and ways of life invisible, as old or older than those they legitimized. But this matrix of knowledge was never fully accepted, and criticisms have been made against it in an expanded cultural circuit, parallel to the academy, and which sees, in art, a fundamental place for the elaboration of thought. Understanding classrooms also as spaces for unlearning, this research rehearses possible ways to engage with this hegemonic content, or to affect it with its own incompleteness, through experiments and editorial methodologies that propose (other) ways to read these narratives. Based on recurrent titles in the basic bibliography of public courses in Architecture and Urbanism in Brazil, displacements were proposed as possibilities of action for architects who occupy the academy and who, from within it, wish to be involved in the localization and deconstruction of the differential knowledge that canonical books carry, contaminating history with what it failed to show, taking into account the countless types of violence shared in our daily lives and, with that, fostering the creation of other possible imaginaries.