On the edges of an artificial lake at Pampulha, outside the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, stand four small architectural masterpieces. But the complex - designed by the country's most famous architect, Oscar Niemeyer, in the early 1940s - never really served its intended function. A dance hall was too far from public transport to be popular for the city's residents. The church was not consecrated for many years, the casino was never used because gambling was illegal and the lake was so polluted with untreated sewage that no one ever wanted to go to the yacht club.
It is one of the most extreme examples of the contradictions of a the radical and innovative architectural tradition that forms the subject of Brazil's Modern Architecture, a set of beautifully illustrated essays by a group of Brazilian and British architects and critics. And although their leaden abstract style sometimes makes for heavy reading, it is worth the effort to persevere.
At their best, Brazil's modern architects adapted the machine age aesthetics of Le Corbusier to their country's tropical geography and vernacular traditions. Niemeyer, for example, uses concrete to produce curves and fluid forms that echo the arches of Brazilian baroque. The results could be sensational.
Yet the classic modernism of the 1940s and 1950s was also flawed. For all their social idealism (many leading lights - including Niemeyer - were members of the Communist party) the modernists could be elitist and dogmatic. Concrete was sometimes valued for its own sake, praised for its "truth and restraint" in the words of Joao Vilanova Artigas, and local materials neglected, paving the way for the ugly brutalism of the 1970s and 1980s. Their buildings - like Niemeyer's in Pampulha - were sometimes dysfunctional. Brasilia, the country's monumental modernist capital built in the late 1950s, may be stunning to look at but has never really worked as a city.
Rigid spatial divisions - a hotel zone here and an esplanade of ministries there - make little allowance for the floods of poor rural migrants, who helped build the city and then moved en masse to live there. And during the military dictatorship (between 1964 and 1984) new ideas were stifled and architecture became dominated by what Roberto Conduru labels a "gratuitous almost limitless formalism".
There has been a reaction and there are some encouraging signs. Younger architects are producing some impressive work that matches innovative design and creative use of materials with greater social sensibility. The problem is that much of what has been done is on a small scale. A dentist's surgery in a small town near São Paulo, a house and a factory complex converted into a cultural complex. It all seems inadequate when measured against the scale of the urban crisis faced by cities such as São Paulo.
As Conduru puts it, "looking at the situation today, the vast majority of new buildings in Brazil neither respect local bio-climatic conditions, nor take advantage of national and human potential, nor tackle the country's social misfortunes. Architecture in Brazil remains an art of exception, dealing with the individual, the special, but never the ordinary, the normal, the everyday."
Richard Lapper 'Brazil's Modern Architecture' edited by Elisabetta Andreoli and Adrian Forty, Phaidon Press, $75
