Theoretical discussion and historical construction

the scenic space in Pevsner, Le Corbusier and Bo Bardi

Abstract

In the various critical reviews of Modernism and in the theoretical setting of Postmodernism, both of them operated in the 1980s and 1990s, an effort was made to understand, and often classify, the manifold manifestations of the plural twentieth century. In many respects, the aim was to understand the autonomy and specificities of the disciplinary fields, as well as the correlation between the different forms of expression. One of the merits, perhaps the greatest, of this epistemic and historiographical revision is the realization that Modernity in the arts and architecture was far from being a single and uniform block, and that even individual trajectories underwent transformations when not substantial inflections. This work studies three modern architectural propositions of the Second Post-War from the different understandings of the scenic space, both its construction and its place of social representation. They are: the understanding of types by the modern historian Nikolaus Pevsner in his work History of Building Types (1976); the Corbusian proposal for the scenic box Boîte des miracles (1950s); and the scenic design for the Three Pennies Opera (1960) at the Carlos Gomes Theater in Salvador by Lina Bo Bardi.