Sérgio Ferro

280 pages

This edition contextualises and expands on Ferro’s essay with earlier and later texts, clarifying both the contextual and theoretical elements at play in its argument. A preface written by Ferro especially for this first English-language edition recounts his journey from Brasilia’s building sites to the experiments of Arquitetura Nova, as well as a topic he has rarely touched on before: postmodernism. ‘Production of Houses in Brazil’, from 1969, analyses the Brazilian dwellings from popular self-builds to the luxury and mass markets, offering both a historical report and a blueprint for deciphering the social relations of architectural production in other contexts. Finally, ‘Against the Grain’, a recent and previously unpublished essay, interprets architectural modernism as a Hegelian ‘determinate negation’ of nineteenth-century eclecticism.