The Favela as Figure: Colonialist Afterlives and Urbanism’s Technocratic Aesthetics in 1920s Rio de Janeiro

#2 of the Organizing Architectures Lecture Series on “Coloniality”

10.12.2025, 19 Uhr – 20:30 Uhr
DAM Auditorium

The lecture will be held in English.

Free admission, no advance registration required

A Lecture by Prof. Dr. Adrian Anagnost (Tulane University School of Liberal Arts New Orleans)

How did the visual and spatial logics of colonial Brazil persist within modern technocratic urbanism? Focusing on Rio de Janeiro’s early-20th-century urban reforms and architectural debates, I argue that the favela emerged as a figure through which elites translated colonial hierarchies of order and disorder into modernist form. From the demolition of Morro do Castelo for the 1922 World’s Fair to the experimental architectural proposals of Flávio de Carvalho and the critical writings of Mário de Andrade circa 1930, the city became a laboratory for reconciling industrial modernity with nostalgic visions of colonial stability. Rather than a break with colonialism, Brazil’s technocratic urbanism recoded the spatial logics of the casa-grande and plantation – hierarchical, paternalist, and racialized – into the visual grammar of modernization. The favela thus became both the symptom and the aesthetic kernel of modern Brazilian urbanism: a site where social inequality was reimagined as a design problem.

Adrian Anagnost teaches the history of modern and contemporary art and space in the Americas, with particular attention to Brazil, the U.S., and Atlantic World networks. Publications have considered representations of vernacular architecture, informality, and race in Brazilian modernism (Brésil/s 2021); performance and urban intervention as a mode of site-based historical commemoration of a revolt by enslaved people in 19th-century Louisiana (RACAR 2021); pandemic-era DIY design (Design Issues 2022), and forms of evidence for the study of West African architecture in the period of early modern globalization. Anagnost’s book „Spatial Orders, Social Forms: Art and the City in Modern Brazil“ was released by Yale University Press in 2022, and current research considers the militarized ecologies of the land- and waterscapes in Louisiana where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico.

This event is part of this year’s lecture series of the DFG Research Training Group “Organizing Architectures”. https://organizingarchitectures.org/

Members of the Architektenkammer Hessen (AKH) can earn 2 credits points for participating.