Critical Itinerary

Among the various interviews granted by Otília Arantes, we have selected this one, given to José Lira, Jonas Delecave, Paula Dedecca and Victor Próspero in November 2019 and published in 2023 in the interview collection Arquitetura e Escrita: relatos do ofício (Romano Guerra), not only because it was her last interview, but also for its comprehensiveness, as it revisits a large portion of her intellectual journey—from her academic studies and theses in Brazil and Paris to her final reflections on the current directions of Architecture and Urbanism. The interview revisits Otília’s theoretical readings and choices—the authors who influenced her: from the classics of Western Marxism to the masters of the Venice School, from the Brazilian Critical Tradition to professors at USP, or her activities with students from PUC and USP, especially through the Centro de Estudos de Arte Contemporânea (CEAC). It recalls her research topics, from Baudelaire or Mário Pedrosa to Postmodernism; from Modern Architecture—with particular attention, in Brazil, to Lúcio Costa—to the decline of the Modern Movement, both globally and locally, and its subsequent developments, whether in architectural projects emptied into extreme formalism—what she termed “simulated architecture”—or, having moved beyond the “ideology of the plan”, in a form of urbanism of contextual and modest interventions, later turned into its opposite: “strategic” urbanism, and ultimately into something akin to a post-urbanism of “extreme urban forms”, or perhaps, even, a new and no less anti-urban urbanism: the “military” one. The very structure of the interview questions ends up forming a synthesis of many of the themes found across the numerous texts published on this website (albeit not always in the same format, often distributed across different collections).

Keywords: Adorno, Architecture, Baudelaire, CEAC, Aesthetics, Intellectual Formation, Extreme Urban Forms, Gilda de Mello e Souza, Jameson, Lucio Costa, Mário Pedrosa, Modern Movement, Postmodernism, Roberto Schwarz, Tafuri, Urbanism, Strategic Urbanism, Walter Benjamin.