The psychosocial aspects of Oscar Niemeyers’ Architecture in Brasília

Abstract

In this article, we reflected on building user’s criteria for psychosocial assessment of Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture in Brasilia. We adopted Moscovici’s formulation as our theoretical reference, which considers the social representations’ phenomenon as a kind of common sense social knowledge/practice to face academic/professional productions. The 71 participants were from both genders and three different schooling levels, and distributed according to their main purpose in the building, whether for tourism/leisure or work/sporadic or regular users. We asked participants to draw the building, separately, from the outside and from the inside, and then they were required to provide a verbal description of their own drawings. Participants were approached at the following buildings: National Congress, National Theater or Cathedral. The buildings were described through the following themes/attitudes: physical-spatial and individual/social appropriation from the outside (both those themes were considered as favorable), while neutral and unfavorable attitudes prevailed about the same themes from the inside. The results were modulated by dimensions such as schooling, gender, type of building, type of users, among others. Users’general apprehension strategy in order of frequency was as follows: material, finish, part, interconnection, plastic element, structure and circulation. We discussed two basic aspects of the phenomenon: the collective importance of Niemeyer’s work to the history of the city of Brasilia as the capital of Brazil and its insertion within the frames of the international abstractionist modernism movement.

Keywords: architecture; social representations; social psychology; Oscar Niemeyer.