A face popular da arquitetura historicista : o ecletismo vernáculo no centro do Cabo de Santo Agostinho (1890-1940)

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the factors that led to the insertion of Eclecticism in the popular architecture of the Center of Cabo de Santo Agostinho, as well as the manifestations of this architecture, in the chronological cut between the end of the 19th century and the first four decades of the 20th century. In the midst of the political, economic, social and intellectual transformations that marked the turn of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century in Europe, Eclecticism emerges as an adaptation of the traditional architectural forms, revisited by a Historicist architecture, to the new panorama unleashed by the Revolution Industrial. Based on the ostensible ornamentation of built facades, this style took as its basis an iconographic reference that included from the forms of the European past - such as the Greek, Roman, Gothic, etc., architectural experiences made available by archaeological research - to those whose historicity dates back to foreign cultures (from Egypt, the Middle East or South Asia), appropriated from the taste for the 'picturesque'. In Brazil, Eclecticism is inserted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, encouraged by the republican government as an instrument in its project to modernize the country. In Brazilian soil, eclectic architecture finds acceptance because of the notorious Frenchness present in society, especially in the emerging urban bourgeoisie, since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Recife, Eclecticism finds its exponent maximum in the reform of the Neighborhood of Recife, with the substitution of the colonial aspect by the French architectural forms. In the specific case of the architecture of the Center of Cabo de Santo Agostinho, based on the information acquired by observation and analysis of the architectural examples (many of which bear the date of construction on the upper part of the façade), consult documentary sources and bibliographical dynamics of urban production in the municipality, it is assumed that Eclecticism spreads in a perceptible vernacular bias, adapted to the economic reality of its producers and to the sociocultural transformations experienced by cabense society in the face of modernization of sugarcane activity, the establishment of new labor relations and the emergence of a proletarian and urban class that continues the process of expansion of the urban nucleus.