Book by Ediciones ARQ.
“Not only the final outcomes of the actions of architectural design and engineering – that is, buildings and infrastructures – can generate dangers for those who inhabit and use them when not properly executed and maintained, but the act itself of construction has been since time immemorable a site of inequity and dangerous working conditions for workers who operate within it. Only in recent years architecture historians have started to consider the issue of the labor inscribed in the execution of building as a field of inquiry, not only to understand questions of form and usage, but also delineating possible lines of analysis, where economic and social relations of power are scrutinized.” [from Complicity and Contradictions]
“Why is concrete so ubiquitous in Brazil? (…) The answers to these questions reside in the overlap between architectural expression, processes of industrialization in Brazil and Latin America after 1945, the quest for a national aesthetic identity, and above all the role of political engagement in Brazilian design culture. Concrete in Brazil was political. It was a tool for direct political action, and a much-debated subject in cultural and political quarrels that crossed the body of artists, intellectuals, activists, designers, and politicians who operated in Brazil before and after the military coup of 1964.” [from Political Concrete]