Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Public Space on the Run

2012; Routledge; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09528822.2012.647660

1475-5297

Guilherme Wisnik,

Public Spaces through Art

With the hardening of the Brazilian military dictatorship and the counter-cultural artistic turn, the end of the 1960s became one of the most intense and explosive moments in the country's recent cultural history. As an effort to encourage a more collective and urban-orientated way of living, architects Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha built houses that abolished the traditional notions of domesticity associated with comfort and the protection of privacy. At the same time, artists like Hélio Oiticica created immersive environments intended to foster creative leisure (‘creleisure’), transgressively proposing a domestic mode of experience in public spaces such as art galleries and museums. One might then say that the artistic and architectural frontlines were crossing, in inverse directions, the boundaries between the public and the private spheres in an attempt to invent a new kind of sociability.