Da escola prisão à escola parque: o movimento escola nova e a modernização da arquitetura escolar no Brasil (anos 1930)

Abstract

The 1930s ware distinguished by the yearnings for implementing Brazil's modernization. In this context, within the scope of pedagogy, the Escola Nova movement sought to modernize education, and its ideas resulted in reforms of public education in various states of the country. To implement the aimed teaching pedagogy, new models of school buildings were designed, under the recommendation of being built according to the principles of modern architecture, at a time when this architecture was not yet consolidated in Brazil. Our case studies are the school buildings that resulted from educational reforms to apply the ideas of the Escola Nova in Rio de Janeiro (1934-1937), São Paulo (1936-1939) and Paraíba (1936-1939). Thus, we intend to verify if these school buildings present signs of meeting social expectations about the modernization of school architecture for the implementation of Escola Nova. To do so, we confront the architectural content of the discourses about these schools, found in official documents and newspapers of the time (1930-1945), with the analysis of the selected school buildings, carried out in two architectural areas: the spatial configuration, by the syntactic analysis of the space, and physiognomy, by comparing photographs of the time of the school buildings with what was recommended. The results indicate that the projects meet in several aspects the discourses in defence of a new architecture to encompass the methods of Escola Nova. The analysis of the spatial configuration shows that there was an attenuation of the conservative pattern of the traditional school building by presenting an integrated and accessible exterior; easily accessible spaces to the community (such as the auditorium gym); by facilitating interaction and diminishing the hierarchy between teachers and students. The physiognomy of the schools, linked to the discourses of rationality and economics, makes no reference to styles of the past: it presents geometrized shapes, standardized elements such as the iron and glass windows, and reinforced concrete marquees. But schools did not always achieve the simplicity advocated in the discourse, suggesting that presenting a modern image was also an important feature within the Escola Nova design plans.