Fernando Corona’s Palace in Pelotas: Innovative, renewing, conservative

Abstract

In 1938, Fernando Corona, working for the construction company Azevedo Moura & Gertum, designs the Palace of Commerce in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, the new headquarters of the Commercial Association. The building, the highest in the city, is undoubtedly a modern, innovative one and is acclaimed as such. In this project Corona consolidates the architectural principles which were dear to him. As a renewing architect, he uses a language of pure forms and surfaces denuded of ornament. As a conservative architect, he does not give up the timeless principles, the perfect balance of symmetry, the propriety of the urban decorum. The idea of rationalism, a common base of all modern architecture, is used in this study as an indicator for the understanding of the architect’s work and of the “pragmatic modernity” of architecture in general, which is indicated in historiography as a manifestation of non-radical renewal, different from avant-garde modernity. Being pragmatic, without the need for discourse, this architecture renews but always keeps something familiar, something which does not need to be explained, which is already part of an understanding shared by a culture.

Keywords: architect Fernando Corona, modern architecture, Palace of Commerce in Pelotas.