Mashrabiya for the metropolis: imagining pasts in the postcards of José Wasth Rodrigues for the IV Centenary of São Paulo

Abstract

The article discusses how some visual representations of the city of São Paulo’s past made for the commemorations of its 4th centenary, in 1954, were associated with the practices of memorial valuing of wooden lattice windows and balconies; elements that were treated as evidence of national identity and of a regulated social behavior arising from the colonial past. The text focuses on a group of postcards with representations of houses that existed in the center of São Paulo in the mid-19th century and that reproduced watercolors made by José Wasth Rodrigues. The watercolors were mainly based on photographs by Militão Augusto de Azevedo, taken in the 1860s. Several of them represent houses with balconies closed – entirely or partially – by hinges, trusses that customarily closed off Brazilian urban constructions until the course of the 19th century. Those postcards – acquired by the organization commission of the IV Centenary celebration – were understood as a preceptive instrument and as instituting an official vision of the past, integrating the city of São Paulo into a circuit of valorization of this architectural element, practiced both by the neocolonial movement and by the modernists of Sphan and by the Museu Paulista; who took over these balconies inherited from Moorish traditions in the Iberian Peninsula as a sign of a rigid and stable behavioral order that divided houses and streets. This normative view is somewhat paradoxical, at least when it comes to the houses with mashrabiya photographed by Militão de Azevedo, all of them marked by material deterioration or by social practices very far from the domestic modesty to which these balconies were associated by historical interpretations current in the 20th century.