Engenharia, Arquitetura e História: as "sábias lições" de Ernesto da Cunha de Araújo Viana (1852-1920)

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the trajectory and intellectual production of Brazilian engineer Ernesto da Cunha de Araújo Viana, who worked in Rio de Janeiro from the 19th to the 20th century. The research starts from its ancestry and professional formation, also going through its first spaces of action. Among them, we highlight the period in which he edited the Revista dos Construtores, a moment from which there is a reorientation of the themes of his greatest preference. Focusing more and more on subjects related to Brazilian architecture and art, Araújo Viana distinguished himself as a professor of Theory and History of Architecture at the former National School of Fine Arts. At the same time, he began to collaborate with the newspaper A Notícia and Renascença magazine. His texts were condensed in the course given at the Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute (IHGB), in 1915. Divided into five lessons, the course gave him entrance into the Institute's guild, which elected him effective partner the following year. From the analysis of such sources, the research intends to understand the positions Araújo Viana took on the issues of his time, and to discuss what his legacy would be and what readings were made about him. The study of his texts, by highlighting the manifestations in defense of the valorization of the architecture of the colonial period, which were presented in the different spaces of the Fine Arts and in the IHGB, seeks to add complexity to the approach of the history of urban improvements in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the First Republic.