Between Architecture and Exile
Sérgio Ferro’s path defies linearity. Trained in Brazil under João Vilanova Artigas, he entered the optimism of modernism—only to confront its contradictions. His exile in France, his turn to painting, and his refusal to practice architecture all mark a life shaped by fracture and resistance.
Brasília’s Hidden Violence
What defined Ferro was his early experience in Brasília. The city was celebrated as a symbol of national progress, yet on the building sites he saw something else: exploitation and suffering among the workers, the candangos. For Ferro, architecture was not an innocent art but complicit in this violence.
Rethinking the Worksite
Together with Flávio Império and Rodrigo Lefèvre, Ferro envisioned an arquitetura nova: a shared construction process where architect and builder could meet on equal ground. Utopian or not, it was a direct challenge to hierarchy and to the separation between design and labor.
Critique as Refusal
Exile radicalized his stance. By abandoning architectural practice, Ferro embodied his own critique: stepping away from complicity in order to speak more freely about architecture’s social meaning. His writings trace the division of mental design and manual labor back to the Renaissance, showing how the construction site itself produces inequality.
Why Read Ferro Today?
Ferro is not easy. His texts mix brilliant insights with uncomfortable exaggerations, but that is their force: they place the reader in productive difficulty. At a moment when questions of labor, inequality, and power are once again urgent, Ferro’s work invites us to see the building site not as a neutral stage of construction, but as architecture’s hidden ground.
Luigi Monzo 