XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Diplomacy, Race, and African Architecture in Brazil’s Senegalese Embassy Building, 1964–1977

• In Event: Art, Race, and the Construction of Space in Contemporary Brazil

Abstract

As a repressive military dictatorship overtook Brazil in 1964, the Senegalese ambassador Henri Senghor settled in Rio de Janeiro and began planning the building of his embassy in the new capital of Brasília. Senghor imagined the embassy as an emblem of Brazilian and Senegalese collaboration. For the design, he recruited the architect Wilson Reis Netto, a protégé of Oscar Niemeyer who had worked on several buildings in Brasília, the new capital marked by white-painted, poured-concrete buildings and imported white marble. While Netto grounded his designs in his experience of Brasília, the ambassador pushed the inclusion of historical African architectural motifs. Aiming to highlight Brazil’s denigrated Black culture and showcase the importance of the people’s West African heritage, Senghor insisted on incorporating sloped walls, interior courtyards, and small windows typical of West African mosques. Netto mixed these references with the poured-concrete, white color of Brasília’s buildings. After an exhibition of the designs in Dakar during 1968, construction took place throughout the 1970s before the inauguration in 1977.
This paper examines the design of the Senegalese embassy in Brasília—and particularly Netto and Senghor’s physical and symbolic use of the color white. Through this building, Netto and Senghor proposed a model both for the incorporation of Brazil’s African heritage into its modernist architecture, as well as for collaborations between Brazil and West African countries. Matching Brasília’s focus on the color white—a reference, in part, to the country’s privilege of whiteness—it overlooked Brazil’s centuries of anti-Black racism amplified during the dictatorship. As a radical departure from Brasília’s European references, the embassy also represents transnational modernism grounded in the history of West Africa’s built environment.

Author

• Abigail Lapin Dardashti, University of California, Irvine