Concursos de Arquitetura: mitos e ideologias.

Abstract

Architecture competitions are events whose goals are to promote and build public structures by the most acurate and transparent way. Competitions are cultural events as they can result in exhibitions where projetcs made over the same theme are shown ti society and interested public. Competitions may have interpretative, ideological and methodological dimensions that pass through all steps of the events and depend from each other. They can be profitable to architecture as long as they exceed the work that they are meant to do.Competitions must produce experimental and didactic material so that their potential is fully explored in a profitable way. This study identifies dominant patterns in architecture competitions since the 18th century to exemplify recurrent themes. On the next step, it approaches the relations stablished among solcial, architectural and competition's fields in order to recongnize values. The last step is to apply those values on the analysis of two competitions that took place in Rio Grande do Sul and were promoted by the Institute of the Architects of Brazil for the purpose of testing how thy interfere on methods, production and judgment.