Tropical Hotel de Manaus (1963) de Sérgio Bernardes: turismo, utopia e modernidade

Abstract

This article intends to investigate the relation between the inclusion of tourism as a strategy of modernization and integration for Amazon region and the modern principles adopted in the first proposal for the Hotel Tropical de Manaus (1963) by analyzing how the utopian character of the project designed by Sergio Bernardes was aligned to the economic, political and symbolic dimensions of the agents involved in the process. Therefore, this article is organized into two parts: analysis of the economic, political and symbolic dimensions of the project, identifying the role of the State, the Tropical Hotels Company and the architect in the design process of the project; project analysis using as parameters: the context and implementation of the architectural object; architectural space; functional interactions; architectural language; formal aspects; structural and building system; and environmental aspects. Finally, the relevance of this study, which is set in a wider research on the relationship between tourism and modern architecture, is justified in terms of transformation and contemporary socio-spatial dynamics, which have provoked and threatened gradually and rapidly the maintenance and conservation of this important legacy of architectural modernism, considering that the documentation of modernist hotels in Brazil a precondition for the preservation of the remaining ideas and assets.