Lucio Costa Archive

The Lucio Costa Archive exhibition, on display at Casa da Arquitetura, draws on the personal archive of Lucio Costa and proposes a critical re-reading of one of the central figures of twentieth-century modernism. Rather than a retrospective account or a survey of canonical works, the exhibition unfolds as an inquiry into the tensions between private life and public vision. Bringing together drawings, photographs, films, correspondence, and a vast array of ephemeral documents, it repositions the architect of Brasília through the fragmentary and often intimate materiality of his archive, challenging the coherence of his established legacy.   

Donated by the architect’s family to the Casa da Arquitetura in 2021, the collection comprises around eleven thousand items produced between 1910 and 1998, ranging from architectural plans and urban studies to personal notes, receipts, family photographs, and sketchbooks.

Organized into six sections—“Family,” “Writings,” “Portugal,” “Pilot Plan,” “Brasília,” and “Drawing”—the exhibition constructs a non-linear trajectory through Costa’s life and work, foregrounding the porous boundaries between the domestic and the disciplinary, the anecdotal and the monumental. At its core are the original drawings of the Pilot Plan of Brasília, rarely exhibited in Europe, alongside materials documenting Costa’s travels to Portugal between the 1940s and 1960s, notably the Portugal Little Sketchbooks.

Far from presenting the archive as a stable repository, the exhibition approaches it as a site of friction. Through what the curator Ana Vaz Milheiro describes as a “confrontation with the contemporary,” Lucio Costa Archive reopens questions surrounding the ideological underpinnings and enduring implications of the modern project.

The materials on display invite a reconsideration of Costa’s role in shaping a national architectural language, while also exposing the tensions embedded in his vision: between universalism and locality, democratization and segregation, utopia and its afterlives. In this sense, the exhibition resists the monumentality often associated with Costa’s work, instead assembling what might be understood as a “minor archive”—one that foregrounds gaps, inconsistencies, and the productive instability of historical narratives.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of two books: Lucio Costa Archive, a richly illustrated volume featuring essays by Portuguese and Brazilian authors, and Raízes do Futuro: Lucio Costa e a tradição moderna by Guilherme Wisnik, a revised edition incorporating materials from the collection.

Presented at the Casa da Arquitetura, Matosinhos, from April 18 to September 13, the exhibition is part of the program marking two hundred years of diplomatic relations between Portugal and Brazil.