The blue silk of the paper that wraps the apple

Brazilian cities in the essays of Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco

Abstract

This article seeks to highlight the analytical keys employed by Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco in his memoir, "The Soul of Time," to reflect on three Brazilian cities: Belo Horizonte, Brasília, and Petrópolis. I argue that the theme of cities, which informs these analyses, receives an essayistic approach within the context of these memoirs, capable of identifying the distinctive aspects of each singular city: sometimes observing the presence of a vigorous urban sociability and civilizing role, and sometimes, through a quasi-sociological lens, highlighting the problematic aspects of the "artificial city," as well as the paradoxical effect of urban degradation caused by progress. This selection of cities examined by Afonso Arinos shares links with modernism, whether in the intellectual debates among his peers, with the city as the locus, or in the changes in his assessments of modernist architecture, toward the idiosyncratic affirmation of a Minas Gerais modernism.