FROM COTTON TO MINING: THE TRAGETORY OF “MODERNIZING ARCHITECTURES” IN CURRAIS NOVOS CITY
Currais Novos, modernizing architectures, economic cycles
In the first half of the twentieth century, the city of Currais Novos / RN, in Seridó region, was the scene of two distinct economic cycles: cotton and mining. Due to the cotton exploitation the city began a modernization process that was intensified two decades later with the discovery of Scheelita mines in the county, beginning the mining cycle and the unbridled pursuit of progress in that city. This work is inserted in this context in order to understand the relationship between these economic cycles and the architecture developed in Currais Novos from the 1920s to the 1950s. As an object of study we seek to detect the impact of these cycles on the production and transformation of local architecture in the first half of the twentieth century and answer to two research questions: did the economic cycles of cotton and mining have had an impact on the corresponding architectural production in Currais Novos? If so, how? Is it possible to notice any distinction in architectural terms in the architecture produced in both cycles in that city? These questions are intertwined with the specific objectives that seek to verify how these two economic periods made possible the development of a corresponding architecture and to apprehend a possible transformation of this architecture due to the change in the local economy. The scarcity of studies about the countryside modern architecture in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, amidst a process of current transformation of this still existing part of the architecture, justifies the development of this work.