Victor da Silva Freire: The Life, Ideas and Work of an Eminent Urban Planner

Abstract

In this paper we will discuss the life and work of the engineer Victor da Silva Freire. This exposure leads to an understanding of the engineer as a man who was acting local but thinking globally. Brazilian and foreign at the same time, anyone knew how Freire equating the various stresses to which was subordinated (political, economic, intellectual and scientific) and build a career in this way both intellectually and as public administration that is the case in a different and enlightening the ways in which issues were addressed in the urban Sao Paulo's First Republic. It was between efficiency and patronage, between public and private, between theory and practice he has built an innovative and independent thought, which caused him to become unique figure in the history of the urban Sao Paulo of his time, it is reasonable to say that , to proceed in this way, established itself as an urban planner for the first hour of São Paulo. To realizing these aims, we rely on research about its origin and professional institutions at which he worked, in particular, in the Archives of the Escola Politécnica and the Documentations of the Companhia City, as well as other institutions that keep records his respect, the example of the Clerk of Liberty. We performed a further analysis of its publication in magazines and journals of the period at hand. This data set allowed us to establish a set of networks (social, political, economic and intellectual) that allowed us to seize it as one of the expressions of the then existing power network in Sao Paulo in the early twentieth century.