Civil Engineering and Architecture 4(3): 139-145, 2016 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/cea.2016.040306 Gilberto Freyre’s Work: Between Urban Morphology and Building Typology – First Approaches Solange de Aragão 1,* , André Marques 2 1 Department of Exact Sciences, Nove de Julho University, Brazil 2 Sao Judas Tadeu University, Brazil Copyright ©2016 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License. Abstract There are many possible ways of reading Gilberto Freyre’s work. One can read them to know about Brazilian society; other to understand the process of mixing races from which resulted Brazilian people; yet some other can do that to get to know the History of Brazil from a sociological point of view. But there is also another possibility which is to find morphological and typological approaches throughout Freyre’s work. Since the sociologist adopted the house as the centre of interest of a great part of his works, and analyzed it to comprehend Brazilian society, there is a lot of information in his texts regarding certain types of buildings, as well as information concerning the cities where these buildings were placed. In fact, Gilberto Freyre was one of the first Brazilian researchers who gave attention to the study of the traditional house in relation to the urban landscape it composed. We aim here to present some morphological and typological approaches in Gilberto Freyre’s work, considering the trilogy composed by The masters and the slaves, The mansions and the shanties, and Order and Progress, as well as some other important works in which he deals with the theme of the Brazilian house. Keywords Gilberto Freyre’s Work, Urban Morphology, Building Typology, The Brazilian House, 19th Century 1. Introduction In general literature, it is possible to find many people who criticize Gilberto Freyre’s work. However, reading some of these critical analyzes and then reading the books written by Freyre, anyone will easily find out that many people who criticize them have not read them deeply or not even read them fully. There are still those who misunderstand what Gilberto Freyre really wanted to mean. Therefore, throughout the last decade we have tried to restore to the public in general the value of his work and to demonstrate how was it predecessor of many works that came afterwards. We did it when we wrote Ensaio sobre o jardin (Essay on the Brazilian garden, Solange de Aragão, 2006), which won a special prize from Gilberto Freyre’s Foundation, as well as when we wrote Ensaio sobre a casa brasileira do século XIX (Essay on the Brazilian house from the 19th century, Solange de Aragão, 2011). The last one was the result of a post-doctorate research developed at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil. Yet, we do it once more in this article. During the 1930’s, Gilberto Freyre published two of his main works: The masters and the slaves (1933) and The mansions and the shanties (1936). In both of them, he adopted the Brazilian house as the centre of interest of his research on Brazilian society. In both of them, he mentioned the creation and transformation of Brazilian types of buildings, mainly those destined for habitation, analyzing the house produced by a society still in process of formation instead of the house or building projected by renowned architects, as it was ordinary along the 20th century. Whereas in The masters and the slaves his focus of interest was the rural residence, particularly the sugar-mill complex, in The mansions and the shanties he was interested in the urban house – specially the two up to five-story house which made up some Brazilian urban landscapes at the 19th century. To analyze the house, Freyre considered also the city, or the urban context, with its open and built spaces. To do his research, Gilberto Freyre made use of some sources such as traveler’s writings, biographies, memories, 19th century journals, 19th century photography and pictures, and some other materials that were not vastly considered by Brazilian historians up to then. Therefore, regarding History and History of Architecture, Freyre’s work was innovative in the use of these source materials, as well as in that consideration of the common house, which composed the majority of the urban, and the cultural landscape of Brazil. It is necessary to mention that before the sociologist, another writer, Euclides da Cunha, the author of Os sertões (The hinterlands), had based his work on some traveler’s writings, although from a very different point of view – and Freyre was aware of such work. It is necessary to