Cities and schools: the material memory and the monument seen through Corrêa de Mello and Ferreira Penteado schools in Campinas (Brazil) in the 1800s

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the construction of the schools Corrêa de Mello and Ferreira Penteado in the 1880s, through the dialogue between these buildings and the urban mesh of Campinas, Brazil. These institutions, apart from being schools, would become monuments for the memory of their creators: those who detained political and economic power in the city. Both buildings were dedicated to people’s education and were inserted in Campinas’ urban mesh as a strategy to determine the space pertaining to less well-off groups and the one attended by the city’s leading group, preserving their memory for future generations. As sources, we used school photographs, blueprints, city maps, newspapers and almanacs of that time. These documents are analyzed from the perspective of new cultural history, comprehending architecture as both the producer and a product of (and by) the urban, and that school buildings possess particular meanings that are linked to memory and to the city.