Piedade Grinberg
The Moinho Fluminense mill: legacy of Rio, symbol and icon of a neighborhood
A notable landmark in the Gamboa and Saúde districts, the Moinho Fluminense mill is a symbol and icon of a neighborhood that became a “modern city” at the start of the industrial age in Brazil, when Rio de Janeiro was still the nation’s capital. More recently, this area has been rediscovered through the Porto Maravilha Docklands upgrade.
A witness to changes that have swept through the city and the stage of countless unexpected and circumstantial events since it was established in 1887, this flourmill reflects the visual language of the surrounding neighborhood at different times. Through the many stages of its expansions and renovations, it mirrors the colonial architecture of nearby rowhouses and churches, as well as the eclectic designs characteristic of the early XX century.
Working from a specific, detailed and documentarist standpoint, the photographer handles urban areas like landscapes, disclosing nooks and crannies that prompt viewers to wonder just how much these schematic works could make us dream about the ideal city. Which angle do we prefer? How does the photographer highlight it? What city is this?
Narrow streets lead to corners, curves, where the architectural mass of the mill rises impressively, with impacts on passers-by. It is impossible not to perceive this solid structure, its façades and angles, the ironwork detailing and its ornamental touches.
Featured in many Rio guidebooks, as well as maps, postcards, advertisements, institutional announcements and commercial panoramas, this imposing industrial building is the brand, the trademark of the Moinho Fluminense mill, cherished by its neighbors and an important element in the heritage of this district and the city.
Very popular from the second half of the XIX century onwards in Rio de Janeiro, its highly ornamented eclectic decoration covers the façades of its warehouses, together with the lettering that displays the Moinho Fluminense name on the three bridges that link them together, needed to distinguish and identify the buildings and their owners.
Together with other sophisticated decorative elements, legendary gryphons are particularly eye-catching. Traditionally, these eagle-headed winged lions symbolize wisdom, strength and power, as well as the victory of virtue over vice.
For the Ancient Greeks and during the Middle Ages, gryphons were believed to convey protection, fidelity and loyalty. Repeated on both sides of the bridges, these elements represent and reaffirm the dedication, competence and responsibility of the company and its owners.
It is interesting to note that the plan of the façade drawn up for the 1912 renovation provides a gentle and unobtrusive finishing touch, by adding blossom-filled cornucopias to the bridges.
Leading photographers working in Rio de Janeiro during the late XIX and early XX century recorded the architectural changes sweeping through many neighborhoods. These images form a vital legacy for the history of the city.
A Swiss photographer living in Rio de Janeiro, George Leuzinger (1813-1892) shot some beautiful views of the Rio landscape from the 1860s onwards, when he produced a panorama featuring the Saúde cove, the Gamboa district and demolished markets around the Moinho Fluminense mill.
One of Brazil’s most famous photographers, Marc Ferrez (1843-1923) was concerned with aesthetics in his work, as shown in his compositions. Several of his pictures showing the Moinho Fluminense mill at different times were published in the magazines and newspapers of his day.
One of the most important landscape photographers of the XIX century, Juan Gutierrez (1859-1897) was a leading visual chronicler of Rio de Janeiro, portraying Brazil’s shift from Empire to Republic.
His birth date unknown, Luís Musso (18??-1908) produced documentary works for Antonio Jannuzzi, Irmão & Cia.
Amateur photographer Augusto Malta (1864-1957) built up an extensive iconography of events, habits and customs in Rio de Janeiro. Appointed by City Hall as its first official photographer during the Pereira Passos administration, he recorded all the modern changes sweeping through the city, including work on its new port, becoming an important name in its historiography.
Flying photographer Jorge Kfuri (1893-1965) took the first aerial photographs of Rio de Janeiro, including some unexpected and amazing shots with bird’s-eye views of the Moinho Fluminense mill.
It is important to stress that the collections built up by these photographers are stored with public and private institutions. They are available for access, particularly by interested parties eager to disseminate the history of the City of Rio de Janeiro.
Countless pictures were taken by unknown and/or amateur photographers, used in advertisements and printed in newspapers, magazines, leaflets and postcards, as well as institutional records. Many of them record architectural changes and transformations to the Moinho Fluminense mill complex. All these records are of the utmost importance for ensuring a clear and objective understanding of these alterations and their surroundings, underpinning new and more modern proposals to repurpose these buildings.
Suddenly, photographers became noteworthy for the quality of their work and specific records. These readings are often romantic, with bucolic landscapes, frequently enhanced by idealized elements that are out of proportion to the human scale; many are even unlikely, bringing in elements from different climates and regions. In others, a more detailed and scientific noted approach may be noted, with schematized images disclosing even the tiniest details.
Forming sets of aesthetic preferences, these themed representations acquire their own definitions within the cultivated world, giving rise to a type of rigorous discipline and an almost insatiable obsession over complying with certain artistic forms, techniques and rules that would lead photographers towards their desired goals. Although it is the “eye” that guides them through their lenses, it is their critical senses and instincts that steer them towards the final outcomes.
The main problem for photographers at that time was how to attain this new vision of “nature and its surroundings”. Like a new model for understanding the city, this progressive and enquiring concept is the outcome of real changes that would turn the landscape and the concomitant study of nature into key factors for a contemporary understanding of the world.
Together with nostalgia for a lost but unexperienced past, the overwhelming reality of a hybrid multiple city that is often impersonal and aggressive – but still dazzling – make this dream rather unlikely. This is because the city really does have amazing landscapes, filled with poetic emotion, moving, harmonious and spontaneous, the outcome of the photographer’s impeccable sense of composition and balance.
