A travel to the meanderings of green hell: discursive plans of Hotel Amazonas advertising campaign in the magazine “O Cruzeiro” 1950-1951

Abstract

The paper aims to develop a critical reflection on the transmission of environmental subjects in the sphere of architecture and construction, centred on the expression “Green Hell”, a designation of the Amazonian forest originating from the literary discourse. The analysis focuses on the advertising campaign of a hotel established in Manaus in the 1950s, examined according to the theoretical-methodological device of discourse analysis, emphasizing among its discursive plans, the notions of intertextuality, interdiscourse and discursive ethos. The investigation focuses on two advertisements of that campaign, published in a widely read illustrated magazine, confronting the enunciating conditions and agents with the intended and produced effects of meaning. The results highlight the existing tensions between opposing discourses as well as in the use of the expression “Green Hell”. At the same time that an illusion of immersion of the architectural object in an inhospitable natural universe is engendered, a distortion of that space is also recreated, along which the hotel gains attractiveness by contrast and distance, and when perpetuated in the discourse of modernity, acts as a potential conditioning factor of the understanding of ecosystem(s) only as earthly paradise(s) while walled, urbanized and, in sum, tame.