Both from his experience as a priest and as a worker in France in the 30’s and from his participation in the group Économie et Humanisme (leaded by Louis-Joseph Lebret), father João Batista set up the idea of integrating the religious chores with the challenge of facing the social contradictions raised by capitalism. His EH period (France, 1947-48) was an opportunity to study the contemporary experience of the Communauté de Travail Boimondau, successfully carried out in the city of Valence (near Grenoble) from 1941 to the end of the 60’s. This experience shaped the Unilabor community.

The modern building of the Chapel of the Worker Christ is today the only preserved element of the Unilabor community project. The community itself, created in 1954 around the Unilabor workshops – which produced modern furniture and inspired the whole project – broke up between the years 1965 and 1967 due to ideological, economic and political causes. Its most remarkable aspect was its self-management structure and the consideration that all profits were to be hold by the entire community, meaning the workers and their families.

The creation of the Chapel building congregated a group of very important artists, architects and intellectuals that joined that catholic leadership. Such co-operation stemmed from the common

desire of making available to workers not only the basic means for their survival but also the best achievements of art and culture – connecting material improvement and spiritual enrichment. The decoration of the Chapel was the work of a group that included some of the best modernist artists in Brazil, like Alfredo Volpi, painter, and Roberto Burle-Marx, landscape architect.

The idea of a worker’s community gained momentum among that group of intellectuals and artists to whom such a modernist-industrialist-humanist enterprise never seemed an utopia.

In fact Brazil was experiencing a period, between 1956 and 1961 (President Juscelino Kubitschek’s term), through which its industrialization process was being completed. It encompassed a set of economic measures to significantly increase foreign investment along with the development of a domestic market to absorb locally produced goods, and the integration of new portions of the worker’s class into this market. It was also an era of great expectations about the future of the country, then classified as underdeveloped country. Development seemed to be attainable and at hands.

The Brazilian modernization – comprehended as the process of inclusion of the country’s industrial economy into the international division of labour – had a clear cultural component given the importance attributed to the modern aesthetic as a symbol of the new industrial society. From this reading of the modern and from that climate of hope in a positive future, profited actions like the Unilabor furniture industry and the Unilabor community project as a whole.