DESPITE MENDES DA ROCHA’S distaste for the term, it’s hard to avoid when discussing the blank concrete facade of his Casa Millán, built in 1970 for the gallerist Fernando Millán in the São Paulo suburb of Morumbi. Currently owned by the art dealer Eduardo Leme, the house is a dim gray womb packed with contemporary art (an exploded 2009 chair by the Mexican artist Damian Ortega, light boxes from 2008 by the British artist David Batchelor) and midcentury furniture by Brazilian masters such as Jorge Zalszupin and Percival Lafer, like a bomb shelter stocked with cultural provisions for an uncertain future. The structure’s two curved surfaces — an undulating wall separating the main house from the kitchen and carport and a dramatically bent staircase, its underside ridged like a newly paved road — seem almost grudging, as if to emphasize the unbending resolve of the building’s right angles. The 6,997-square-foot house stands at street level but feels subterranean, a lair carved from the city’s underbelly, with sun entering through skylights striated by concrete beams, like giant sewer grates. “Fundamentally, the question of architecture is not the isolated building but the city,” Mendes da Rocha told me when we met at his studio in an undistinguished São Paulo high-rise in February. “A house is always a public space.” That idea mirrors comments made by the architect Alison Smithson in 1959 about Brutalism: “Even if you had only a little house to do it, [the building] somehow had to imply the whole system of town building. ...”

Yet despite the clear resonances with European-born Brutalism — the rigid geometry, the cavernous interiors, the coffered ceilings and abundant concrete — Mendes da Rocha’s structures, like many Brutalist-inflected buildings that thrived well into the 1980s throughout the equatorial world, feel fundamentally different from their predecessors in cooler climates. From the 1950s to the 1970s, while European nations reckoned with economic depression and the end of colonization, the nations they had once oppressed emerged into a new prosperity (as seen in Latin America) or else independence (as seen throughout Africa and Asia). Lacking a clear set of well-articulated principles, Brutalist architecture has always taken different forms in different regions — consider the Soviet functionalism of Eastern European housing projects compared to the rowhouse-like Alexandra Road estate designed by Neave Brown in postwar London. In Brazil, Brutalism grew out of the Modernist tradition, imported, according to the historian Kenneth Frampton, as early as 1928 by the Ukrainian émigré Gregori Warchavchik. The first great Brazilian Modernist was Lúcio Costa, who grew up in Europe and returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1924 to study architecture, then led a movement immortalized in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal 1943 exhibition “Brazil Builds,” which traced the country’s building practices from the late 17th century into the early 1940s and cataloged a growing global fascination with innovative responses to the local climate. In India, Cambodia and Singapore, which won their sovereignty between 1947 and 1965, local designers adapted the rough concrete forms of internationally renowned architects like Le Corbusier and the American Brutalist icon Paul Rudolph to their own cultural and climatic contexts. And across sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s, newly established national governments in countries such as Ghana, Kenya and Zambia invited foreign architects like Henri Chomette from France and Jacek Chyrosz and Stanislaw Rymaszewski from Poland to create grand commercial and public structures, such as 1978’s Hotel Independence in Dakar, Senegal, and 1960’s International Trade Fair complex in Accra, Ghana — projects that announced these countries’ arrival on the global stage.

What these buildings shared, beyond an aesthetic — though they shared that, too, with their radical porousness, their blunt geometric forms and their extensive use of raw concrete — was a commitment to architecture as an instigator of progress. But in the tropics, Brutalism reached an unexpected apotheosis: Infiltrated by lush plants and softened by humidity, buildings that looked cold and imposing against London’s constant drizzle or Boston’s icy slush were transformed into fecund, vital spaces. Concrete surfaces bloomed green with moss. The panels of glass necessary for sealing rooms against the northern chill either disappeared or receded from view, encouraging cross-ventilation while also protecting interior spaces from direct sun. The openness and transparency that the Smithsons had pronounced became a practical reality in these humid environments, both theoretically and literally: Built from inexpensive, readily available materials, equatorial Brutalism was as accessible and functional as it was symbolically potent, resulting in buildings that would define new societies growing around them like vines. Here, Brutalism wasn’t only an architecture that shaped the future or confronted the past — it was an architecture of freedom.