Roberto Cochrane Simonsen was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1889, the son of Sidnei Martin Simonsen, a British citizen residing in Brazil, and Robertina da Gama Cochrane, a descendant of a Scottish family. He grew up in Santos, where he attended primary school at the Tarquínio da Silva School. At an early age, he moved to São Paulo to live with his maternal grandfather, Inácio Wallace da Gama Cochrane, who exerted a strong influence on him and played a key role in his future career choices. In the capital of São Paulo, he attended the Colégio Anglo-Brasileiro High School. At the age of 14, Roberto Simonsen entered the Escola Politécnica de São Paulo [Polytechnic School of São Paulo], an institution created in 1893 with the aim of providing technical training in line with the modernisation project of the São Paulo elite. He completed his Civil Engineering degree there in 1909, the year in which he began his professional career at the Southern Brazil Railway one of the most important railway companies of the time. In 1911, he married Raquel Cardoso and, in the same year, began working for the Prefecture of Santos Prefecture, becoming chief engineer of the Comissão de Melhoramentos [Improvement Commission]. In 1912, he retired from the Prefecture of Santos to found the Companhia Construtora de Santos [Santos Construction Company], a pioneering company in urban planning, paving works and the construction of public buildings. In the years that followed, Simonsen significantly expanded his business, becoming involved in major projects such as the development of the working-class neighbourhood of Vila Belmiro and the construction of military establishments across various regions of the country.

His greatest intellectual concern during this period was associated with the issue of work organisation, emphasising the importance of collective, organised and collaborative work. In the debates at the time, he opposed wage cuts, arguing that production costs should be reduced by rationalising production. He was an important promoter of Taylorist principles in Brazil, and in 1931 he was one of the founders of the Instituto de Organização Racional do Trabalho [Institute for the Rational Organisation of Work] (IDORT), an institution dedicated to promoting studies on the general organisation of production, professional counselling and work hygiene.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | (Pdf)