By LUIZ RECAMAN
Article posted in tribute to the recently deceased architect and USP professor
It will be surprising to the inattentive eye to see the gap between the jewels of our architecture, now once again internationally recognized, and the reality of our cities. And even between the average architecture designed by most local architects and their renowned masters.
The works of Oscar Niemeyer and Paulo Mendes da Rocha confront the deteriorated urban environment in which they are located, insisting on an alternative for development based on criteria that are autonomous in form (which include the claim to rationality, emancipation and utopia). This imposition of thought could alter the spatial and, essentially, social reality of large Brazilian cities and the absurdities of their industrial development.
These masters not only set aside a generation, but also the challenges they faced when forming their architectural repertoire. Oscar Niemeyer, a leading figure among the brilliant architects of the first period (1936-1957), epitomizes the search for a national identity, exemplarily achieved in his architecture, following the vicissitudes of our modernism and its standardization.
Commanded by a centralizing and developmentalist State, the creation of the industrial nation was forged in the decantation of constituent elements of the cultural and social diversity of a politically divided country, in the period before the Revolution of 30. Such a synthesis was, therefore, not at all spontaneous or endogenous: the period of formation of Brazilian modern architecture corresponds to the most authoritarian period of the Vargas era, which goes from the New York Pavilion (Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa), in 1939, to the Pampulha complex (Oscar Niemeyer), completed in 1942.
ideological curve
From this initial equation, its insurmountable impasse can be deduced: the conservatism of this development alternative deprived Brazilian architecture of the ideological raison d'être of the modern movement: its social extroversion with an emphasis on housing and planning.
The curved shape, which will characterize this hegemonic matrix of Brazilian architecture, synthesizes and simplifies (hence its great mass appeal) icons of nationality: the exuberance of colonial baroque, the landscape and the sensuality of its inhabitants.
This simplification is combined with technical knowledge that risks unusual structures, exploring the plasticity of reinforced concrete in an abstract language (achieved through the social irrationality of wooden forms). This formula remains in force, with ideological force, as long as the national-developmentalist State endures, including its long moments of authoritarian character.
In the 1950s, the city of São Paulo emerged as an urban-industrial force, which required a different architectural formulation in relation to the synthesis linked to the national State and the federal capital. At this time, Oscar Niemeyer's presence in the city was fundamental. However, given the urban, social and economic specificities of the young metropolis, the model of the so-called “Carioca school” found its limits.
Contrary to what common sense claims, the Copan building, as the architect himself rightly analyzes, is a clear demonstration of the inadequacy of this matrix to the urban and social reality of the city.
The real conflicts of this conservative development will have as their backdrop the strength of the private sector and the consolidation of the poor periphery of the capital of São Paulo.
The architecture that emerged there, based on the work of its most innovative architect, Vilanova Artigas [1915-1985], reacted promptly to this devastating urban model. However, unlike Niemeyer's idealization – which required a neutral backdrop for the building –, the architecture of Vilanova Artigas and his contemporaries opposes – but takes into account – the urban reality in which it is inserted.
The self-absorbed, introverted building recreates on the available land (most often urban lots in upscale neighborhoods of the city) a sociability that is distinct from the unjust one that shapes and destroys the city around it. But it inherits from it its formal circumstance – the volume, which starts from orthogonal geometries, enclosed in the lot – and its social circumstance: the union of technical and rational knowledge and the labor of the alienated urban worker.
As a didactic example of this ideological union – the intellectual and the technician with the urban proletariat –, large reinforced concrete spans with marks of manually prepared wooden forms appear.
Vilanova Artigas' work suggests several approaches, in addition to the one presented. However, it is this characteristic that is taken to its ultimate consequences by his young follower Paulo Mendes da Rocha.
In the exacerbated circumstances of the 1960s, Mendes da Rocha consolidated a rich vocabulary that would influence new generations: formal abstraction, prefabrication, technical ingenuity that included the development of construction details on a mechanical scale and the reduction of architecture to its essential spatial and construction elements.
Historical determination
However, this is not the great news that this architect's recent research brings and that places him in a unique position among the architects of his generation.
Starting from the questions posed by the generation of the 1950s and 1960s, Mendes da Rocha paradoxically opens himself up to the real city, to its physical and historical determinations. One cannot speak of inflection, because slowly his work, from the beginning and with different emphases, becomes contaminated by the city that in principle should be opposed.
If this is more evident in projects from the 1980s onwards, it can be said that it was slowly developed in the conflicts and contradictions in his formative works.
A recent and forceful moment of this opening to urban praxis – mainly to its social conflicts – unlike his countless mannered followers, who repeat the master's own ways of solving false problems of the city, in the celebration of his 452nd birthday, the architect Mendes da Rocha constrains the demand for a redemptive project and defends the strengthening of public bodies that should control and direct its growth (such as Emurb/Municipal Urbanization Company) and criticizes the implosion of “cracolândia”, which opens itself to the voracity of real estate businesses that characterize the exclusionary urban dynamics of the city.
The model of modern Brazilian architecture, which relentlessly distanced this architecture from our urban reality, has been exhausted by the social catastrophe that we have witnessed in amazement. Recognizing the complexity of Brazilian urban and social reality requires more than the beautiful forms that our architecture has consecrated. In this regard, the transition from a formal radicalism to an urban (and therefore social) radicalism can contribute as an alternative for the action of architecture in the current years. This alternative, although it can be intuited so far, has not been configured.
*Luiz Recamán is an architect and professor in the Department of History of Architecture and Project Aesthetics at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at USP. He is co-author, with Leandro Medrano, of Brazilian modern architecture (Phaidon).
Originally published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul, on April 16, 2006.
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