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Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.
Sabina Escola Parque Do Conhecimento, São Paulo, Brazil, 2007. Photos: Nelson Kon. All photos courtesy of the architect and the photographer.
Paulo Mendes da Rocha is one of Brazil’s leading architects, and his recognition has greatly increased since winning the Pritzker Prize in 2006. That was the peak, but he has enjoyed an international reputation for the last decade. Awarded the “Professional Trajectory Prize” at the 1998 Ibero-American Biennial, Mendes da Rocha renovated the Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo’s State Museum. Two years later, this earned him the 2000 Mies van der Rohe Prize for Latin American Architecture and the opportunity to work abroad. In 2002, Mendes da Rocha was one of 12 architects invited to propose designs for a vast sports complex in Paris coinciding with the city’s bid for the 2008 Olympic games. Since then, he has developed building models as well as a topographic scheme for the Technological City, a section of the University of Vigo in Galicia, Spain, which features a series of bridges to which new and existing buildings are connected, preserving the hilly landscape. This year he will finish a social housing project in the community of Vallecas, Madrid. Recent works in Brazil include the revitalization of an abandoned brick-and-stone chapel at the ceramicist Francisco Brennand’s atelier in Recife, and a Children’s Museum in Santo André, São Paulo.
Born in 1928 in Vitória, a harbor city between Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, Mendes da Rocha arrived in São Paulo in the ’50s to study architecture at Mackenzie University. Very early in his career he won a national competition and designed, with João de Gennaro, the Paulistano Athletic Club, using a daring, innovative concrete and steel structure that received the 1961 São Paulo Biennial Grand Prize. He also won the national competition for the Brazilian Pavilion at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan, a minimalist structure modeled on artificial topography and covered by an airy, lightness-lending grid of concrete slabs.
The architect Vilanova Artigas, a generation older, invited Mendes da Rocha to teach at the University of São Paulo in the early ’60s. It was a moment when the lessons of the Carioca Modernist School had been absorbed, and the field had ripened onto other paths. The ’60s were a time of architectural experimentation when important creators like Artigas, Mendes da Rocha, Lina Bo Bardi and several others designed outstanding works tuned with the “brutalist connection.” Described by British art critic Reyner Banham as blending an ethical discourse and aesthetic assertions, they favored rough, apparent concrete surfaces and impressive huge-span structures. This second Brazilian architectural avant-garde trend—the Paulista School—is lesser known abroad but very important in Brazil and Latin America, and Mendes da Rocha is one of its main contributors.
For political reasons Mendes da Rocha and other leftist Brazilian intellectuals were expelled from the University in 1969 by the military dictatorship. Mendes da Rocha was only able to resume his professorship in 1980 following the country’s democratic restoration. Back at the university, a new generation of architects has been influenced by his ethical discourse and strong architectural propositions. Nowadays, most of his projects are being developed with some of these young talents.
About to turn 80, Mendes da Rocha continues to produce outstanding works both big and small, each one an intriguing union of the sensible and the extraordinary. His propositions can be read as poetic statements about art and technique. In this email interview, conducted over the past few months, but really part and parcel of a lifelong conversation, Mendes da Rocha has treated both topics—technique and art—with his usual polemical enthusiasm.
