Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha dies at 92 | Culture

In the neglected historic heart of São Paulo, the Sesc 24 de Maio Civic Center is crowned by a panoramic public swimming pool. That it is public and offers the best views of the city is a daring and unexpected gesture, also proof of the mental youth that Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who died this Sunday, in São Paulo, at the age of 92, did not has never lost. The São Paulo Pritzker (he obtained it in 2006) signed the reform of these old warehouses five years ago, when he was commissioned to restore the building protected by cultural heritage. Although he is known for the austerity of his brutalist buildings, the expression of reinforced concrete and the dryness of his creations, he had already shown – with the restoration of the Pinacoteca of the State of São Paulo in 1998 – that ‘he knew how to coexist with what already existed. This museum, like the last Muelle de las Artes (which ended in 2011 in Vitória, the city where he was born) or like the old Museum of Sculpture of Brazil (MUBE), completed in São Paulo in 1995, added to his audacity the particular religion of Mendes: he never built a building that does not take into account the public space. “No city can be solved with a museum. The supreme museum is the city itself, ”he said.

The two legendary schools of Brazilian architecture speak of place, almost of geography. Faced with the sensuality, expressiveness and curves that propelled Oscar Niemeyer to world fame at the head of the Carioca school, the São Paulo school, where Mendes da Rocha learned from Vilanova Artigas, defended the relationship with people, the setting of life, the strength of concrete and also its austerity, the need for lush vegetation to coexist, to shelter and shade the ramps, porches and reinforced concrete cantilevers. This is what Mendes buildings are: scenarios to be invaded by users and by nature.

His first works – the Paulistano Club Gymnasium (1960), indebted to Le Corbusier and to European modernity – already had the germ of what his architecture would be: understanding that it is the relationship to place, and not to ideas, to roots. and build them alive. He demonstrated this in his own house in Butantä (1964), radically austere, beautifully lit and lovingly shaded by vegetation. And, years later, also in the Forma store (1994), where public space coexists with commercial space. The same strength of concrete was used thirty years later, leaving one of his designs timeless.

When Paudo Mendes won the Pritzker Prize in 2006, he was not talking about geometry but about people. He asserted that peace is the cornerstone of architecture. “I have the impression that before the city gets ugly, it’s the people who are ugly,” he writes in The city belongs to everyone (which José María García del Monte has compiled in the collection The Cimbra published by the Caja de Arquitectos Foundation).

Mendes was expelled, along with many of the professors, from his chair at the São Paulo School of Architecture. It was 1964 and they never tired of protesting against the military coup that had invaded the country. He did not teach again until 1988. Despite this, and saving countless problems, he managed to build the pavilion in Osaka that represented his country at the 1970 World’s Fair. This is why his legacy today is both what he built and what he taught. . And what is written (or protested). Despite the fact that he has designed several museums – including the one dedicated to the automobile in Lisbon (2015) – he has always been wary of cultural centers “which distort what is true in the idea of ​​culture. Behind these centers, I see only an elitist idea which serves to prevent more promising transformations in the city ”. What was he proposing? “Revitalize sites by creating new non-polluting industries.” A staunch Marxist, like Niemeyer, he lived in a dream house while writing against closed communities: “Deprived of what? It is private because it is exclusive: it belongs only to them. But it also deprives them of many things, such as the medical student falling in love with a dancer. This does not happen in a private urbanization ”.