“All space is public. The only private space that you can imagine is in the human mind.”
Says Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, the ageing Marxist, with his baggy navy blazer and bristling white moustache, makes for an unlikely addition to the list of famous names chiselled into the walls of RIBA, alongside Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel.
In the past decade Mendes da Rocha has been showered with awards, winning the Pritzker prize (architecture’s Nobel), the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale award , but he doesn’t fit the stereotype of a globe-trotting “starchitect”.
His most celebrated work, the Brazilian Sculpture Museum (MuBE) in São Paulo, completed in 1995, is the result of trying not to make a building at all. The site is instead conceived as a terraced sculpture garden, with the museum’s galleries located underground and a concrete canopy flying overhead, a jaw-dropping 60-metre long levitating beam.
"Not having my own office gives me the greatest freedom – to do nothing if I want to!” says Paulo Mendes da Rocha.
He maintains an office of one, based in a modest room in São Paulo’s crumbling 1940s headquarters of the Institute of Brazilian Architects, lit by a naked lightbulb, its walls lined with blackboards on which he sketches his structures with extraordinary freehand precision, and when he works on projects, he collaborates with a number of different studios around the city, many of them run by former students.
It is a unique model of practice for an architect of his stature, and he may make light of it now, but this unusual setup stems from the fact that he was forbidden from running his own office in Brazil for almost 25 years.
When the military dictatorship came to power in 1964, he and his fellow left-leaning architects were dismissed from their university teaching posts and had their architectural licences revoked.
Blacklisted for almost half his career, Mendes da Rocha’s rise to prominence is all the more remarkable. He first made his mark at the age of 30, a toddler by architects’ standards, with his startling scheme for the Paulistano Athletic Club. Photographs of the building were widely published on its completion in 1958, showing a minimalist concrete UFO.
In its bold structural simplicity, it set the tone for what would become a series of projects driven by clear constructional logic.
His works in contrast to the formalist approach favoured by some contemporary architects, who come up with a shape and hand it over to the engineers, Mendes da Rocha insists that “you can only imagine what you know how to build”.
For Mendes da Rocha his works and buildings are trophies of public realm over the private inequality. The triumph of concrete Marxist utopia.
Source: 'One never builds something finished': the brutal brilliance of architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha
Says Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, the ageing Marxist, with his baggy navy blazer and bristling white moustache, makes for an unlikely addition to the list of famous names chiselled into the walls of RIBA, alongside Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel.
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| Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha |
His most celebrated work, the Brazilian Sculpture Museum (MuBE) in São Paulo, completed in 1995, is the result of trying not to make a building at all. The site is instead conceived as a terraced sculpture garden, with the museum’s galleries located underground and a concrete canopy flying overhead, a jaw-dropping 60-metre long levitating beam.
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| Brazilian Sculpture Museum (MuBE) in São Paulo |
He maintains an office of one, based in a modest room in São Paulo’s crumbling 1940s headquarters of the Institute of Brazilian Architects, lit by a naked lightbulb, its walls lined with blackboards on which he sketches his structures with extraordinary freehand precision, and when he works on projects, he collaborates with a number of different studios around the city, many of them run by former students.
 |
| Paulo Mendes da Rocha on his office of one |
When the military dictatorship came to power in 1964, he and his fellow left-leaning architects were dismissed from their university teaching posts and had their architectural licences revoked.
Blacklisted for almost half his career, Mendes da Rocha’s rise to prominence is all the more remarkable. He first made his mark at the age of 30, a toddler by architects’ standards, with his startling scheme for the Paulistano Athletic Club. Photographs of the building were widely published on its completion in 1958, showing a minimalist concrete UFO.
In its bold structural simplicity, it set the tone for what would become a series of projects driven by clear constructional logic.
 |
| Paulistano Athletic Club in São Paulo (1961) |
For Mendes da Rocha his works and buildings are trophies of public realm over the private inequality. The triumph of concrete Marxist utopia.
Source: 'One never builds something finished': the brutal brilliance of architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha
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