Goodbye to Paulo Mendes da Rocha
The international architecture scene has lost one of the greatest interpreters of the poetics of rigour and architectural and social coherence
Paulo Mendes da Rocha was 92 years old – he was born in October 1928 in Vitória, Brazil – and he studied in the department of Architecture and Urban Planning at Mackenzie University in Sao Paulo, where despite the school’s tendency towards a historicist approach, he nurtured a growing interested in modern architecture, until finally fully embracing the philosophy of João Batista Vilanova Artigas, founder of the Escola Paulista, who favoured the bold use of reinforced concrete, in its roughest and most direct form.
Fascinated by a social vision of architecture that was devoted to the search for a rapport of synergistic coexistence between architecture and territory, between space and man, the Brazilian maestro is the author of works that celebrate rigour and structural coherence with elegance and determination. Among the examples that attest to this are the Club Athletico Paulistano in Sao Paulo (1958), the Chapel of Saint Peter in Campos do Jordão (1987), the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture in Sao Paulo (1988), and the revitalisation of Patriarch Plaza in Sao Paulo (2002).
His work, as well as his activities as a teacher, earned him many awards including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2006 and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Biennale di Venezia in 2016. At the respective awards ceremonies, Thomas J. Pritzker, president of the Hyatt Foundation, affirmed that “the lessons to be learned from his work (…) are universal”, and Alejandro Aravena, curator of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition, defined Paulo Mendes da Rocha as “a nonconformist challenger and simultaneously a passionate realist”.
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