Risky Space

LATIN AMERICA: THOUGHTS

Romano Guerra Editora

Nhamerica Platform

MANAGEMENT COORDINATION

Abilio Guerra, Fernando Luiz Lara and Silvana Romano Santos

RISKY SPACE

Otavio Leonidio

Brasil 03

EDITOR

Abilio Guerra, Fernando Luiz Lara and Silvana Romano Santos

EDITORIAL STAFF

Silvana Romano Santos, Fernando Luiz Lara, Abilio Guerra

and Fernanda Critelli

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Maria Claudia Levy and Ana Luiza David (Goma Oficina)

FORMATTING

Fernanda Critelli

EBOOK FORMATTING

Natalli Tami

TECNICAL REVIEW

Nathalia Perico

TRANSLATION

Carlos Eduardo Dias Comas, Fernando Luiz Lara,

Gabriel Pomerancblum, Giovana Sanchez, Luca Senise,

Nick Rands and Otavio Leonidio

TRANSLATION REVIEW

Fernanda Critelli Fernando Luiz Lara and Otavio Leonidio

FOREWORD

ANGELO BUCCI

RISKY SPACE

CHRISTIAN DE PORTZAMPARC

THE INVADER

ÁLVARO SIZA VIEIRA

ANOTHER VOID

LELÉ

I LIVE IN AN ISLAND

LÚCIO COSTA

CRITIQUE AND CRISIS

IN SEARCH FOR THE

WORDS OF OUR MASTER

CONCRETISM, NEO- CONCRETISM

AND THE CONTEMPORARY

THE FOSTER-EISENMAN COMPLEX

GUY DEBORD

AND ROBERT SMITHSON

HAL FOSTER

HISTORY AND THE REAL

foreword

I wrote the texts in this compilation over ten years. With the exception of Angelo Bucci, Risky Space, all were written at my own risk. That is, they are the product of a very personal intention – namely to publicly address subjects and issues that captured my attention at different points in time. Looking back, I can clearly tell what those subjects and issues were.

The first subject is Lúcio Costa. Both of the texts that focus on his ouevre (Lúcio Costa, Critique and Crisis and In Search for the Words of Our Master) are developments of my doctoral dissertation, which I defended in 2005 at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. Whenever I addressed Costa’s writings, it was in order to understand how he managed to account for the questions that challenged the leaders of Brazilian modernist movement. And what became clear to me is that, without Costa’s utterences, Brazilian modern architecture as we know it would never have existed.

The second subject is Brazilian modern architecture itself – more specifically, the power of its presence in the contemporary scenario. Christian de Portzamparc, the Invader, Álvaro Siza Vieira, Another Void and Angelo Bucci, Risky Space are all essays that take the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Reidy and the like as a bench mark for works as diverse as those of Portzamparc, Siza and Bucci. But the texts also the wish to problematize the notion of heritage itself – in this case, a heritage that always seemed to me more embarrassing than beneficial. Hence my interest in the work of Lelé – which, not by chance, constitutes the most relevant isolated fact in Brazil’s contemporary output.

The third subject are the nexuses between contemporary art and architecture – phenomena that I address here either in tandem (Concretism, Neo-concretism and the Contemporary, Guy Debord and Robert Smithson and The Foster-Eisenman Complex) or in standalone form (Hal Foster, History and the Real). The main difference from the first two subjects is that in the latter case, Brazil ceases to be the locus of enunciation. This choice reflects both a personal motivation (ridding myself of an atavistic localism) and the perception that, in order to address the contemporary, I had to muffle the typically Brazilian voice that pervades the previous texts.

Text selection took shape in conversations with Abilio Guerra and Fernando Lara, with input from Silvana Romano. Without their dedication this book would not exist.

angelo bucci

risky space

translated by gabriel pomerancblum

not long ago, i wrote that one of the most remarkable aspects of angelo bucci’s work is the complex relationship it establishes between structure and spatiality. i was referring, on that occasion, to one specific project, namely the carapicuíba house, designed by bucci and alvaro puntoni – in my view, one of the best projects of the last few years in brazil.

¹

An analysis of Bucci’s recent work suggests that the design of that small house somehow sums up the inner principles of his architecture.

I reiterate my argument: As many Brazilian architects, that is to say, as direct descendants of Oscar Niemeyer and Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Bucci and Puntoni paid very close attention in this house to the design of the structure. The operation is not restricted, however, to reproducing some of the structural recurrences in Brazilian modern architecture.

Granted, some of these recurrences are present in the project at hand – namely: a) the typically Niemeyer-esque exiguousness of columns and pillars (in this case, two large columns that support the volume of the office atop the set); and b) the rhythmically sequenced structural porticoes which support roof and floor slabs, much like what Reidy does at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro – MAM (in Carapicuíba, two parallel, rectangular porticoes that support the building’s floor slabs).

The essence of the operation, however, is not limited to that. What sets the project apart is the way it explores the plastic and spatial effects of the unusual juxtaposition of these two structural gestures, which are treated here – and this is the key point – as two autonomous entities.

To say that the project’s spatiality coincides with or stems from the design of the structure is insufficient, therefore. Rather, it is the complex, hybrid resultant of the juxtaposition of structural entities which are not only endowed with specific morphologies, but which also generate spatialities of their own. The project’s formal and, above all, spatial quality, therefore,

resides less in the juxtaposition of its built elements than in the collision of the empty spaces (of the voids!) that each of these structural entities independently produce.

The Carapicuíba project is one of the most complex and sophisticated developments of a research that began some two decades ago. The terms of the investigation seem clear enough to me: As I said, Bucci set out to explore the potentialities of the structure-spatiality relationship. The theme is not altogether new. Since the 1930s, Oscar Niemeyer and Affonso Eduardo Reidy relied on it to constitute their seminal oeuvres, which throughout the second half of the 20th century, shaped the architecture of so-called São Paulo School – the architecture of Vilanova Artigas, Lina Bo Bardi, and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, among others. Bucci’s work, evidently, belongs to that lineage. Each new project is for him an opportunity to rearticulate a reasonably limited structural and formal repertoire. Which explains why his designs appear to be variations of one and the same theme.

House in Carapicuíba, Carapicuíba SP. Angelo Bucci and Alvaro Puntoni, 2003-2008. Photo Nelson Kon

Not all developments are as complex as the house in Carapicuíba. As a matter of fact, some of them are exceedingly simple – which does not mean less interesting. A good example is the house in East Hampton, designed in 2007. Here, there isn’t any hybridism in the structure’s design, composed of two lengthy inverted beams, running parallel and very close to one another, which support the flat roof slab. The arrangement of the items that comprise the building’s program is also reasonably simple, with living areas divided into two independent sectors: living room and kitchen are in the top floor, while the bedrooms, the garage, family room, and remaining elements are in the half-buried ground floor.

House in Carapicuíba, living floor, Carapicuíba SP. Angelo Bucci and Alvaro Puntoni, 2003-2008. SPBR Arquitetos Collection

At once, the project evokes two icons of 1950s Brazilian modern architecture – namely, Lina Bo Bardi’s Art Museum of São Paulo – Masp, and Oscar Niemeyer’s Casa das Canoas [Canoas House]. From the former, Bucci’s building inherits a rather unorthodox way of employing the principle of the repeating structural porticoes. Indeed, just like in Bo Bardi’s building (and in contrast to what happens in Reidy’s MAM), the sequence of porticoes does not run in the same direction as the building’s spatial expansion, or better yet expansibility. This entails a sort of semantic uncertainty: Are these elements really porticoes or instead pillars and beams?²

House in Carapicuíba, longitudinal section, Carapicuíba SP. Angelo Bucci e Alvaro Puntoni, 2003-2008. SPBR Arquitetos Collection

From Niemeyer’s residence, in turn, the East Hampton house borrows the classical compositional principle of the mineral pedestal (half-buried in both cases; fragmented in Bucci, and partly hidden in Niemeyer) topped not by a solid object, but instead by a habitable void (defined by a horizontal concrete slab). While sections suggest a connection with Niemeyer’s house, as well as the reliance on the classical model, floor plans render explicit an inversion in the terms of the composition: Whereas, in Niemeyer, plastic freedom is ascribed to the flat roof slab, and formal restraint to the pedestal, in Bucci the opposite holds true. This compositional parti (and I believe that here, unlike Carapicuíba, it really makes sense to speak of parti and composition) commands other projects of Bucci’s, notably the PUC-Rio media library.

The affinity with the architecture of Niemeyer, Reidy and Lina Bo Bardi emphasizes the aspect of continuity between Bucci’s work and the tradition of modern Brazilian architecture. This is not an original argument. It was after all under suspicion of mere continuism that the then-newly graduated Bucci found himself thrust overnight into the epicenter of Brazilian architectural debate. The year was 1991, and project selection was pending for the Brazilian pavilion at the Seville Exhibition due the following year. A public competition was held; 253 teams entered, many comprising renowned Brazilian architects. To the surprise of many, the contest was won by a team of three young men fresh out of school: Alvaro Puntoni, José Oswaldo Vilela, and Angelo Bucci.

The result wreaked havoc. In a controversial, now-famous article, suggestively entitled Deu em vão (a play on words with em vão, which means both in vain and free span, which is a trademark of the architecture of São Paulo School), critic and historian Hugo Segawa harshly censured the contest’s jury – which included Paulo Mendes da Rocha – for picking a known, predictable, and therefore conservative architectural line.³ Even today, some point to the outcome of the competition as the cornerstone of the modernist revival that presumably has reigned in Brazil since then.

To read Bucci’s work from the perspective of continuity is, however, misleading. For by all accounts, Brazilian architecture as a whole, and São Paulo architecture in particular, are for Bucci essential references – but not sacred totems. His later output shows how little interested he is in simply reproducing the formal and structural findings of Brazil’s modernist tradition.

Once again, let us focus on the design of the structure, notably to the trend toward a reduced numbers of pillars and the extensive use of stayed slabs.⁴ There are many plausible explanations for these recurrences. Personally, I don’t think that it merely reflects the Corbusian principle of socializing the ground floor of buildings (hence his proverbial eulogy of pilotis). Instead, I think it expresses the somewhat obsessive drive of Brazilian modern architects (devoted as they were to the project of modernizing a rural, underdeveloped country) to demonstrate the national ability to overcome the myriad of constraints which, in architecture as much as in other domains of culture, were bound to prevent Brazil from attaining modernity. The obsession with the formalization of the structural work should be read, in this sense, as a typical case of symbolic form – a metonymy of the heroic cultural effort employed in Brazil’s forceps-based modernization project. Hence, in the specific domain of architecture, of the recurrent and – in my view, embarrassing – aspect of structural prowess and virility which characterizes some of the most iconic modern Brazilian buildings. As if erecting a building with a limited number of columns and few slender steel cables equated to erecting Brazilian society as a whole.

Now, if the need to affirm potency and virility could once fit the bill of Brazil’s conservatist modernization process, obviously that is no longer the case today. Times have changed. To simply reenact it in our times would lead to pure anachronism, as attested by Oscar Niemeyer’s recent work.

Bucci’s use of the national tradition of exiguous points of support and stayed slabs demonstrates how far removed the architect is from Brazilian modernist architecture and its symptomatic structural showboating. This distance is precisely what enables Bucci, while employing typically Brazilian architectural themes and structural devices, to invest where our architecture had advanced the least – namely, spatial research.

In fact, Brazil’s modern architecture has always been far more objectual than spatial oriented, more about construction than about voids, more iconic than phenomenological.⁵ Hence Giulio Carlo Argan’s claim from the early 1950s that this architecture relied excessively on the combination of technique and beauty – and precisely for that reason, also on an overly objectual, contemplative, classical notion of beauty.⁶ Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s specific contribution to Brazil’s architecture resides, from that perspective, on the attention he gives to the void.⁷

bucci, however, does not seem content – not anymore, anyway – in picking up from where mendes da rocha had stopped. his starting point is not even artigas. he feels entitled, perhaps even obliged, to go all the way back to reidy and niemeyer. which means to say to le corbusier.

The confrontation between the East Hampton house and Casa das Canoas is enlightening. I said