The Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha was named on Monday as recipient of the 2006 Pritzker Prize, architecture’s richest ($100,000) and most prestigious award. The news was released the same day that Marcos Cesar Pontes touched down in a freezing Kazakhstan, having become the first Brazilian astronaut.
In architecture at least, Brazil has been at the forefront of modern design since the 1940s and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, with his dramatic, structurally inventive and ostentatiously public architecture has been, for much of that time, one of its very finest proponents. He is not the first Brazilian to win the prize: that honour went to Oscar Niemeyer, architect of Brasilia and some of modernism’s most stunning structures in his native Rio de Janeiro, in 1988 (he is still working now, aged 98). If Niemeyer represented the official face of the new, post-colonial Brazil and the sexy free spirit of Rio, with his curvaceously sensual structures, Mendes da Rocha stands for the serious urbanity of his home city, the sprawling megalopolis São Paulo.
Born in 1928, Paulo Mendes da Rocha began his career early, realising important buildings before his 30th birthday. His extraordinary Club Atletico Paulistano of 1958 was a feat of structural daring and economy, a concrete disc floating above a sports hall, a blend of Niemeyer’s wonderfully alien objects and a building as seemingly athletic and sinewy as the sportsmen it sheltered. His design for the Brazilian pavilion at Osaka in 1970 had all the dynamism of a brilliantly simple sketch. His own house, built in the mid-1960s, is exactly the kind of tough but sophisticated concrete brutalism (it was even named Paulist brutalist) that is very much in vogue at the moment, while his domestic designs over the next decade are as fine as anything anywhere. Hard, formal and sculptural, they defined a moment when Europeans were losing faith in the modern, but in Brazil it continued to be refined and to develop. Thus when modernism was rediscovered after the brief postmodernist interlude, Mendes da Rocha had never been away. His Brazilian Museum of Sculpture in São Paulo (1985-95) is architecture as public landscape, a highly unconventional and brilliant structure forming a series of platforms for art contained beneath a startlingly simple and massive concrete canopy. Another canopy, at Patriarch Plaza, revitalised and reclaimed one of São Paulo’s most important public spaces with a dramatic show of structural suspension, and confirmed his dedication to and importance in his home city.
Increasingly the future of the world is being seen in terms of the mega-city, the huge semi-slums that already house most of the urban population of the southern hemisphere. Perhaps this year’s Pritzker award implicitly recognises that awkward inevitability. Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s adherence to a city that demonstrates that the most vibrant culture can emerge where extreme urban poverty coexists with wealth and bourgeois values seems to offer hope. He has taught, campaigned, built and contributed to the public realm and the results should encourage us that the megalopolis does not have to be entirely dystopian.
