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| The Unexpectedly Tropical History of Brutalism | The Unexpectedly Tropical History of Brutalism |
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| Long associated with European cities, the style has plenty of history in other parts of the world, too. In Brazil, it reached a surprising apotheosis. | Long associated with European cities, the style has plenty of history in other parts of the world, too. In Brazil, it reached a surprising apotheosis. |
| By Michael Snyder | By Michael Snyder |
| Last October, the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who was nearing 90, was interviewed by the Spanish newspaper El País about his six-decade career. By then, Mendes da Rocha — whose buildings include São Paulo’s subterranean sculpture museum, Museu Brasileiro da Escultura e Ecologia (MuBE), completed in 1995, with its 197-foot stretch of gravity-defying concrete that spans the open plaza, and the levitating concrete disk of the city’s Paulistano Athletic Club Gymnasium, built in 1957 — had been canonized as not only the most important living architect in Brazil, or perhaps in all of Latin America, but also as the world’s most significant practitioner of Brutalism — a word, ironically, that he has always disavowed. “Ask an intellectual what they mean by Brutalism, and the majority won’t know,” Mendes da Rocha told the reporter. “Brutalism is nothing.” | Last October, the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who was nearing 90, was interviewed by the Spanish newspaper El País about his six-decade career. By then, Mendes da Rocha — whose buildings include São Paulo’s subterranean sculpture museum, Museu Brasileiro da Escultura e Ecologia (MuBE), completed in 1995, with its 197-foot stretch of gravity-defying concrete that spans the open plaza, and the levitating concrete disk of the city’s Paulistano Athletic Club Gymnasium, built in 1957 — had been canonized as not only the most important living architect in Brazil, or perhaps in all of Latin America, but also as the world’s most significant practitioner of Brutalism — a word, ironically, that he has always disavowed. “Ask an intellectual what they mean by Brutalism, and the majority won’t know,” Mendes da Rocha told the reporter. “Brutalism is nothing.” |
| The term “Brutalism” has never been well liked among architects, nor well defined among the critics who invented it. Beginning in the 1940s, builders in Europe and the United States began turning away from high Modernism in favor of what the Swiss critic Sigfried Giedion and the American architect Louis Kahn referred to as a New Monumentality: a muscular architecture that “conveys the feeling of its eternity,” as Kahn put it in his 1944 essay “Monumentality.” Near the end of that decade, the French-Swiss Modernist Le Corbusier began building monolithic structures in raw concrete — béton brut, in French, one of the sources for the word “Brutalism.” In 1949, the Swedish architect Hans Asplund coined the term nybrutalism, which the British journalist Reyner Banham popularized in a 1955 essay called “The New Brutalism,” in which he used the blocky brick-and-steel Hunstanton School, built in 1954 in the county of Norfolk, England, by the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, as a case study. “One can see what Hunstanton is made of, and how it works,” he wrote, “and there is not another thing to see except the play of spaces.” Banham’s New Brutalist buildings, in other words, extended the functional logic of Modernism, leaving surfaces untreated and joints, seams and pipes exposed, privileging transparency over proportion and style. Where Modernism was poised and polite, often incorporating white plaster and walls that concealed the buildings’ internal logic, Brutalism evolved into something bold and confrontational, its heavy, rugged forms forged of inexpensive industrial materials that disguised nothing at all. | The term “Brutalism” has never been well liked among architects, nor well defined among the critics who invented it. Beginning in the 1940s, builders in Europe and the United States began turning away from high Modernism in favor of what the Swiss critic Sigfried Giedion and the American architect Louis Kahn referred to as a New Monumentality: a muscular architecture that “conveys the feeling of its eternity,” as Kahn put it in his 1944 essay “Monumentality.” Near the end of that decade, the French-Swiss Modernist Le Corbusier began building monolithic structures in raw concrete — béton brut, in French, one of the sources for the word “Brutalism.” In 1949, the Swedish architect Hans Asplund coined the term nybrutalism, which the British journalist Reyner Banham popularized in a 1955 essay called “The New Brutalism,” in which he used the blocky brick-and-steel Hunstanton School, built in 1954 in the county of Norfolk, England, by the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, as a case study. “One can see what Hunstanton is made of, and how it works,” he wrote, “and there is not another thing to see except the play of spaces.” Banham’s New Brutalist buildings, in other words, extended the functional logic of Modernism, leaving surfaces untreated and joints, seams and pipes exposed, privileging transparency over proportion and style. Where Modernism was poised and polite, often incorporating white plaster and walls that concealed the buildings’ internal logic, Brutalism evolved into something bold and confrontational, its heavy, rugged forms forged of inexpensive industrial materials that disguised nothing at all. |
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| Having emerged in the early 20th century from the Bauhaus, the German school that lived at the intersection of art and technology, Modernism was a well-established movement that corresponded to other advances in art, music and literature: a way of building that was intended to express the conditions of the machine age as eloquently as, say, Virginia Woolf’s novels — but by the 1940s, the aesthetic was being called superficial, anodyne and placeless. In a 1959 interview, Peter Smithson described Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier’s iconic 1929 house on the outskirts of Paris, with its white walls and ribbon windows, as “a single object, turned out on a lathe,” whereas the rising Brutalist buildings were being composed of disparate machine-made objects stacked, stitched and cleaved together. While Modernism expressed a blithe faith in its own power to manifest the future, Brutalism — a term that exists only in architecture — would look like work. | Having emerged in the early 20th century from the Bauhaus, the German school that lived at the intersection of art and technology, Modernism was a well-established movement that corresponded to other advances in art, music and literature: a way of building that was intended to express the conditions of the machine age as eloquently as, say, Virginia Woolf’s novels — but by the 1940s, the aesthetic was being called superficial, anodyne and placeless. In a 1959 interview, Peter Smithson described Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier’s iconic 1929 house on the outskirts of Paris, with its white walls and ribbon windows, as “a single object, turned out on a lathe,” whereas the rising Brutalist buildings were being composed of disparate machine-made objects stacked, stitched and cleaved together. While Modernism expressed a blithe faith in its own power to manifest the future, Brutalism — a term that exists only in architecture — would look like work. |
| DESPITE MENDES DA ROCHA’S distaste for the term, it’s hard to avoid when discussing the blank concrete facade of his Casa Millán, built in 1970 for the gallerist Fernando Millán in the São Paulo suburb of Morumbi. Currently owned by the art dealer Eduardo Leme, the house is a dim gray womb packed with contemporary art (an exploded 2009 chair by the Mexican artist Damian Ortega, light boxes from 2008 by the British artist David Batchelor) and midcentury furniture by Brazilian masters such as Jorge Zalszupin and Percival Lafer, like a bomb shelter stocked with cultural provisions for an uncertain future. The structure’s two curved surfaces — an undulating wall separating the main house from the kitchen and carport and a dramatically bent staircase, its underside ridged like a newly paved road — seem almost grudging, as if to emphasize the unbending resolve of the building’s right angles. The 6,997-square-foot house stands at street level but feels subterranean, a lair carved from the city’s underbelly, with sun entering through skylights striated by concrete beams, like giant sewer grates. “Fundamentally, the question of architecture is not the isolated building but the city,” Mendes da Rocha told me when we met at his studio in an undistinguished São Paulo high-rise in February. “A house is always a public space.” That idea mirrors comments made by the architect Alison Smithson in 1959 about Brutalism: “Even if you had only a little house to do it, [the building] somehow had to imply the whole system of town building. ...” | DESPITE MENDES DA ROCHA’S distaste for the term, it’s hard to avoid when discussing the blank concrete facade of his Casa Millán, built in 1970 for the gallerist Fernando Millán in the São Paulo suburb of Morumbi. Currently owned by the art dealer Eduardo Leme, the house is a dim gray womb packed with contemporary art (an exploded 2009 chair by the Mexican artist Damian Ortega, light boxes from 2008 by the British artist David Batchelor) and midcentury furniture by Brazilian masters such as Jorge Zalszupin and Percival Lafer, like a bomb shelter stocked with cultural provisions for an uncertain future. The structure’s two curved surfaces — an undulating wall separating the main house from the kitchen and carport and a dramatically bent staircase, its underside ridged like a newly paved road — seem almost grudging, as if to emphasize the unbending resolve of the building’s right angles. The 6,997-square-foot house stands at street level but feels subterranean, a lair carved from the city’s underbelly, with sun entering through skylights striated by concrete beams, like giant sewer grates. “Fundamentally, the question of architecture is not the isolated building but the city,” Mendes da Rocha told me when we met at his studio in an undistinguished São Paulo high-rise in February. “A house is always a public space.” That idea mirrors comments made by the architect Alison Smithson in 1959 about Brutalism: “Even if you had only a little house to do it, [the building] somehow had to imply the whole system of town building. ...” |
| Yet despite the clear resonances with European-born Brutalism — the rigid geometry, the cavernous interiors, the coffered ceilings and abundant concrete — Mendes da Rocha’s structures, like many Brutalist-inflected buildings that thrived well into the 1980s throughout the equatorial world, feel fundamentally different from their predecessors in cooler climates. From the 1950s to the 1970s, while European nations reckoned with economic depression and the end of colonization, the nations they had once oppressed emerged into a new prosperity (as seen in Latin America) or else independence (as seen throughout Africa and Asia). Lacking a clear set of well-articulated principles, Brutalist architecture has always taken different forms in different regions — consider the Soviet functionalism of Eastern European housing projects compared to the rowhouse-like Alexandra Road estate designed by Neave Brown in postwar London. In Brazil, Brutalism grew out of the Modernist tradition, imported, according to the historian Kenneth Frampton, as early as 1928 by the Ukrainian émigré Gregori Warchavchik. The first great Brazilian Modernist was Lúcio Costa, who grew up in Europe and returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1924 to study architecture, then led a movement immortalized in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal 1943 exhibition “Brazil Builds,” which traced the country’s building practices from the late 17th century into the early 1940s and cataloged a growing global fascination with innovative responses to the local climate. In India, Cambodia and Singapore, which won their sovereignty between 1947 and 1965, local designers adapted the rough concrete forms of internationally renowned architects like Le Corbusier and the American Brutalist icon Paul Rudolph to their own cultural and climatic contexts. And across sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s, newly established national governments in countries such as Ghana, Kenya and Zambia invited foreign architects like Henri Chomette from France and Jacek Chyrosz and Stanislaw Rymaszewski from Poland to create grand commercial and public structures, such as 1978’s Hotel Independence in Dakar, Senegal, and 1960’s International Trade Fair complex in Accra, Ghana — projects that announced these countries’ arrival on the global stage. | Yet despite the clear resonances with European-born Brutalism — the rigid geometry, the cavernous interiors, the coffered ceilings and abundant concrete — Mendes da Rocha’s structures, like many Brutalist-inflected buildings that thrived well into the 1980s throughout the equatorial world, feel fundamentally different from their predecessors in cooler climates. From the 1950s to the 1970s, while European nations reckoned with economic depression and the end of colonization, the nations they had once oppressed emerged into a new prosperity (as seen in Latin America) or else independence (as seen throughout Africa and Asia). Lacking a clear set of well-articulated principles, Brutalist architecture has always taken different forms in different regions — consider the Soviet functionalism of Eastern European housing projects compared to the rowhouse-like Alexandra Road estate designed by Neave Brown in postwar London. In Brazil, Brutalism grew out of the Modernist tradition, imported, according to the historian Kenneth Frampton, as early as 1928 by the Ukrainian émigré Gregori Warchavchik. The first great Brazilian Modernist was Lúcio Costa, who grew up in Europe and returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1924 to study architecture, then led a movement immortalized in the Museum of Modern Art’s seminal 1943 exhibition “Brazil Builds,” which traced the country’s building practices from the late 17th century into the early 1940s and cataloged a growing global fascination with innovative responses to the local climate. In India, Cambodia and Singapore, which won their sovereignty between 1947 and 1965, local designers adapted the rough concrete forms of internationally renowned architects like Le Corbusier and the American Brutalist icon Paul Rudolph to their own cultural and climatic contexts. And across sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s, newly established national governments in countries such as Ghana, Kenya and Zambia invited foreign architects like Henri Chomette from France and Jacek Chyrosz and Stanislaw Rymaszewski from Poland to create grand commercial and public structures, such as 1978’s Hotel Independence in Dakar, Senegal, and 1960’s International Trade Fair complex in Accra, Ghana — projects that announced these countries’ arrival on the global stage. |
| What these buildings shared, beyond an aesthetic — though they shared that, too, with their radical porousness, their blunt geometric forms and their extensive use of raw concrete — was a commitment to architecture as an instigator of progress. But in the tropics, Brutalism reached an unexpected apotheosis: Infiltrated by lush plants and softened by humidity, buildings that looked cold and imposing against London’s constant drizzle or Boston’s icy slush were transformed into fecund, vital spaces. Concrete surfaces bloomed green with moss. The panels of glass necessary for sealing rooms against the northern chill either disappeared or receded from view, encouraging cross-ventilation while also protecting interior spaces from direct sun. The openness and transparency that the Smithsons had pronounced became a practical reality in these humid environments, both theoretically and literally: Built from inexpensive, readily available materials, equatorial Brutalism was as accessible and functional as it was symbolically potent, resulting in buildings that would define new societies growing around them like vines. Here, Brutalism wasn’t only an architecture that shaped the future or confronted the past — it was an architecture of freedom. | What these buildings shared, beyond an aesthetic — though they shared that, too, with their radical porousness, their blunt geometric forms and their extensive use of raw concrete — was a commitment to architecture as an instigator of progress. But in the tropics, Brutalism reached an unexpected apotheosis: Infiltrated by lush plants and softened by humidity, buildings that looked cold and imposing against London’s constant drizzle or Boston’s icy slush were transformed into fecund, vital spaces. Concrete surfaces bloomed green with moss. The panels of glass necessary for sealing rooms against the northern chill either disappeared or receded from view, encouraging cross-ventilation while also protecting interior spaces from direct sun. The openness and transparency that the Smithsons had pronounced became a practical reality in these humid environments, both theoretically and literally: Built from inexpensive, readily available materials, equatorial Brutalism was as accessible and functional as it was symbolically potent, resulting in buildings that would define new societies growing around them like vines. Here, Brutalism wasn’t only an architecture that shaped the future or confronted the past — it was an architecture of freedom. |
| IN 1947, LE CORBUSIER began what many consider the world’s first Brutalist building, the Unité d’Habitation housing project in Marseille, France. Built entirely from raw concrete, the Unité marked Corbusier’s departure from the International Style’s glossy polish, with its reliance on flat surfaces, modular forms and mass-produced materials. But one of the Unité’s most important structural innovations — the use of concrete screens and louvers to protect the windows from the sun, a technique called brise-soleil — had first been used a decade earlier in Rio. In 1936, the education minister Gustavo Capanema invited Le Corbusier to Brazil to partner with Costa in overseeing a consortium of local architects that included future Modernist luminaries such as Affonso Reidy, Oscar Niemeyer and the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, who were designing a new headquarters for Rio’s Ministry of Education and Health. Together, they conceived a high Modernist masterpiece: an impeccably proportioned glass rectangle lifted on slender columns over the street. The Brazilian architects on the team introduced an expressive rooftop garden, panels of ceramic tiles painted with starfish and sea horses to frame the building’s entrance and concrete fins and coverts to protect its northwest facade, an inexpensive way to keep the interior cool in hot weather. | IN 1947, LE CORBUSIER began what many consider the world’s first Brutalist building, the Unité d’Habitation housing project in Marseille, France. Built entirely from raw concrete, the Unité marked Corbusier’s departure from the International Style’s glossy polish, with its reliance on flat surfaces, modular forms and mass-produced materials. But one of the Unité’s most important structural innovations — the use of concrete screens and louvers to protect the windows from the sun, a technique called brise-soleil — had first been used a decade earlier in Rio. In 1936, the education minister Gustavo Capanema invited Le Corbusier to Brazil to partner with Costa in overseeing a consortium of local architects that included future Modernist luminaries such as Affonso Reidy, Oscar Niemeyer and the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, who were designing a new headquarters for Rio’s Ministry of Education and Health. Together, they conceived a high Modernist masterpiece: an impeccably proportioned glass rectangle lifted on slender columns over the street. The Brazilian architects on the team introduced an expressive rooftop garden, panels of ceramic tiles painted with starfish and sea horses to frame the building’s entrance and concrete fins and coverts to protect its northwest facade, an inexpensive way to keep the interior cool in hot weather. |
| Within two decades, Le Corbusier had incorporated brise-soleil into five Unités across Europe and throughout his expansive government complex in Chandigarh, India, founded in 1953 and still perhaps the most ambitious Brutalist project on earth. From there, the technique traveled with Le Corbusier’s colleagues Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who added it to college and school buildings they designed in Ghana and Nigeria throughout the late 1950s. The work of Fry and Drew, who were among the founders of the Department of Tropical Architecture at London’s Architectural Association in 1954, went on to inspire the early buildings of the Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa before he turned to his now signature vernacular-inspired tropes like deep eaves and verandas, which punctuate his light, graceful (and decidedly non-Brutalist) tropical Modernist homes. | Within two decades, Le Corbusier had incorporated brise-soleil into five Unités across Europe and throughout his expansive government complex in Chandigarh, India, founded in 1953 and still perhaps the most ambitious Brutalist project on earth. From there, the technique traveled with Le Corbusier’s colleagues Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, who added it to college and school buildings they designed in Ghana and Nigeria throughout the late 1950s. The work of Fry and Drew, who were among the founders of the Department of Tropical Architecture at London’s Architectural Association in 1954, went on to inspire the early buildings of the Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa before he turned to his now signature vernacular-inspired tropes like deep eaves and verandas, which punctuate his light, graceful (and decidedly non-Brutalist) tropical Modernist homes. |
| Brise-soleil and other Brutalist elements followed the same circulatory route as the progressive politics of liberation. In his 1951 announcement for the design of Chandigarh, the current capital of both Punjab and Haryana states, India’s then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, described the plans for the city as “symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past.” Brutalism, as the newest and most daring school of contemporary architecture at the time — suggesting both industrial modernity and a humanistic embrace of democratic principles such as community and equality — soon became the physical lingua franca of his left-leaning government. From the 1960s into the 1980s, Indian architects such as Kuldip Singh, Achyut Kanvinde, Raj Rewal and Balkrishna Doshi (who won last year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize) used concrete the color of the dust that coats Delhi’s ubiquitous flame-of-the-forest trees to build angular, futuristic buildings. At Singh’s 1978 National Cooperative Development Corporation building, two legs joined at the top stand over an open plaza, providing shade in New Delhi’s brutal summer heat. | Brise-soleil and other Brutalist elements followed the same circulatory route as the progressive politics of liberation. In his 1951 announcement for the design of Chandigarh, the current capital of both Punjab and Haryana states, India’s then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, described the plans for the city as “symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past.” Brutalism, as the newest and most daring school of contemporary architecture at the time — suggesting both industrial modernity and a humanistic embrace of democratic principles such as community and equality — soon became the physical lingua franca of his left-leaning government. From the 1960s into the 1980s, Indian architects such as Kuldip Singh, Achyut Kanvinde, Raj Rewal and Balkrishna Doshi (who won last year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize) used concrete the color of the dust that coats Delhi’s ubiquitous flame-of-the-forest trees to build angular, futuristic buildings. At Singh’s 1978 National Cooperative Development Corporation building, two legs joined at the top stand over an open plaza, providing shade in New Delhi’s brutal summer heat. |
| Le Corbusier’s influence reached Southeast Asia a few years later, in 1956, when the architect Vann Molyvann, who’d studied under the master in Paris, returned to his newly independent homeland of Cambodia. Like Nehru, King Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s leader, made architecture a cornerstone of economic and cultural development. Over the next decades, Molyvann built a sports complex, a theater, schools and government buildings that rendered the peaked towers of ancient temples and the high gables of indigenous houses in reinforced concrete, incorporating the natural ventilation and restrained ornamentation that defined the work of his teacher. At a state dinner in 1967, Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who led the city-state from 1965, when the country gained independence, until 1990, described what he and his family had seen on a visit to Cambodia as “the architectural style, in steel and concrete, of what Angkor [Wat] had in sandstone and laterite,” referencing the ninth- to 14th-century archaeological sites of the Khmer Empire. “The buildings in Phnom Penh, although more functional, are no less monuments to Khmer creativity. It was a lesson of what is possible, given a united people, led by a patriot of great verve and vitality.” During his quarter century in power, Lee’s government commissioned overtly Brutalist projects: The utilitarian concrete forms of 1976’s horseshoe-shaped Pearl Bank Apartments and the vivid green-and-yellow block of 1973’s People’s Park Complex spoke to Singapore’s emerging prosperity. | Le Corbusier’s influence reached Southeast Asia a few years later, in 1956, when the architect Vann Molyvann, who’d studied under the master in Paris, returned to his newly independent homeland of Cambodia. Like Nehru, King Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s leader, made architecture a cornerstone of economic and cultural development. Over the next decades, Molyvann built a sports complex, a theater, schools and government buildings that rendered the peaked towers of ancient temples and the high gables of indigenous houses in reinforced concrete, incorporating the natural ventilation and restrained ornamentation that defined the work of his teacher. At a state dinner in 1967, Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who led the city-state from 1965, when the country gained independence, until 1990, described what he and his family had seen on a visit to Cambodia as “the architectural style, in steel and concrete, of what Angkor [Wat] had in sandstone and laterite,” referencing the ninth- to 14th-century archaeological sites of the Khmer Empire. “The buildings in Phnom Penh, although more functional, are no less monuments to Khmer creativity. It was a lesson of what is possible, given a united people, led by a patriot of great verve and vitality.” During his quarter century in power, Lee’s government commissioned overtly Brutalist projects: The utilitarian concrete forms of 1976’s horseshoe-shaped Pearl Bank Apartments and the vivid green-and-yellow block of 1973’s People’s Park Complex spoke to Singapore’s emerging prosperity. |
| As governments across Southeast Asia engaged local architects, many of them educated in the West, most of the tropical Brutalist projects in sub-Saharan Africa were led by foreigners. In 1960, Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, commissioned the Norwegian architect Karl Henrik Nostvik to lead the design for Nairobi’s Kenyatta International Convention Center, with its 28-story concrete columnar tower and auditorium resembling a tightly closed lotus bud. In the Ivory Coast, the Italian architect Rinaldo Olivieri completed La Pyramide in 1973, an attempt to adapt the port city of Abidjan’s covered markets into a modern high-rise. Today, the building sits largely empty, but with its receding tiers of concrete hanging off a central column like the awnings of street stalls, it remains a striking architectural landmark. These buildings’ forms varied widely across the region depending on available materials, on the vestigial cultural influence of various colonizers and on the political leanings of the new leaders, says the Swiss-based architect Manuel Herz, whose 2015 book, “African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence,” examines several Modernist buildings in Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, the Ivory Coast and Zambia. In Ghana, Herz says, the government of the socialist prime minister Kwame Nkrumah commissioned schools and museums; across the border in the Ivory Coast, which allied itself more closely with free-market capitalism, the most prominent Modernist projects were hotels, banks and other private commissions. In South Africa, the apartheid state employed the style’s cold rationality as a technocratic disguise for evil; according to the Scottish-Ghanaian scholar and architect Lesley Lokko, the founder of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, Modernism and its offshoots are still considered suspect by some in that country today. Whatever their political underpinnings, such buildings were “about Africa emerging out of centuries of, in a sense, nonhistory, but it was still very much an elsewhere style,” she says. | As governments across Southeast Asia engaged local architects, many of them educated in the West, most of the tropical Brutalist projects in sub-Saharan Africa were led by foreigners. In 1960, Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, commissioned the Norwegian architect Karl Henrik Nostvik to lead the design for Nairobi’s Kenyatta International Convention Center, with its 28-story concrete columnar tower and auditorium resembling a tightly closed lotus bud. In the Ivory Coast, the Italian architect Rinaldo Olivieri completed La Pyramide in 1973, an attempt to adapt the port city of Abidjan’s covered markets into a modern high-rise. Today, the building sits largely empty, but with its receding tiers of concrete hanging off a central column like the awnings of street stalls, it remains a striking architectural landmark. These buildings’ forms varied widely across the region depending on available materials, on the vestigial cultural influence of various colonizers and on the political leanings of the new leaders, says the Swiss-based architect Manuel Herz, whose 2015 book, “African Modernism: The Architecture of Independence,” examines several Modernist buildings in Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, the Ivory Coast and Zambia. In Ghana, Herz says, the government of the socialist prime minister Kwame Nkrumah commissioned schools and museums; across the border in the Ivory Coast, which allied itself more closely with free-market capitalism, the most prominent Modernist projects were hotels, banks and other private commissions. In South Africa, the apartheid state employed the style’s cold rationality as a technocratic disguise for evil; according to the Scottish-Ghanaian scholar and architect Lesley Lokko, the founder of the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, Modernism and its offshoots are still considered suspect by some in that country today. Whatever their political underpinnings, such buildings were “about Africa emerging out of centuries of, in a sense, nonhistory, but it was still very much an elsewhere style,” she says. |
| DESPITE THE AESTHETIC’S dispersion around the globe, no place indigenized Brutalism more completely than São Paulo, which helps explain why Paulista architects like Mendes da Rocha object so strongly to the word. “Brazil is a colonial nation: It began just a few centuries back,” Mendes da Rocha says. “So we’re condemned to be modern, to be anticolonial, against occupation.” For him and most of the city’s other architects, the term “Brutalism,” imported from the West, constitutes a linguistic occupation. | DESPITE THE AESTHETIC’S dispersion around the globe, no place indigenized Brutalism more completely than São Paulo, which helps explain why Paulista architects like Mendes da Rocha object so strongly to the word. “Brazil is a colonial nation: It began just a few centuries back,” Mendes da Rocha says. “So we’re condemned to be modern, to be anticolonial, against occupation.” For him and most of the city’s other architects, the term “Brutalism,” imported from the West, constitutes a linguistic occupation. |
| And yet few places seem so obviously marked by the style. Though originally founded in the middle of the 16th century as a Jesuit outpost within the country’s interior highlands, São Paulo didn’t thrive economically until the rise of the South American coffee industry in the early 19th century. Following the Great Depression in the United States, an important market for Brazilian beans, the city’s coffee barons started selling their estates to be converted into apartment blocks. Residential complexes like Rino Levi’s 1944 Prudência Apartment Building, with its entrance framed by colorful Burle Marx-designed tiles, and the iconic sine curve of Niemeyer’s 1961 Edifício Copan, defined the city’s early architectural boom years. | And yet few places seem so obviously marked by the style. Though originally founded in the middle of the 16th century as a Jesuit outpost within the country’s interior highlands, São Paulo didn’t thrive economically until the rise of the South American coffee industry in the early 19th century. Following the Great Depression in the United States, an important market for Brazilian beans, the city’s coffee barons started selling their estates to be converted into apartment blocks. Residential complexes like Rino Levi’s 1944 Prudência Apartment Building, with its entrance framed by colorful Burle Marx-designed tiles, and the iconic sine curve of Niemeyer’s 1961 Edifício Copan, defined the city’s early architectural boom years. |
| São Paulo wouldn’t develop its own distinctive modern architecture until 1948, when João Batista Vilanova Artigas founded the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP), with a curriculum that focused on engineering. During the midcentury, the city’s greatest buildings — such as Artigas’s 1961 boat garage, with its flat sweep of concrete en pointe over eight triangular feet, and Lina Bo Bardi’s 1968 Art Museum of São Paulo, a glass shoe box suspended over an open plaza by a pair of immense concrete brackets — derived their beauty not from smooth surfaces or graceful forms but from technical rigor and sheer audacity. The style they invented would later be known as the Paulista School or, sometimes, Paulista Brutalism, characterized by its counterintuitive juxtaposition of lightness and weight, its vast stretches of raw concrete hovering over the ground as if by sorcery. | São Paulo wouldn’t develop its own distinctive modern architecture until 1948, when João Batista Vilanova Artigas founded the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP), with a curriculum that focused on engineering. During the midcentury, the city’s greatest buildings — such as Artigas’s 1961 boat garage, with its flat sweep of concrete en pointe over eight triangular feet, and Lina Bo Bardi’s 1968 Art Museum of São Paulo, a glass shoe box suspended over an open plaza by a pair of immense concrete brackets — derived their beauty not from smooth surfaces or graceful forms but from technical rigor and sheer audacity. The style they invented would later be known as the Paulista School or, sometimes, Paulista Brutalism, characterized by its counterintuitive juxtaposition of lightness and weight, its vast stretches of raw concrete hovering over the ground as if by sorcery. |
| Artigas, a member of Brazil’s Communist Party starting in 1945, designed the most influential Paulista building for the Faculty of Architecture in 1961. A vast coffered canopy held up by 14 sculptural pylons and 18 vanishingly slim interior columns soars over a 49-foot atrium that doubles as the school’s town square. The building has no exterior doors. Walls rise toward but never reach the ceiling; mere centimeters of air separate heavy volumes where you expect them to meet. The structure seems to hang miraculously overhead as though, released from gravity, it were drifting apart, forever in the process of unmaking itself. The building, and the school of architecture it contains, suggest not only a society that favors shared experience over private space but also a gentler idea of how a building meets the ground: a counternarrative to the violent suppression of nature perpetrated by centuries of colonization and industrialization. | Artigas, a member of Brazil’s Communist Party starting in 1945, designed the most influential Paulista building for the Faculty of Architecture in 1961. A vast coffered canopy held up by 14 sculptural pylons and 18 vanishingly slim interior columns soars over a 49-foot atrium that doubles as the school’s town square. The building has no exterior doors. Walls rise toward but never reach the ceiling; mere centimeters of air separate heavy volumes where you expect them to meet. The structure seems to hang miraculously overhead as though, released from gravity, it were drifting apart, forever in the process of unmaking itself. The building, and the school of architecture it contains, suggest not only a society that favors shared experience over private space but also a gentler idea of how a building meets the ground: a counternarrative to the violent suppression of nature perpetrated by centuries of colonization and industrialization. |
| Five years before the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism’s completion in 1969, a military dictatorship, supported by the United States, came to power in Brazil. Artigas was exiled for a year and both he and Mendes da Rocha were temporarily stripped of their teaching posts. Despite its repressive politics, the regime oversaw a period of considerable economic growth, positioning itself as a new regional power, often in opposition to the American juggernaut steamrolling its way through Latin America. So whatever their political reservations, Artigas and Mendes da Rocha, committed to the city and to resistance against the United States, continued to build for the regime: The former designed schools and public housing projects while the latter crafted a dazzling national pavilion for the 1970 Expo Osaka in pure Paulista style — a sheet of concrete that barely brushed the ground. The historian Monica Junqueira de Camargo, a professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, says that the dictatorship in those years “also wanted to be seen as progressive.” But like the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich producing triumphalist symphonies under Joseph Stalin, these architects still had their chamber works: “The beginning of the Paulista School was in houses,” says the scholar Marlene Acayaba, 70, whose 1987 book, “Houses in São Paulo, 1947-1975,” remains the essential text on the subject. “These houses were the laboratories.” | Five years before the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism’s completion in 1969, a military dictatorship, supported by the United States, came to power in Brazil. Artigas was exiled for a year and both he and Mendes da Rocha were temporarily stripped of their teaching posts. Despite its repressive politics, the regime oversaw a period of considerable economic growth, positioning itself as a new regional power, often in opposition to the American juggernaut steamrolling its way through Latin America. So whatever their political reservations, Artigas and Mendes da Rocha, committed to the city and to resistance against the United States, continued to build for the regime: The former designed schools and public housing projects while the latter crafted a dazzling national pavilion for the 1970 Expo Osaka in pure Paulista style — a sheet of concrete that barely brushed the ground. The historian Monica Junqueira de Camargo, a professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, says that the dictatorship in those years “also wanted to be seen as progressive.” But like the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich producing triumphalist symphonies under Joseph Stalin, these architects still had their chamber works: “The beginning of the Paulista School was in houses,” says the scholar Marlene Acayaba, 70, whose 1987 book, “Houses in São Paulo, 1947-1975,” remains the essential text on the subject. “These houses were the laboratories.” |
| ONE MORNING IN São Paulo, I spent an hour in traffic, weaving through tunnels and roads built over what had once been rivers, past walled-off mansions and banks of commercial high-rises, en route to the neighborhood of Cidade Jardim (Garden City), where Acayaba lives with her husband, the 75-year-old architect Marcos Acayaba, in a house that he designed in 1972. A slender concrete roof arcs gracefully over the lawn — each of its four corners touching the ground — and disappears into thick fronds of tropical gardens like two ends of a rainbow. Glass walls separate the 4,843-square-foot interior from the gardens, outside and inside flowing seamlessly into one another. Inside, there are virtually no closed spaces; it feels like a lung, distended with breath, or a heart pumping blood through an infinite loop of ventricles. “I decided to make no dead ends,” the architect says. “You can always be moving ahead.” | ONE MORNING IN São Paulo, I spent an hour in traffic, weaving through tunnels and roads built over what had once been rivers, past walled-off mansions and banks of commercial high-rises, en route to the neighborhood of Cidade Jardim (Garden City), where Acayaba lives with her husband, the 75-year-old architect Marcos Acayaba, in a house that he designed in 1972. A slender concrete roof arcs gracefully over the lawn — each of its four corners touching the ground — and disappears into thick fronds of tropical gardens like two ends of a rainbow. Glass walls separate the 4,843-square-foot interior from the gardens, outside and inside flowing seamlessly into one another. Inside, there are virtually no closed spaces; it feels like a lung, distended with breath, or a heart pumping blood through an infinite loop of ventricles. “I decided to make no dead ends,” the architect says. “You can always be moving ahead.” |
| By the end of the last century, “moving ahead” in most parts of the world meant moving away from both the forms and politics of Brutalism — even, for the most part, in São Paulo. Consider, for instance, the house that the architect Ruy Ohtake built over the course of 25 years for his mother, the Japanese-Brazilian sculptor and painter Tomie Ohtake, which traces his defection from hard, straight lines to an architecture that, he says, could better represent his “country of colors.” The first part of the house, completed in 1970, is paradigmatic Paulista Brutalism: 3,875 continuous square feet of space, the low roof held up by thick concrete beams, with cell-like bedrooms at the center that force the house’s life into public areas. When Ohtake’s mother bought the neighboring property in 1992, he inserted paraboloid dividers, like Richard Serra sculptures painted in white and blue and yellow, to separate the stark dining room from a dim, cloistral library, its back wall a bank of windows barely withstanding an army of philodendrons. In the final addition, built in 1982, which expanded the house to 7,965 square feet, he opened a 59-foot diameter oval skylight and filled it with opaque glass, framing it in steel like the keel of a blimp. “The Paulista School looks backward,” Ohtake says. “In my work, I try to look toward the future.” | By the end of the last century, “moving ahead” in most parts of the world meant moving away from both the forms and politics of Brutalism — even, for the most part, in São Paulo. Consider, for instance, the house that the architect Ruy Ohtake built over the course of 25 years for his mother, the Japanese-Brazilian sculptor and painter Tomie Ohtake, which traces his defection from hard, straight lines to an architecture that, he says, could better represent his “country of colors.” The first part of the house, completed in 1970, is paradigmatic Paulista Brutalism: 3,875 continuous square feet of space, the low roof held up by thick concrete beams, with cell-like bedrooms at the center that force the house’s life into public areas. When Ohtake’s mother bought the neighboring property in 1992, he inserted paraboloid dividers, like Richard Serra sculptures painted in white and blue and yellow, to separate the stark dining room from a dim, cloistral library, its back wall a bank of windows barely withstanding an army of philodendrons. In the final addition, built in 1982, which expanded the house to 7,965 square feet, he opened a 59-foot diameter oval skylight and filled it with opaque glass, framing it in steel like the keel of a blimp. “The Paulista School looks backward,” Ohtake says. “In my work, I try to look toward the future.” |
| LIKE MODERNISM BEFORE it, Brutalism ultimately failed to bring about the change it had promised. In India, Nehru’s descendants consolidated wealth and power to become an outright political dynasty: May’s re-election of Narendra Modi, a right-wing demagogue, is nothing less than an outright rejection of Nehruvian socialism and secularism; the Indian Trade Promotion Organization’s overnight demolition two years ago of Raj Rewal’s Hall of Nations, a Brutalist masterpiece completed in New Delhi in 1972, was that shift’s architectural analogue. Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, political and economic turmoil in the late 1970s and early 1980s put an abrupt halt to public works projects — and the architecture they’d supported. In Cambodia, state-sponsored Brutalism ended with the rise of the Khmer Rouge in 1975. (Molyvann fled to Switzerland and worked for the United Nations until his return to Cambodia in 1991; many of his contemporaries were murdered.) Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Singapore-based architect and scholar Erik L’Heureux says, access to air conditioning and mass-produced materials like sheet glass rendered natural ventilation and brise-soleil obsolete. Not long after joining the ranks of rich nations in the early 1980s, Singapore followed the lead of the United States and Britain in tearing down many of its Brutalist buildings, replacing them with flashy private developments sealed off from the city by curtain walls (a travesty that continues today with the impending demolition of Pearl Bank Tower in favor of a high-end apartment complex). Such radically open architecture no longer had a place under governments that were encouraging the cultivation of private wealth over public good. | |
| In the United States, Brutalist masterpieces have been threatened since the late 1960s, when Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art and Architecture building, completed in 1963, was damaged in a mysterious fire. By then, Rudolph’s building, with its blind towers and literally abrasive scored-concrete surfaces, was so universally loathed that rumors of arson quickly calcified into oral history. In 1980, after his reputation in America declined, Rudolph began building his most impressive projects in Southeast Asia. Some, like Singapore’s Colonnade, a 28-story commercial and residential tower finished in 1980, referenced his earlier Brutalist works, particularly the Orange County Government Center in Goshen, N.Y., constructed in 1971 from convoluted stacks of concrete rectangles piled like cardboard boxes. | In the United States, Brutalist masterpieces have been threatened since the late 1960s, when Paul Rudolph’s Yale Art and Architecture building, completed in 1963, was damaged in a mysterious fire. By then, Rudolph’s building, with its blind towers and literally abrasive scored-concrete surfaces, was so universally loathed that rumors of arson quickly calcified into oral history. In 1980, after his reputation in America declined, Rudolph began building his most impressive projects in Southeast Asia. Some, like Singapore’s Colonnade, a 28-story commercial and residential tower finished in 1980, referenced his earlier Brutalist works, particularly the Orange County Government Center in Goshen, N.Y., constructed in 1971 from convoluted stacks of concrete rectangles piled like cardboard boxes. |
| While Rudolph built his most famous buildings throughout northeastern America, he was always, L’Heureux says, “fundamentally a tropicalist,” having spent the early part of his career erecting delicate Modernist houses in Sarasota, Fla. And even as Brutalism fell out of favor up north, it moved south, like a weary retiree, to warmer climates. Throughout Florida, Rudolph’s former employee William Morgan continued to build Brutalist-inflected coastal homes, like 1965’s George M. Goodloe House in Ponte Vedra Beach, with whitewashed concrete cubes that are a clear reference to Rudolph’s 1961 Milam Residence on the same stretch of shore. In Hawaii, too, the Russian émigré Vladimir Ossipoff imbued projects like 1962’s IBM building in Honolulu and 1966’s Davies Chapel at the Hawaii Preparatory Academy on the Big Island with elements of Brutalism, the former screened in a modish brise-soleil, the latter built with volcanic stone embedded in its raw concrete walls. But these buildings, for all their beauty and power, lacked the political edge of their counterparts around the world. An architecture of self-interrogation in Europe and of proud defiance in postcolonial equatorial nations never sat comfortably with America’s capitalist triumphalism. | While Rudolph built his most famous buildings throughout northeastern America, he was always, L’Heureux says, “fundamentally a tropicalist,” having spent the early part of his career erecting delicate Modernist houses in Sarasota, Fla. And even as Brutalism fell out of favor up north, it moved south, like a weary retiree, to warmer climates. Throughout Florida, Rudolph’s former employee William Morgan continued to build Brutalist-inflected coastal homes, like 1965’s George M. Goodloe House in Ponte Vedra Beach, with whitewashed concrete cubes that are a clear reference to Rudolph’s 1961 Milam Residence on the same stretch of shore. In Hawaii, too, the Russian émigré Vladimir Ossipoff imbued projects like 1962’s IBM building in Honolulu and 1966’s Davies Chapel at the Hawaii Preparatory Academy on the Big Island with elements of Brutalism, the former screened in a modish brise-soleil, the latter built with volcanic stone embedded in its raw concrete walls. But these buildings, for all their beauty and power, lacked the political edge of their counterparts around the world. An architecture of self-interrogation in Europe and of proud defiance in postcolonial equatorial nations never sat comfortably with America’s capitalist triumphalism. |
| For many critics, Brutalism died decisively in the mid-1970s. The scholar Ruth Verde Zein, whose 2014 essay “Brutalist Connections,” argues in favor of using the term for the Paulista School, also argues that today Brutalism is impossible — tropical or otherwise. The style, she says, explored “the structural constraints and possibilities of the materials at hand.” Those restrictions, like the cultural circumstances that produced them, have since evolved; concrete exteriors on Brutalist-looking buildings are often no more structural than the cloud of glass around Frank Gehry’s 2014 Louis Vuitton Fondation in Paris, a flamboyant bauble of a building that, for all its grace and wonder, stands for nothing but itself. | For many critics, Brutalism died decisively in the mid-1970s. The scholar Ruth Verde Zein, whose 2014 essay “Brutalist Connections,” argues in favor of using the term for the Paulista School, also argues that today Brutalism is impossible — tropical or otherwise. The style, she says, explored “the structural constraints and possibilities of the materials at hand.” Those restrictions, like the cultural circumstances that produced them, have since evolved; concrete exteriors on Brutalist-looking buildings are often no more structural than the cloud of glass around Frank Gehry’s 2014 Louis Vuitton Fondation in Paris, a flamboyant bauble of a building that, for all its grace and wonder, stands for nothing but itself. |
| YET EVEN AS THE structural and political principles of Brutalism have fallen by the wayside, the style’s urban aesthetic endures: Just look at São Paulo’s Casa Cubo, designed in 2008 by Suzana Glogowski, 47, the architecture director of Marcio Kogan’s firm, MK27. The home may not be strictly Brutalist, but it certainly looks it, with a massive concrete prism, 22 by 39 by 48 feet, floating over a ground floor lined in glass, its rough gray surface stained with lichen and punctured by windows that light up at night like eyes. The garden, designed by the Brazilian landscape architect Isabel Duprat, ambushes the house, but even as the heliconias advance, the structure reflects the bulk of the city: Standing on the roof terrace, surrounded by solar panels and cisterns, stainless steel towers form a phalanx as assertive as the plants below. When a graphic designer commissioned the house for her family in the wealthy neighborhood of Jardim Europa, recalls Glogowski, the owner asked for something “more extreme” than MK27’s usual pristine compositions in wood and glass. The architect, born and raised in the city, knew what to do: “Here,” she says, “we think in concrete.” | YET EVEN AS THE structural and political principles of Brutalism have fallen by the wayside, the style’s urban aesthetic endures: Just look at São Paulo’s Casa Cubo, designed in 2008 by Suzana Glogowski, 47, the architecture director of Marcio Kogan’s firm, MK27. The home may not be strictly Brutalist, but it certainly looks it, with a massive concrete prism, 22 by 39 by 48 feet, floating over a ground floor lined in glass, its rough gray surface stained with lichen and punctured by windows that light up at night like eyes. The garden, designed by the Brazilian landscape architect Isabel Duprat, ambushes the house, but even as the heliconias advance, the structure reflects the bulk of the city: Standing on the roof terrace, surrounded by solar panels and cisterns, stainless steel towers form a phalanx as assertive as the plants below. When a graphic designer commissioned the house for her family in the wealthy neighborhood of Jardim Europa, recalls Glogowski, the owner asked for something “more extreme” than MK27’s usual pristine compositions in wood and glass. The architect, born and raised in the city, knew what to do: “Here,” she says, “we think in concrete.” |
| Increasingly, the rest of the world does, too. By the end of 2007, the majority of Earth’s population lived in cities: The metropolitan age that Brutalist architecture anticipated is now reality. The year before, the Pritzker committee recognized the work of Mendes da Rocha, predicting, if not instigating, a decade-long explosion in popularity for Brutalist buildings. If we abandoned the style because we lost hope in its promise of a better future, perhaps we’ve returned to it because we need its hard-edge optimism more than ever. Staring down the crisis of climate change, it makes sense to look to permeable, hopeful Brutalism to inspire our next future. | Increasingly, the rest of the world does, too. By the end of 2007, the majority of Earth’s population lived in cities: The metropolitan age that Brutalist architecture anticipated is now reality. The year before, the Pritzker committee recognized the work of Mendes da Rocha, predicting, if not instigating, a decade-long explosion in popularity for Brutalist buildings. If we abandoned the style because we lost hope in its promise of a better future, perhaps we’ve returned to it because we need its hard-edge optimism more than ever. Staring down the crisis of climate change, it makes sense to look to permeable, hopeful Brutalism to inspire our next future. |
| On a gray, humid morning, the 48-year-old architects Cristiane Muniz and her husband, Fernando Viégas — two of four partners in the São Paulo-based firm Una Arquitetos — drove me an hour west of the city center to the suburb of Cotia to visit a home they’d completed in 2017. Called Cotia House, the 4,300-square-foot structure explodes from the side of its gently sloping plot in a long thrust of concrete and steel, lifted off the ground on a pair of skinny columns, sharp as a lightning bolt. Curving beds of tropical grasses bend around a jagged, papyrus-studded reflecting pool that weaves between the sun-filled living areas. A mural painted by the street artist Zezão, best known for his installations deep in the city’s sewer system, provides a backdrop of circles, whorls, hooks and apostrophes in shades of cerulean and navy behind the ramps connecting the dining room to the bedrooms. Even here, in the gated suburbs, surrounded by terra-cotta-roofed houses peaking out from coils of bougainvillea, Cotia House is consciously urban. | On a gray, humid morning, the 48-year-old architects Cristiane Muniz and her husband, Fernando Viégas — two of four partners in the São Paulo-based firm Una Arquitetos — drove me an hour west of the city center to the suburb of Cotia to visit a home they’d completed in 2017. Called Cotia House, the 4,300-square-foot structure explodes from the side of its gently sloping plot in a long thrust of concrete and steel, lifted off the ground on a pair of skinny columns, sharp as a lightning bolt. Curving beds of tropical grasses bend around a jagged, papyrus-studded reflecting pool that weaves between the sun-filled living areas. A mural painted by the street artist Zezão, best known for his installations deep in the city’s sewer system, provides a backdrop of circles, whorls, hooks and apostrophes in shades of cerulean and navy behind the ramps connecting the dining room to the bedrooms. Even here, in the gated suburbs, surrounded by terra-cotta-roofed houses peaking out from coils of bougainvillea, Cotia House is consciously urban. |
| Muniz and Viégas believe, as did their teachers at FAU-USP, that even houses like these, situated beyond the sprawl, have something to say about urban life. As professors at the Escola da Cidade (School of the City) in downtown São Paulo, they’ve also been witness to a new generation of architects more committed than ever to the city. “Our generation lived at a time when public space was undervalued,” Muniz says. “This generation understands that it’s important to occupy those spaces.” In a period when the government no longer creates as many parks or greenways, Viégas says that private homes become a way to experiment with shaping shared environment. | Muniz and Viégas believe, as did their teachers at FAU-USP, that even houses like these, situated beyond the sprawl, have something to say about urban life. As professors at the Escola da Cidade (School of the City) in downtown São Paulo, they’ve also been witness to a new generation of architects more committed than ever to the city. “Our generation lived at a time when public space was undervalued,” Muniz says. “This generation understands that it’s important to occupy those spaces.” In a period when the government no longer creates as many parks or greenways, Viégas says that private homes become a way to experiment with shaping shared environment. |
| The day after visiting Cotia, I drove along a winding highway through mountains draped with what remains of São Paulo’s dense Atlantic rain forest to the beach town of Ubatuba, where the architect Angelo Bucci, 54, founder and principal architect of the firm SPBR — short for São Paulo, Brazil — built a pair of Paulista houses on a steep slope overlooking the sea. The second of the two houses, designed in 2014, looks much like its Brutalist predecessors: a hulking concrete box lifted on four concrete columns, its external staircase forming a diagonal gash across its southern facade. From the road, the house appears as a solid mass, half swallowed by the surrounding forest. | The day after visiting Cotia, I drove along a winding highway through mountains draped with what remains of São Paulo’s dense Atlantic rain forest to the beach town of Ubatuba, where the architect Angelo Bucci, 54, founder and principal architect of the firm SPBR — short for São Paulo, Brazil — built a pair of Paulista houses on a steep slope overlooking the sea. The second of the two houses, designed in 2014, looks much like its Brutalist predecessors: a hulking concrete box lifted on four concrete columns, its external staircase forming a diagonal gash across its southern facade. From the road, the house appears as a solid mass, half swallowed by the surrounding forest. |
| Two plots down on the same road, the first Ubatuba house, completed in 2009, could be an X-ray of its younger sibling. A concrete shelf bursts from the top of the plot at street level and rushes out over the forest. Wooden louvers attached to an exposed system of weights and pulleys, like flies in a Broadway theater, slide up and down to protect the raised verandas from the sun. Open staircases drop through the canopy of jabuticaba trees, their trunks bulbous with ebony berries, and embaubas, with leaves like outstretched hands, connecting glassed-in rooms suspended from the structure above. Bucci conceived of the 3,700-square-foot house, he says, “almost like a Calder” — a mobile dangling over the forest floor. If Artigas’s building for the architecture school feels like it might float off at any moment, then this one feels like it’s already gone: the ghost of a house haunting the jungle. | Two plots down on the same road, the first Ubatuba house, completed in 2009, could be an X-ray of its younger sibling. A concrete shelf bursts from the top of the plot at street level and rushes out over the forest. Wooden louvers attached to an exposed system of weights and pulleys, like flies in a Broadway theater, slide up and down to protect the raised verandas from the sun. Open staircases drop through the canopy of jabuticaba trees, their trunks bulbous with ebony berries, and embaubas, with leaves like outstretched hands, connecting glassed-in rooms suspended from the structure above. Bucci conceived of the 3,700-square-foot house, he says, “almost like a Calder” — a mobile dangling over the forest floor. If Artigas’s building for the architecture school feels like it might float off at any moment, then this one feels like it’s already gone: the ghost of a house haunting the jungle. |
| It’s not an obviously Brutalist building, but it does take Brutalism’s logic of transparency to new extremes: a house made from a few rooms, a few staircases, a pair of columns like tree trunks; a house so porous that the distinction between indoor and outdoor becomes meaningless. A house that does not, as Kahn wrote 80 years ago, “convey the feeling of its eternity” but rather the eternity of the landscape that surrounds it. Mendes da Rocha, it turns out, has been right all along. Brutalism is nothing. | It’s not an obviously Brutalist building, but it does take Brutalism’s logic of transparency to new extremes: a house made from a few rooms, a few staircases, a pair of columns like tree trunks; a house so porous that the distinction between indoor and outdoor becomes meaningless. A house that does not, as Kahn wrote 80 years ago, “convey the feeling of its eternity” but rather the eternity of the landscape that surrounds it. Mendes da Rocha, it turns out, has been right all along. Brutalism is nothing. |
| Brazil production: André Scarpa. | Brazil production: André Scarpa. |