Risky Space E-Book

Otavio Leonidio

• Herausgeber: Romano Guerra Editora
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Latin America: Thoughts
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 230

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The third book of the collection "Latin America: Thoughts" brings together texts written by Otavio Leonidio since 2005. Dispersed until now, the texts address three main themes: the thought and action of the great ideologist of Brazilian modern architecture – Lúcio Costa; the presence of Brazilian modern architecture in the contemporary production (here represented by the works of Angelo Bucci, Christian de Portzamparc, Álvaro Siza and Lelé); and, finally, the complex relation between contemporary art and architecture.

Leseprobe

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

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 before that unlike what happens with the Niemeyer house, in Bucci’s project plastic freedom is not ascribed to the roof slab, but rather to the basement. The formulation is imprecise. I would do better to state that unlike Niemeyer, freedom is not in the air, but on the ground. This is a radical inversion.

House in East Hampton, model, East Hampton NY. Angelo Bucci, 2007-2008. Photo Nelson Kon

In the capacity of leading Brazilian modern designer, Niemeyer was much too focused on the task of demonstrating how vigorous our architecture was, especially with regard to structure. Each new project was therefore matched by a strict requirement – namely, demonstrating how innovative and, especially, how structurally virile Brazilian architecture was. Niemeyer’s architecture has in fact always been doubly monumental – both in the sense of a landmark that celebrates a historic feat (i.e. the miraculous fulfillment of our modernization);8 and in the sense of an object that elevates itself from the ground and, in reaching out into the air, stands out in the landscape – preferably against a free, unimpeded horizon. Put differently, his was an architecture that always conceived of space as a surrounding void, whose main function is to favor the contemplation of a monumental object.

Bucci, on the contrary, is particularly challenged by spatial research; the enormous attention he imparts to the design of the ground is an expression of that. He knows that walking is an activity forever tied to the shape of the ground; that, as per the teachings of Le Corbusier, “the plan is a generator. The plan holds in itself the essence of sensation.”9 Though formally freer, his floor designs aren’t random, let alone purposeless. They reflect not only the corbusian premise that life is walking, and space a construction that takes place in lifeworld, but also the understanding that walking always implies choosing between an objective trajectory and simply wandering.

House in East Hampton, transversal section and elevation, East Hampton NY. Angelo Bucci, 2007-2008. SPBR Arquitetos Collection

Thus, there is no reason at all to match up the designs of floor slabs and structure. On the contrary: While a total disconnection (as in the East Hampton house) may not always be the case, it is at any rate important to make explicit that these are separate instances (and not by chance, as a rule of thumb, Bucci’s covering slabs are not accessible to the public). This contrast is indeed emphasized through design: If primary structure and roof slabs are oftentimes orthogonal and rectangular, the geometry of floor slabs is usually freer and uncertain.

The Cotia house exemplifies that principle. A superstructure composed of two robust pillars and four large articulated inverted beams supports two slabs – a roof slab and a floor one. The roof slab runs flush with the main beams; the floor slab hangs from it. The contrast between both designs is unambiguous. Whereas the roof slab tends to fall in line with the rectangular beamwork design, never surpassing its limits, the floor slab frankly exceeds the projection of the roof slab, at once causing space to overflow and eroding the volume-object integrity. The plan for an apartment building in Lugano, Switzerland attests that the possibilities of that principle are far from depleted. On the other hand, the Church of the Nativity suggests that something gets lost when the opposition is diluted.

As in Carapicuíba, Bucci combines in Cotia two recurrent structural gestures in Brazilian architecture – one more closely associated with Oscar Niemeyer, the other with Affonso Reidy. And again, I believe the project’s interest lies in causing the spaces that one and the other gestures generate to collide. But clearly there is another modernist master involved in both projects (and not in these two alone), namely the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. There is no reason for surprise. For if, as I believe, one of the trademarks of Bucci’s spatial research is the attention he gives to the design of the ground, it is only natural to resort to the work of the chief designer of the Brazilian modernist ground.

House in Cotia, living floor, Cotia SP. Angelo Bucci, 2008-2009. SPBR Arquitetos Collection

House in Cotia, transversal section, Cotia SP. Angelo Bucci, 2008-2009. SPBR Arquitetos Collection

From Burle Marx, Bucci inherits not only a certain graphic style (marked by the combination of line segments and curves) but also an inclination toward a picturesque approach to ground floor design – an approach I tend to associate with a desire to elevate floor design to the status that modernism has always ascribed to painting, and never to floor designs.

Natividade’s Church, model, Culiacan MX. Angelo Bucci and João Paulo M. de Faria, 2009. Photo Nelson Kon

And nothing seems more auspicious to me than the attempted coexistence of these three modernist masters – Niemeyer, Reidy and Burle Marx – in the work of a young contemporary architect such as Angelo Bucci. For as many Brazilian architects are aware, Niemeyer’s relationships with the latter two were always tense, and occasionally outright conflicted. I am not referring to the realm of personal relationships alone – to the resentment that the episode of the CTA competition in São José dos Campos, won by Niemeyer, bred in Reidy (an episode which, partly at least, explains Reidy’s boycott of the Brasília competition, whose judge panel included Niemeyer); or the angry public breakup of Burle Marx and Niemeyer, as a consequence of Burle-Marx’s critique of Niemeyer’s proposition to build a monument in Parque do Flamengo. I refer to the idea (which has prevailed in Brazil since Max Bill, in the early 1950s, opposed Niemeyer’s formal barbarism to Reidy’s rigorous, rational constructivism10 that the architecture of these two master of Brazilian modern architecture represented two antagonistic, irreconcilable models – the first, associated with plastic freedom (characteristic of Rio de Janeiro School), the second, with formal containment and constructivist rigor (characteristic of São Paulo School).

Subversively so, Bucci does not regard the works of Niemeyer (and Burle Marx) and Reidy as antagonistic, let alone irreconcilable. His démarche is not, however, merely conciliatory. On the contrary, it expresses the confidence that the juxtaposition of two, or better yet, three different approaches might eventually give place to an unusual, hybrid, impure – in a word, contemporary – development of Brazilian modern architecture. Needless to say how far removed he is from the mourners of modernism, with their nostalgic revivals. So if there is a lesson to be learned from his practice, it has to do with the ability to show that a productive relationship with the modernist tradition need be neither neo-modernist (that is, nostalgic, reverential, melancholic) nor postmodernist (through simple image quotation or linguistic deconstruction); that it can pertain to critical interpretation. Naturally, such an attitude implies assuming risks. How far is Bucci willing to go in this risky quest? We shall wait and see.

NOTES

EN. Article previous published at: Otavio Leonidio, “Espaço de risco/Risky Space,” Monolito 1, February/March 2011, 30-41.

1. Otavio Leonídio, “O túmulo do samba,” Projeto Design 371, January 2011, 96-97.

2. The subject was approached in Renato Anelli, “O Museu de Arte de São Paulo: o museu transparente e a dessacralização da arte,” Arquitextos 112-01, Vitruvius, September 2009, www.vitruvius.com.br/revistas/read/arquitextos/10.112/22.

3. Hugo Segawa, “Pavilhão do Brasil em Sevilha: deu em vão,” Projeto Design 138, February 1991, 34-39.

4. The rationale borrows from the reading of Brazilian modern architecture which Sophia Silva Telles has delivered in multiple contexts.

5. The main reason for this is the fact that, like everything that descends from Mário de Andrade’s brand of modernism, Brazilian architecture too had to be thematic, meaning that it had to adapt to the theme of Brazility. And, of course, it is much easier to thematize the visible (the built thing) than it is the invisible (the gap).

6. Giulio Carlo Argan, “Arquitetura moderna no Brasil,” in Depoimento de uma geração: arquitetura moderna brasileira, ed. Alberto Xavier (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2003), 158-163.

7. Sophia Silva V. Telles, “Museu da Escultura visto por Sophia Telles,” AU – Arquitetura e Urbanismo 32, October/November 1990.

8. Which makes our modern architecture totemic, more so than it is iconic.

9. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret – Oeuvre Complete 1910-1929 (Zurique: Les Éditions d’Architecture Erlenbarch, 1946), 33. The translation is mine.

10. Max Bill, “Max Bill critica a nossa moderna arquitetura,” Manchete 60, June 13, 1953, 38-39.

christian de portzamparc the invader

translated by carlos eduardo dias comas

Cidade da Música, atual Cidade das Artes, croquis, Rio de Janeiro RJ. Christian de Portzamparc, 2002-2013. Foto Otavio Leonidio

They say in Brazil that the form of the building is an echo of the Brazilian architecture of the 1950s.Christian de Portzamparc, Filiations franco-brésiliennes, 2006.

The acceleration of work on the construction site of Cidade da Música [City of Music] found a curious parallel in the increasing number of articles about this project in the local press. Unfortunately, nothing that has been written addresses the qualities (or the eventual lack of qualities) of its design, signed by the French architect Christian de Portzamparc (Casablanca, 1944). Led by the newspaper O Globo, the local press approach to the construction of that large cultural ensemble follows a single point of view, that of building cost or, more precisely, the fact that it far surpasses the original budget. Of course these articles are not signed by architects. As usual, they remain silent.1

Although predictable, the silence of the architectural milieu is at once troubling and eloquent; after all, from the standpoint of Brazilian architecture this is not – or at least should not be seen as – an ordinary project.

Brazilian architects like to think that, in contrast with everything made in Brazil under the flag of modern art, Brazilian modern architecture was a true exceptional achievement, mainly due to its so celebrated international acceptance.This is, at least, what we have been repeating since 1943, when the Museum of Modern Art of New York – MoMA supposedly surrendered to the force and originality of Brazil’s new architecture.

We know today how much this perception owes to the ideas of the great champion of Brazilian modern architecture, Lúcio Costa (1902-1998). This phenomenon did not go unnoticed: Ever since the 1990s, Brazilian scholars have been proficient in identifying (and in some cases, denouncing) the narrative fabric or the discoursive assemblage of Brazilian modern architecture, pinpointing as a rule to Costa’s utterances as the origin of this discoursive trope.2

On the other hand, Brazilian historiography seems to be aloof from another dimension of Brazilian modern architecture – namely, how the conception or image of this architecture marked countless European architects, in particular those who completed their studies throughout the 1960s.3

My own acknowledgement of these phenomena took place abroad, in the beginning of the 1990s, when I worked in the Parisian office of Christian de Portzamparc. I was struck at once by the constant mentions of Brazilian architects in that working place. Niemeyer, Reidy, Costa – these and other names filled our conversations and projects. And there were also names I had never heard of. I remember hearing about Bina Fonyat (an architect whose existence I simply ignored then) and how ashamed I was to say that I didn’t know his design for the Castro Alves Theater, in Salvador. By that time Portzamparc traveled a lot to Brazil (almost always on vacation, with his Brazilian-born wife, the designer and architect Elizabeth de Portzamparc); each one of those trips was stamped by the enthusiastic discovery of a new feature of Brazilian architecture.

Later on, there was an episode that made a big impression on me, when, after two years at the office, I decided to leave France. The day I was going home, from a public phone in Charles de Gaulle Airport, I called Portzamparc. I felt uneasy and he certainly realized that; then, he told me something I will never forget:

You can be something I always wanted to be but I will never be able to: a Brazilian architect.4

That happened in March, 1993. Portzamparc was then 49 years old; he had not yet received the renowned Pritzker Prize but since the inauguration of his Cité de la Musique in Paris (1990) he was already well known outside France. Among other things, he belonged to a particular group of European architects – those who had intensely lived the 80s (that is, the overwhelming vogue of postmodernism) and now, in the beginning of the 90s, felt increasingly attracted by European architecture from the period between the World Wars and by Brazilian architecture from the 50s. So he belonged to the group (initially called neo-moderns) that, in the beginning of the 90s, started to rehabilitate the architecture of the modern movement.

Rem Koolhaas might be included in this group. In 1993 Koolhaas was not the celebrity he is nowadays; he hadn’t published some of his most notorious texts (though his famous Delirious New York had already been published), and his ideas were just starting to gain the impact they have today in international debates.

But to me, Koolhaas was part of a special category of architects: Those who manifestly worshiped Brazilian modern architecture. After all, I had not forgotten what he said in an interview from the 1990s. Like Portzamparc, Koolhaas had an impossible dream to fulfill:

Until I was fourteen... I wanted to be some sort of Brazilian architect.5

As in most statements made by members of that group, the mood of Koolhaas’ speech was confessional; one perceives in it a blend of melancholy and hope, as if a close affinity united his own youth to the naïf, wild, uncompromising force – to the freshness of Brazilian modern architecture.

Significantly, Koolhaas’ discourse was essentially different from the one employed by members of the previous generation. To them, Brasília, especially, was everything but freshness, vitality, promise. On the contrary, it was a mistake, and might as well be considered a fraud, an attempt to cover up the background irrationality that characterized the process of modernity in general, and the modern movement in particular.

Cidade da Música, currently Cidade das Artes, Rio de Janeiro RJ. Christian de Portzamparc, 2002-2013. Photo Nelson Kon

One of the characters of Simone de Beauvoir’s novel Les belles images