THE FOLLOWING REVIEW was written between my visit to the opening of the “Constructed Geographies” exhibition in Portugal two months ago, and the recent death of its senior curator, Jean-Louis Cohen, at the age of seventy-four. For the architecture world, the loss of this formidable scholar and teacher is a calamity; for me, it has come as a particular blow. Professor Cohen was my primary master’s thesis advisor at the Institute of Fine Arts over a decade ago, and has remained the north star of my historical and critical firmament ever since. His final exhibition stands as a testament to his enduring influence on the field and on culture at large. I’m only grateful to have had the opportunity to have seen him one final time in May, taking in the scene and greeting well-wishers at the Casa da Arquitectura. He is missed, and missed terribly.
“A PROPHET IS NOT* without honor, save in his own country.” An architect didn’t say that; Christ did. But it was once said about an architect, namely Frank Lloyd Wright, in John Dos Passos’s 1936 book, The Big Money. In the mid-1930s, Wright wasn’t reckoned very honorable around these parts—well after the breakthroughs of his early career, just before the breakthroughs of his late career, the designer at middle age was mostly known among his compatriots for a couple of well-publicized adulteries and the occasional brush with the law. Between the end of the First World War and the start of the Second, he enjoyed a far loftier reputation overseas: in Japan, for example, where some thirty-four English loanwords are said to have entered the language for the express purpose of describing Wright’s buildings.
Plenty of other architects have struggled to find a receptive audience at home, only to take their show on the road and then return, trailing clouds of glory. Paulo Mendes da Rocha is one such architect—with one difference. As with so many of his prophet-predecessors, the Brazilian rose to fame preaching a radical architectural gospel, only to be crucified by cultural officialdom and then resurrected in public esteem toward the tail end of his career. On the whole, his is a happy story. His success was crowned with a Pritzker Prize in 2006, after which he remained active for another fifteen years before his death at ninety-two, attended by the tweeted appreciations of prominent brasileiros from President Lula da Silva on down. But unlike Wright and others, Mendes da Rocha’s domestic woes kept him from making as big a splash abroad as he might have otherwise done. And so he decided, apparently, to get even.
In late May, the double exhibitions “Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha” and “Paulo: Beyond Drawing”—the first a comprehensive survey of the modernist master’s work, the latter an intimate portrait-in-film of his ideas and persona—debuted simultaneously at the Casa da Arquitectura in the seaside town of Matosinhos, Portugal. The museum, established in 2007, is just a few miles north of the bustling city of Porto; it is considerably farther from the even more bustling city of São Paulo, Brazil, where Mendes da Rocha made his name in the 1950s and the site of most of his key public projects, including such landmarks as his renovated Pinacoteca do Estado and the Serra Dourada football stadium. The Portuguese shows, which both run until February 25 of next year, represent the Casa’s first large-scale public exploration of the Mendes da Rocha archive, willed by the architect to the institution in 2019. Given the powerful influence that his primal, emotive, concrete-and-glass stylistics had on his countrymen (second only, perhaps, to the futuristic lyricism of Oscar Niemeyer), it may be thought curious that Mendes da Rocha’s extensive cache of models, drawings, photographs, and correspondence would land across the Atlantic, on the shores of Brazil’s erstwhile colonizer. As it happens, a lot of Brazilians think it is very curious.
“Architecture, collections, and barbarism,” blared one headline in the Folha de São Paolo newspaper in early 2020. Another simply stated that “Fellow architects lament the choice.” The designer’s decision to export his legacy fell on the Brazilian design community like a kind of collective disinheritance, and Mendes da Rocha did nothing to soften the blow when he explained his rationale, stating (according to his widow) that in Brazil his work would be “kept in tubes in the middle of a corridor”—a cutting slight, and a surprising one given that Mendes da Rocha himself had worked with and for so many of nation’s leading schools and museums. Mendes da Rocha designed very few buildings abroad, and even those tend to vibrate with a distinct samba energy; see for example his Brazil Pavilion for Expo 70 in Osaka, a space-frame slab floating hugely over a hilly ersatz landscape, equal parts brash and sensuous. Why on earth would such an architect elect to spend his afterlife in Portugal?
For a number of reasons, as the Casa installations make plain. Under the exacting curation of the late French scholar Jean-Louis Cohen and the University of Pennsylvania’s Vanessa Grossman, “Constructed Geographies” makes a project-by-project case for Mendes da Rocha as a cultural actor on a very large, very complicated stage. Born in 1928 in the coastal southeastern city of Vitória, he was at first drawn to a life at sea, only to bristle at the martial strictures of the Naval School in Rio. That nonconformism seems to have been genetic, the elder Mendes da Rocha having moved the family to São Paulo following his involvement in the 1932 anti-government uprising there. For the son, politics—and the search for a more expansive form of Brazilian identity—would determine much of what followed: In Mendes da Rocha’s first projects, in particular the decade-before-its-time Paulistano Athletic Club of 1957, he built on the democratic vision of older contemporaries like Lúcio Costa and Lina Bo Bardi to articulate a still more strident, confrontational brand of tropicalismo. Known in time as the Paulista School, the tendency’s reliance on exposed concrete owed something to the emerging Brutalist current in Europe. But for Mendes da Rocha, the material promised something more than just a fresh, modernist take on monumentality; it was “masonry for the masses,” as critic Edwin Heathcote once called it, the elemental substance of a poured-in-place utopia. Paired with the openness and complexity of his interior schemes (especially apparent, as Grossman and Cohen point out, in his gorgeous sectional drafts), Mendes da Rocha’s concrete radicalism put him in a class by himself.
Swift ascent was followed by the abrupt hammer-drop. The occasion, unsurprisingly, was politics. In 1964, after a military coup toppled the government of President João Goulart, the newly installed junta revoked Mendes da Rocha’s license and removed him from his post at the University of São Paulo. “I had five children and I didn’t want to abandon the country,” he told a reporter years later. Instead, the avowed socialist stayed on in a state of professional limbo, shut out of some commissions, demoted on others. In the inscrutable way of dictatorships, no formal reason was ever given for his being sidelined, and his marginalization was never more than partial—the Osaka pavilion moved forward with his involvement, though “Constructed Geographies” reveals how much of its original program was blocked by the regime, which also insisted on the building’s demolition after the Expo, despite local opposition. Japanese dictionaries never got to absorb any Mendes da Rocha vocab, and Mendes da Rocha was robbed of the chance to become the international presence he might have been.
Was that what he wanted? Yes, perhaps, though on his own terms. As revealed through dozens of dangling video screens, the Mendes da Rocha of “Paulo: Beyond Drawing” (curated by Rui Furtado and Marta Moreira) was a thinker of immense scope, garrulous and kvetchy and worried, inveigling on behalf of a design approach that pushes “towards the horizon of architecture” and allows “a transgressive occupation of space.” With Brazil’s return to democracy in the 1980s, Mendes da Rocha returned to favor, and the interview footage shows him settling comfortably into the role of grand old man; he remained as he always had been, a sole practitioner, often collaborating with friends and former students but committed to pursuing his own formal and theoretical fancies. His cantankerous humanism encompassed the whole of his field, and the whole world with it. No wonder he didn’t want to spend his afterlife at home.
Mendes da Rocha’s posthumous emigration may look a lot like retrospective spite, a bit of score-settling with the nation that rejected him so many years ago. But then others have done the same thing, for a host of reasons: Costa’s estate also donated his archive to the Casa da Arquitectura, likewise citing the quality of its facilities; Portugal’s own Alváro Siza triangulated his between Matosinhos, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, and the still higher-profile Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal (though that may have had something to do with the Casa declining to execute his renovation scheme). In the case of Mendes da Rocha, the recent tumult in Brazil’s political life does make the loss of his particular cultural patrimony rather hard to bear. “Beyond Drawing” acknowledges this, with an image of a protestor holding a sign that reads, “I want to live in Paolo Mendes da Rocha’s Brazil.” So would everybody—and Mendes da Rocha would have liked nothing better than to give us all the chance, a more likely motive perhaps for wanting to scatter his professional ashes as far and wide as he did.
That’s certainly the impression one gets from the exhibitions; it’s also what one senses on visiting the only major public building by the architect not in his native country. Built in 2015, his National Coach Museum in Lisbon is a lighter, ghostlier sort of building than his better-known work. Perched on a bluff above the waterfront, it gazes westward as though “over the rim of the world,” to paraphrase Wright, toward the ocean and home.
“Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha” and “Paulo: Beyond Drawing” are on view at the Casa da Arquitectura in Matosinhos, Portugal, through February 24, 2024.
