Musue Brasileiro de Escultura (MuBE)
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Location:
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Rua Alemanha 218
Sao Paulo
Brazil
coordinates:
lat -23.5731773, long -46.6766853
Building names(s): Musue Brasileiro de Escultura (MuBE)
Architect/Designer:
Paulo Mendes da Rocha
architect website:
Other Information:
Completion date:
Function:
Last modified: 3 June, 2009 | Suggested by LT
The Brazilian Museum of Sculpture (1986-95), his most famous work, aimed to symbolically join two districts of the city. He used the simplest techniques at hand – pre-stressed concrete and welding – to gain the greatest possible effect. A sixty metre concrete span was set on two columns, as a portico; below, the site’s topography was manipulated to create a subterranean hollow, sheltering an open air theatre. The entrance to the gallery space is found here, at the end of a downward ramp. In a spare landscape of water, gardens and concrete created by the celebrated Brazilian landscape architect Robert Burle Marx, the concrete span stands as a great sculpture in itself, playing mass against absence, and granting some obscure meaning upon the place. So too the Plaza of the Patriarch (1992-2002), a site in the historic centre and architectural heart of São Paulo, where Mendes da Rocha re-pedestrianised a bus terminus, restored Portuguese mosaic paving stones, and built a massive white steel canopy above the underground arcade, as a portal between the old and the new. The slope of the canopy dips down to the human level and rises upward to the grand height of the historic facades. It’s a new frame through which to view the city.