http://PauloMendesdaRocha A world guide for architecture and travel. Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:20:46 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 http://www.checkonsite.com/mube/comment-page-1/#comment-114 Quote from Specifier Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:10:02 +0000 http://www.checkonsite.com/?p=1264#comment-114 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. 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.

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