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Joaquim Guedes, 1932-2008

This blog is mourning the death of Brazilian architect Joaquim Guedes last Sunday in Sao Paulo.

Joaquim Guedes’ work is fundamental for understanding Brazilian architecture in the second half of the XXth century. Departing from the rationalism or brutalism of the so called Escola Paulista (São Paulo´s school) in the 1950s, Guedes developed a unique response to the challenges of Brazilian modern architecture, one that is much closer to the local demands and tectonic responses. Guedes understands “architectural design as the art of building”.
Born in 1932, the first of 15 siblings, Guedes graduated in 1954 from the University of São Paulo where he was influenced by Corbusier’s methods (but not its formal solutions) and Aalto’s materiality. Aalto would continue to be a strong reference in his works as well as other professors and pioneers of the Escola Paulista: Vilanova Artigas, Oswaldo Bratke and Eduardo Knesse de Mello. With them Guedes shares the belief in the tectonics as a base for a coherent architecture.

Having the opportunity to work on all scales, from objects to renovations to hospitals to entire cities, Guedes strikes us for his objectivity and rationality. Against anything superfluous, Guedes has always criticized Brazilian Modern Architecture of the 50s and 60s for its exaggerated formalism. For him, the most important is the submission to social programs, technology, economy and human activities, which come before expressionism and personal creation.
His work is also outstanding for the rigorous detailing (not a stronghold of Brazilian Modernism) , which pushes Guedes’ work to a higher level. Rigour and detailing has been a trademark of Guedes as a professor also. Teaching since 1958 at the School of Architecture of the University of São Paulo, Guedes has been a strong reference throughout the last 30 years. He also taught in Strasbourg (France) between 1970-1973. His incisive rational process can be summarized in his own words: “the more I doubt, inquire and criticize, the more I feel closer to knowledge and truth”.

Working with his wife Liliana from 1954 to 1978, Guedes architectural talent was manifested very early. He was only 24 years old when in 1956 and his entry for the Brasilia’s plan competition broke up with the Charter of Athens. Still debated and studied today, his proposal for Brasilia presents a city based on quotidian experiences able to grow and expand with the pace of Brazilian modernization and consequent urbanization.
In 1957 he designed the J. Guedes house (his father) in a difficult site (30 x 150 ft) for a large family. In this house the principles of his later work: rationality and tectonics, are already laid out in an incipient manner. Shortly after (1958) he designed the Cunha Lima house which made him famous with the prize at the VII São Paulo Bienal. At the Cunha Lima house the exposed reinforced concrete structure that was the trademark of the Paulista School is reinterpreted with emphasis on economy of means and maximization of spaces for social life. For Guedes, architecture has always been an rational and economic way to materialize spaces for the needs of society. In the Cunha Lima house, as would be common in all his buildings, the structural solution is very important and the economy of columns increase the flexibility of interior spaces.

The same would occur in his own house (Liliana and Joaquim Guedes house) where the fantastic slabs continue outside the plan and work as shading device. In this house the outstanding detailing is fully harmonized with the overall plan and the exposed reinforced concrete slabs are humanized by the wooden fenestration subordinated to the structure.

In the 1970s Guedes had the opportunity to design and build entire cities in the Brazilian backlands and the Amazon Jungle. The city of Carajás (1973) , Marabá (1973) and Barcarena (1980) in the amazonian state of Pará where designed as part of a major mining project in which Guedes worked from the beginning, influencing even the path of the 400 miles railway that connects it to the port. Distant …. From the major cities of Belém and … from Brasília, the design of those city plans included a complex logistics of transportation and labor, a task up to Guedes’ rationality.
In the design and construction of the city of Caraíba (1976) in Bahia’s backland, Guedes faced a completely different task. Caraíba is located in a very dry region of the Brazilian sertão (dry savana) where the challenge was to shade and protect from the hot winds. Guedes solved this problem with little shaded spaces instead of large plazas and a high respect to the traditional local way of building guided him towards very simple facades whose elegance adds a delicate touch to the hard life of the sertanejos.
Guedes focus on economy instead of aesthetic expressionism guided him to think of the Brazilian slums, for instance, not as a problem but a solution since it reveals the amazing capacity that people have to build and overcome daily problems.
Structure, economy, rationality and emphasis on quotidian life might be the major forces behind Guedes architecture but are not enough to explain the strength of his major works. To all those we need to add an extremely developed sensibility of a humanist.

We will miss Joaquim Guedes

inspiration

Ingrid Froelich collects stories about what inspires people and I was honored to be interviewed thanks to our project 365 special days but ended up talking about Studio Toró because it has been more active in me

mine and other interviews are here:

www.icecreamisnicecream.com

who would profit?

two weeks ago I presented the studio toró work at the Michigan Council for Social Sciences, and after going through all the problems created by urban flooding in south America and our non-profit work towards dissemination information to mitigate the problem, one teacher in the audience asked me a very important question :

which industry do you think would profit from a more sustainable built environment, in this case in particular, from a higher permeability that would create less flooding?

I immediately thought about the insurance industry which has been sponsoring many studies of the impact of global warming on climate change, but almost nobody in Brazil has home insurance.
in other words, how can we break the cycle of more problems means more construction which brings more problems and therefore more construction becomes necessary?

in about two weeks the mayor of Belo Horizonte will be visiting us in Ann Arbor and I hope to ask him directly about that.

where is the north-american architecture?

thanks to Letícia’s work at the UN, I had the chance to come to NYC a couple of times in the last few months.

and walking around Manhattan and Brooklyn, I was lining up a series of recent buildings that I thought I must see: The New Museum by Kasuo Sejima; Jean Nouvel at Soho, Herzog & de Meuron at 40 Bond St; NYTimes tower and Morgan library by Renzo Piano; the diamond tower by Foster; and Gehry’s building at 18th St. at the Hudson River.

so goes the label of this post. With Gehry being the exception that proves the rule (born in Canada, living in LA for 40 years), all the others are foreigners.

after the boom of the 70s and 80s with Eisenman, Meyer, Graves and etc, there is no young generation of north-american architects capable of substituting the "whites" and "grays".

perhaps Phillip Johnson is veeery much missed,

or perhaps the answer is in an article that Michael Speaks wrote 10 years ago in which he presented a clamorous difference between the US avant-guard with its elaborated manipulation of the form and geometries; and the European avant-guard more concerned with buildings performance and the transformations in the design process brought by new technologies

I tend to think that after 20 years of the so-called critical-discourse the north-american architecture suffers from a certain disorientation

much like a dog that fell out of a moving truck, it knows that there is no coming back to the old house of blobs and geometric manipulations based on drawing; nor it knows how to reach the new house built out of a neo-pragmatism with modernist roots and sustainable veneer.

niemeyer 100th birthday

this blog pay homage to a little man who changed the way Brazil looks at its own society and designed so many of the very images which defines the country today,

born on December 15th, 1907, Oscar Niemeyer celebrated his hundredth birthday today,

and still designing….

happy centennial Oscar

on rankings

I have to say that I am not a big fan of rankings, they tend to be quite reductionist, but following the tip of a collegue at Tulane I checked the new ranking of the Chronicle of Higher Education and there it was:

U of Michigan # 1 in Architecture and Urban Planning doctoral programs.

they put together architecture and planning and I still haven't figured out why they post us twice, but in any case, if feels really good to learn that we have been very productive collectivelly and that our hard work has payed off.

congratulation to us all here