Advisor: Ana Luiza Nobre
Dissertation: Beaten Earth: On the two Butanta houses and how to inhabit pathways
Defense date: 03/06/2022
Abstract
From the analysis of two neighbouring houses in the Butanta neighbourhood, in the
outskirts of the metropolis of Sao Paulo, as a set – a Bandeirante house restored in
1954 by Sphan (National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service) and transformed
into a museum as part of the celebrations of the IV centenary of the city, and the
house that the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha built for himself between 1964 and
1967 – the aim is to understand, mainly through the material, constructive and
tactile dimensions of architecture, how issues of continental scale may cross from
one time to another; not by chance two fundamental moments in the establishment
of national borders, from the Atlantic coast to the interior of the American
continent. Looking simultaneously at these two iconic houses when considering the
history of Sao Paulo’s architecture, built side by side and on the same level, it is
possible to establish associations between the ideas of inhabiting that they
represent, and, in their architecture, manifestations of the construction of a territory
– visible not only in the two houses, but also in the common plane that traverses
them. A beaten earth that carries expressions of the paths, the meanders, the
topography transformed and recreated by human action; e(E)arth that was mined,
excavated and turned over to fit somewhere in the interval between these two
gestures; in between the two houses, Butanta.