Advisor: Ana Luiza Nobre
Dissertation: Inform: the discourse of technique in Paulo Mendes da Rocha
Defense date: 28/04/2021
Abstract
This research aims to investigate the discourse of technique of the architect
Paulo Mendes da Rocha (Vitoria, 1928). Firstly, some of his statements from the
2010s are mobilized, in which the phrase that triggers the research is the statement
that the main goal of architecture is to “exhibit the success of technique”. This
sentence leads to the analysis of the architect’s first project, the Paulistano chair
(1956). Mendes da Rocha’s discourse on the chair, in turn, reveals the conditions
of production in a context undergoing a marked process of industrialization: the
Sao Paulo of the second half of the 1950s. In the midst of these transformations,
in parallel with the construction of Brasilia, the production of the Paulistano
articulates, on the one hand, the production of modern industry and, on the other,
the work of the craftsman in a modest workshop. In this way, we observe in
Paulistano’s design discourse the passage from the private scale of furniture to the
scale of the metropolis. This passage effectively takes place in the architect’s
career with the construction of his first building, the Paulistano Gymnasium
(1958), on which we also detain ourselves, while raising questions about
authority, autonomy, originality, and the very concept of technique, with the
support of authors such as Richard Sennett, Martin Heidegger, and Michel
Foucault. With this cut we seek to question the meaning assumed by technique in
Mendes da Rocha’s discourse, which in “exhibiting” and “success” points to a
condition of visibility not only of technique, but of the human need to summon it
and, ultimately, of humanity itself.