Arquitetura, restauração e a poética Brutalista: Ladeira da Misericórdia

Lina Bo Bardi (1914-92) is one of the most widely studied architects of the country today, raising accentuated international interest. There are various academic papers, articles and publications dedicated to his work, but the complexity of its totality continues to offer challenges and opportunities for reflection. His knowledge and erudition intimidated his interlocutors on occasion. His passionate positions, misunderstood, have generated controversy. In a way, his positions and temperament approximated him to the younger generations, leaving a legacy not yet sufficiently evaluated. There is certain unanimity among historians and critics of modern Brazilian architecture in locating his work, or part of it, in the field of investigations of a “brutalist” architecture, which marks São Paulo’s modern architecture, from 1950, as reaffirmed by Fuão (2000): (...) The school of São Paulo would, with great creativity, transform the “universal” Brutalism. "universal." Unquestionably, Artigas and Lina Bo Bardi substantially transfigured the language of the European New Brutalism to the point of founding a peculiar language of its own (...), such as Artigas and Carlos Cascald’s School of Architecture and Urbanism of the USP, the Museum of Art of São Paulo, and Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia. Brutalism as architectural classification category opens, as systematized by Zein (2007), a broad spectrum of meanings. There are several attempts to define it in the context of international experiences, but none of the definitions "is fully dominant, they all connect, and all are relatively disparate. " In the development of this work, however, we will use a comprehensive concept: Brutalism in architecture has developed since the 1950s in a number of countries simultaneously, and it has done so from the work of different architects "which share formal, constructive and plastic approximations”, which had the use of material without coating as its central feature. The main references indicated by historiography for its development are the Marseille Housing Unit (1947-53) by Le Corbusier, and the Institute of Illinois (1945-47) by Mies van der Rohe. Brutalist architecture spreads in the 1960s and its permanence on the international scene as trend extends to the 1970s [1]. The following article aims to explore the transformation of the concept of restoration from the decades of 1930 to 1960, with the establishment of the Venice Charter (1964). The proximity of the Charter, valid after 50 years, with the propositions of the modern movement is remarkable, particularly in the use of materials, relying on the principle of the authenticity of the goods and the differentiation between new and old, whose first formulations are present in the Athens Charter (CIAM), 1933. The concepts of brutalism and critical restoration, consolidated in the Venice Charter, converge synthetically in the architectural work of Lina Bo Bardi. To verify this hypothesis, we propose the analysis of the work of the Ladeira da Misericordia (1987-9), a project by Lina Bo Bardi and collaborators [2], with the participation of the architect João Filgueiras Lima (Lelé), which elucidates, more than in other restoration projects, the brutalist architectural approach on the use of gables in mortar, as in the whitewash wall treatment, archetypal of the entire eighteenth century. Brutalist in its use of materials as well as in its expressiveness, simple and elementary. It is in the relationship between architecture and structure where the vital connection between the new and old constructions can be beheld. As Lina Bardi herself reminds (cited in Adams, 2008): "The structure of a building is raised to the level of poetry, as part of aesthetics. There is no difference. An architect must design the structure as he designs architecture, in the domestic sense of the word. " [2] On the concept of brutalism see Banham (1967), Fampton (1997), Tafuri (1979), and in Brazil, Fuão (2000), Zein (2007). [3] The architects Marcelo Suzuki and Marcelo Ferraz collaborated with Lina Bardi.