Oswaldo Bratke e a “cidade nova”: o texto e o contexto

On the 1940s and 1950s Oswald Arthur Bratke realizes several projects in what is called ´´The New City``: to the period of new points of business and services in the central area of São Paulo. The buildings were mainly destined to residential, commercial and service purposes: they were conceived under the strategy of verticality suggested for the area and also under the impact of the Plan of Avenues by Prestes Maia. Among them are detached Bratke´s three buildings ,built in course of a decade, in the junction of Araujo and Major Sertorio Streets, they are: the Jaçatuba, the ABC and the Renata Sampaio Ferreira. The three ones are protected as architectonic cultural real state with preservation interest by the Municipal law number 8.328/75., making part of the called ´´mancha 11: São Paulo Moderna``. In the early 1940s, coincide and cohabit in an intense and singular way in this part of the city, the politics of verticality, the drawing changes of the transport system given by the Plan of Avenues, the law modification in the urbanistic codes, and the most programmatic and consistent elaboration of a modern stylistic language for the Brazilian and Paulista architecture. This study examines these corners and these three buildings, this peculiar moment of São Paulo´s central area, describing this mutual mix of factors, detaining to the circumstances that created them, as in the qualification and configuration of the public space as in the particularity of Bratke´s architecture: on its peculiarity, that remarks it, that distinguishes it from the generalities of a system of ideas of the period. In other words, it is tried to describe what it is interlaced together: the system of ideas-text of an architect and the city-context of its interventions. The encounter and reciprocity between a modern language that it is built expressing new values and the modernizing urbanism that forms it through new urbanistic normative and logic.