Paisagens desoladas: quatro máscaras de concreto em deriva

Can we take four buildings in reinforced concrete on Brazil’s central plateau as objects in the dérive? All of them configure situations that we understand as of a difficult anchorage, “masks” of what they were or should be when create places in changing and limited urban zones. The author Paulo Mendes da Rocha was awarded a prize in the II Prize Mies van der Rohe of Architecture Latin American (2000) and in Prize Pritzker (2006). A dérive are found: Jóquei Clube de Goiás (1962), Bento Odilon Moreira’s residence (1963), Estádio Serra Dourada (1973), and Terminal Rodoviário (1986). What is proposed here is a reflection of the contingencies that, on the beginning of the 21st century, maintain the projects’ promises, misunderstandings and displeasures. The argument is developed with the actual images’ support, that help to weave its histories and that still illustrate its actual situation, revealing that its singular characteristics, in between all those years, seam not to have been understood in the cultural context of the city. They are projects which urban’ scales does not submit to what is normative, but to a new topological reading of the space. The advancement of the city over the existent territory in these projects establishes new implicit rules that, when forming new “urban landscapes”, challenge any possibility of continuity that is not a new pre-existence. They are ancient empty spaces, terrains vagues that were transported to urban episode-buildings, creating some new and proper tensions. The projects suggest and materialize the understanding that all cities are also made of exceptions and it’s not only a product of a rule.