A madeira como artifício

The modern Brazilian architecture was historically linked to a context of trials not only using materials that conjured up the plasticity of new technologies, but also seeking to recover the formal and evocative aspects of a prospecting, contextual and historical location. It could be true, as it’s said, that wood was not the highlight of Brazilian vanguards such as other materials like reinforced concrete, glass and metal, but the local geographical condition has brought about its use, if not as the main protagonist, at least as an important coadjuvant in both, formal and structural aspects. Wood as element intrinsically linked to geographical nature of the country, plays an important role today as expressive element in contemporary designs. Historically speaking, its allegorical presence in architecture refers the origins of the first structural systems, system-based architraved that always participated in the constructive and theoretical formulations of Vanguards. The wood is a basic material that builds all the immanent meaning to the myth of "primitive hut" and its unfoldings theorists, and it represents in itself an intrinsic evocation to the primitive, as a formal or technical solution. It’s an ideal and historical reference that causes and stimulates new limits in its use. At the same time, the wood assums the role of a basic element, from a parallel and structural experimentalism to other technologic news, and always returns as an essential element to formal and structural surveys of architectural culture. Within this context, this research seeks to rescue a not very well known project of Brazilian modern architecture of the 1960s. The Clube de Regatas Jaó, founded in August 1962 in Goiânia, has its headquarters designed by Sérgio Bernardes, an architect from Rio de Janeiro, the building covers an area of 110 .000 sqm, facing the Meia Ponte river and the old dam of Jaó. In Jaó Club’s project, the architect does not avoid the experimentalism present in his work, articulating the functional spaces through a complex mesh of natural and constructed elements: mirrors of water, waterfalls, plateaus in gap, courtyards and gardens which are articulated in order to establish connections with the nature of the place, that goes from the associated use of wood and iron; inventive solutions involving the capture rainwater; adoption of large spans and bet on lightweight solutions for coverage; all resulting in a strong spatial horizontality. In this project the architect creates multiple environments, which placed sequentially, configure amazing sensitivity paths from the apparent use of laminated wood, brick and stone locations. The spaces are home to a series of murals, screens and sculptures of important local artists, seeking the characteristic dialog of synthesis of arts seasons, in environment s rich in references. Wood itself is not used only in structural elements of coverage, but also in sealing environments; in flooring surfaces and in the furniture itself, which maintains its originality until today. Thus, wood creates rustic ambience that is animated at the same time by light, transparencies, reflexes and different textures. The plastic ability of wood, in the case of laminated wood beams, operated by Sérgio Bernardes in this project, had already been experienced in previous projects, especially his house in Rio, built between 1960 and 1961, one year before Jaó's project. The manipulation of different construction materials and formal possibilities derivative from a "architecture pavillon " was already present since the beginning of his professional training in the late 1940s, like his design for a "Country Club" in Petropolis -published in French magazine L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui in 1947. This communication intends to disclose part of the existing documentation of the project of Club Jaó and make a brief analysis of the building, based on an iconographic material that was, focusing on the design of the project, the formal and symbolic technical importance of wood and the potential of the material.