Lota de Macedo Soares: casa moderna, materialidade híbrida

The Lota de Macedo Soares House, located in Petrópolis, on the mountains of the state of Rio de Janeiro, was designed by the architect Sérgio Bernardes in 1951. Three years later, although the building was still unfinished, the house was awarded the first prize at the 2nd Bienal de São Paulo, given to architects under 40 years old. The architect was then 32 and had recently graduated at Universidade do Brasil. His design was evaluated by a distinguished jury headed by Walter Gropius and composed by the renowned architects José Lluis Sert, Alvar Aalto, and Ernesto Rogers. The house which caught the attention of the jury is indeed atypical considering Brazilian modern architecture at the time. Articles on the house were published in the French magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui and in the Brazilian magazine Habitat, both in 1952. It was also catalogued by Henrique Mindlin in Modern Architecture in Brazil, which included the main modern works in Brazil until 1956. Sérgio Bernardes was a talented architect, and started to design even before he graduated. He was bold, versatile, and keen on experimentation. The client was also special: she was cosmopolitan, rich, loved arts, had avant-garde attitude, and was a prominent person in the arts and culture environment in Rio at that time. She lived in the house with Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet that won the Pulitzer prize in 1956. The site is breathtaking. Fashionable resort of Rio’s elite, Petrópolis received celebrities that fled the hot summers of the city of Rio. Lota, heiress of a huge estate in the neighborhood of Samambaia, decides to build there her weekend house, in a lot which had a view of the mountains and of the valley, and in which there are natural vegetation, stones, and a stream. Such factors allowed the architect to design a very singular house, both in terms of its conception of the plan as well as of the different materials applied, which were very distinct comparing with the Brazilian standards at that time. The irregular contour plan has wings along a longitudinal circulation that orderly spread over the uneven relief of the plot. In the center, glass allows a clear view of the landscape, and at the east end, it incorporates an existing stone, on which the private wing is balanced above the stream. The simultaneous use of seemingly different elements and materials, such as the delicate metal frame, the thatched aluminum roof, and stone, glass, and tile walls, is quite different from the usual design of modern Brazilian houses at that time. The contemporary group of Rio’s architects, led by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, tended to follow the modern architecture proposed by the European Le Corbusier, mixing some Brazilian traditional aspects, whereas the North-American trends caught the attention of Sérgio Bernardes. The plans with long wings designed by Wright, who had also incorporated stone in the Fallingwater House in 1936 and rough bricks in the Usonian Houses of the 1930s and 1940s; Mies’ houses with metal frames and center transparence, such as the Farnsworth and Resor houses; and particularly, the Case Study Houses of the 1940-60’s, with light metal frames, unpainted lattices, and pre-fabrication ideals, evidently echoed in this design of Bernardes. Of course, European references of Le Corbusier himself and of the straight lines of Dutch neoplasticism, among others, are also found. The Lota de Macedo Soares house, with its modern shape and spaces, was the first to use metal frames in Brazil, incorporating at the same time traditional materials, such as rough stones and bricks. This house demonstrates that modernity, tradition, crafts, pre-fabrication, rationality, and freedom are not only compatible, but capable of building an elegant set.