Banking architecture, late modernism and exposed concrete in Porto Alegre — Brazil
Resumo
O presente trabalho busca reconhecer e analisar a arquitetura bancária Porto Alegre, influenciada pela pratica do concreto aparente e uma modernidade de características já bastante diversificadas; uma produção que se concentrou nos anos setenta, mas atingiu parcialmente as décadas adjacentes. Essa é a arquitetura da estrutura monumentalizada, da experimentação formal, do alto teor artesanal presente. Este último merece destaque pela sua existência dentre dois Brasis, o colonial e o industrial – e de forma curiosa ainda foi capaz de gerar riqueza no detalhe arquitetônico, um desdobramento autóctone próprio de uma modernidade de raízes brasileiras, mas que transcende um certo folclore tropical. O fenômeno da “arquitetura bancária” ocorrido em todo País, cujo epicentro foi São Paulo, contextualiza esta experiência gaúcha e periférica. Havia naquele período certa dualidade no processo operativo de projeto. Por um lado, existia a notabilidade artística do autor, a autoria da composição particular, o projeto solucionado de modo “artesanal”; por outro, havia os modelos genéricos, quase institucionalizados, de uso corrente e estandardizados para satisfazer a demanda de projetos modernos em escala global. Dois caminhos antagônicos tendo como fatores fundamentais a cultura local de elaboração de projeto e as limitações climáticas, técnicas e econômicas próprias do estado gaúcho. Era o momento, segundo Luis H. H. Luccas, quando se tornava assimétrica a comparação entre arquitetura como concepção individual artesanal ou como projeto coletivo. E a vertente do concreto aparente, dita “brutalista”, em ascensão resgatava a manufatura artesanal dos componentes, seus aspectos primitivos e suas imprecisões, como sinônimo de excepcionalidade, audácia, expressão e novidade. Entretanto, a concepção do concreto enquanto pedra falsa, ou ao menos como um material de envelhecimento rápido e patológico sob condições subtropicais, fatalmente não sobreviveu a intervenções que mascarassem seu sentido. Enfim, este trabalho busca demonstrar que a Escola Paulista não era a única nem a principal influência dos arquitetos locais. Fica evidente, no entanto, a influência direta de mestres europeus exercida sobre os profissionais locais, destacadamente para a presença subjacente de matrizes miesianas e para a tactilidade madura corbusiana. Embora os arquitetos trabalhassem em torno de utopias artísticas, os exemplares mais bem-sucedidos na criação da forma foram justamente os exemplares de composição elementar. Isso contribui em alguma medida com a revisão, o sentido e o prosseguimento da genealogia da arquitetura moderna como um fenômeno ainda a traduzir para os dias de hoje.
Palavras-chave
Abstract
This study aims to recognize and analyze the banking architecture Porto Alegre, a production concentrated in the Seventies which used exposed rough concrete as the main characteristic and late modern features. Brutalist features appeared through monumentalized structures, formal experimentations, and high level of artisanal content applied. This last one deserves special attention due to its existence inside two antagonist Brazils: the colonial and the industrial. Curiously, this apparent contradiction (or duality) was still able to generate high architectural standards, reveling itself as an autochthonous development from Brazilian Modern Architecture, which transcended the general image of a tropical folklore. There was at that time a certain duality in the operating process of design. On the one hand, the architect searched for and artistic notability through particular compositions, so-called "artisanal" mode. On the other, there were the generic architectural models almost institutionalized, usual and standardized to meet the modern designs demand on a global scale. Two opposing methods dealing with fundamental local factors as the designing culture, and the climate technical and economic limitations typical in South Brazil. According to Luis H. H. Luccas the postwar period marks the asymmetric comparison between architecture as an individual design development or as a collective project. In addition, the rising exposed concrete movement so-called "brutalist" rescued that artisanal manufacture included in the components, with its primitive aspects and its inaccuracies, as a synonym of uniqueness, boldness, expression and novelty. This is a "romantic" aesthetic that countered the synthetic, homogeneous and systematic architectural language developed earlier through international standards. The design of concrete as faux stone, or at least as fast and pathological aging of material under subtropical conditions, fatally did not survive to constructive interventions, which would mask its meaning. Finally, this paper seeks to show that the so-called “Paulista School” was not the only or the main influence for local architects. Miesian matrices and Corbusien tactilities are more feasible. Although the local architects worked around some artistic utopias, the most successful forms used actually elementary compositions. This contributes to the review, the meaning and the continuation of the Brazilian modern architecture as a phenomenon to translate to nowadays.
Keywords
Como citar
PETROLI, Marcos Amado. Banking architecture, late modernism and exposed concrete in Porto Alegre — Brazil. In: SEMINÁRIO DOCOMOMO SUL, 5., 2016, Porto Alegre. Anais [...]. Porto Alegre: Núcleo Docomomo RS / PROPAR-UFRGS, 2016. ISBN 978-85-61965-40-2. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19291757.
Referências
- Justin Read. Alternative Functions: Oscar Niemeyer and the Poetics of Modernity. In: Modernism/modernity, Volume 12, Number 2. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2005, pp. 253-272 (254).
- It starts with the overvalue under the reinforced concrete structural shape, the
- Luccas, Luis Henrique Haas. Concreto aparente e valorização da estrutura: a influência estética do Brutalismo em Porto Alegre nos anos 60/70. In: X DOCOMOMO_Brazil Seminar: brutalist connections 1955-75. PUC-PR
- Curitiba, 15-18 out., 2013, p.3. (Translated by the author) 3 Luccas, op.cit, 2013, p.19.
- “At that time, innovation was usually pursued to transform architectural elements, which, in extreme situations, resulted in mutilations thereof. Recovered by Le Corbusier, the traditional gargoyles of Ronchamp (1950) illustrate the situation: they were creatively and continuously modified in his later works. (…) The belief in concrete as an ideal material,
- Luccas, op. cit, 2013, p.12 (translated by the author) Luis Henrique Haas Luccas. Arquitetura Moderna Brasileira em Porto Alegre: sob o mito do “gênio artístico nacional”. Porto Alegre: PROPAR-UFRGS, 2004. (Doctoral dissertation)
- Two elementary compositional strategies synthesized by Maria Luiza Adams Sanvitto. Ronaldo de Azambuja Ströher. As Transformações na Tipologia e no Caráter do Prédio Bancário em meados deste século. Porto Alegre: PROPAR-UFRGS, 1999, p.162. (Master’s thesis).
- Figures 11 and 12: elementary formal banking schemes used in the period, mainly for the corner lot: the “Shell” (left) and the “horizontal Plan”. Source: Author
- Both in Debiagi’s banking agency and in the Mies` German pavilion there is a list of similarities, such as glazed facades, cruciform pillars, transferring the compartmentalized part of the program to the subsoil, form-synthesis, horizontality, and economy of sources. The use of horizontal plan 8
- Mahfuz, Edson. Transparência e Sombra: o plano horizontal na arquitetura paulista. Arquitextos: Portal Vitruvius, dez, 2006 (translated by the author) for shading is also so-called as “Tropical” architecture as well due to the creation of a kind of porch to protect the facades.
- Figures 15, 16, and 17: Alternative formal schemes for bank building in lots of block half: “superbeam” (left); ribbed slab (center); and portico. Source: Author Present in: Ströher, Ronaldo de Azambuja. op. cit., p.144.
- Monique Wagner, From Gaul to De Gaulle: An Outline of French Civilization. Peter Lang, 2005, pp. 139 Marilyn Stokstad, ed. Art History. 4th ed. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2005.
- Term used by Espallargas Luis Gimenez, op. cit. 2013, p.2. It is not intended here also make reflections on the artistic function of the architect and investigate its possible existence, but only to point the interest by the authors in particular and sculptural detail. 13 Espallargas, Luis. op.cit. p.2 did not look like something questionable at that time in the professional board, but actually seen as innovation.
- Figures 23, 24, and 25 : CEF Alegrete (1974), CEF Rio Grande (1977), and CEF San Borja (1974): Portico as the main element of differentiation between similar compositions. By J. Debiagi. Source: Debiagi Collection
- Figures 28 and 29: CEF Moinhos de Vento, By Cesar Dorfman, Porto Alegre, 1973 (original and current status). Source: Xavier; Mizoguchi, 1987, p. 278 (left) and author (right)
- Figures 30 and 31: Itaú Passo d’Areia agency, Itaúplan, Porto Alegre. Photo (left): Rev. Projeto n° 63, mai/1984, p. 57. Current picture (right): Google Maps
- Figures 32 and 33: Azenha Banking agency, Itaúplan, Porto Alegre. Photo (left): Rev. Projeto n° 63, mai/1984, p. 56; Current picture (right): autor apocalyptic postwar reality. Anyways, it is a fact that these buildings were based on images, such
- David Langdom. United States Embassy in Havana. Archdaily, Jan. 2015. <http://www.archdaily.com/584114/adclassics-united-states-embassy-in-havana-harrison-and-abramovitz> as “Paulista School”, Le Corbusier late works, or other masters mentioned before. 15 But concrete is not a rock (Figure 34).
- “Imagination” is a way for criticism in Architecture, and not how is mistakenly used as a corruption of the meaning and the form. Based on: Richard Kearney. The Wake of Imagination. New York: Routledge, 1988.
- Figures 35 and 36:, Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier, 1928-1931. Before restoration of 1985. Source: pinterest.com
- Alberto Perez-Gomez. Built Upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008, p. 140.
- Bibliography Bill, Max. O arquiteto, a arquitetura, a sociedade. Habitat 14: A-B, 1954.
- Bergdoll, Barry, Carlos E. Comas, Jorge F. Liernur, and Patricio Del Real. Latin America in construction: architecture 1955-1980. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2015.
- Del Real, Patricio, and Helen Gyger. Latin American Modern Architectures: Ambiguous Territories. New York: Routledge, 2013.
- Justin Read. Alternative Functions: Oscar Niemeyer and the Poetics of Modernity. In: Modernism/modernity, Volume 12, Number 2. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, April 2005, pp. 253-272.
- Bill, Max. Luis Henrique Haas. Arquitetura Moderna Brasileira em Porto Alegre: sob o mito do “gênio artístico nacional”. Porto Alegre: PROPAR-UFRGS, 2004. (Doctoral dissertation)
- Mahfuz, Edson. Ordem, Estrutura e Perfeição no Trópico: Mies van der Rohe e a arquitetura paulistana na segunda metade do século XX. Arquitextos, Portal Vitruvius, fev. 2005.
- Bibliography Bill, Max. Edson da Cunha. Transparência e Sombra: o plano horizontal na arquitetura paulista. Arquitextos: Portal Vitruvius, dez. 2006.
- Bibliography Bill, Max. Edson da Cunha. An investigation into the nature of the relationship between the parts and the whole in architectural composition. Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI, 1987.
- Mostafavi, Mohsen; and David Leatherbarrow. ”On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time”. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.
- Perez-Gomez, Alberto. Built Upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.
- Petroli, Marcos Amado. A avis rara do Arquiteto Jorge Debiagi: Uma Análisesobre a Influência Brutalista em duas de suas Obras Bancárias. In: X Seminário DOCOMOMO_Brasil:conexões brutalistas 1955-75. PUC-PR | Curitiba, 15-18 out. 2013
- Sanvitto, Maria Luiza Adams. As questões compositivas e o ideário do Brutalismo Paulista. ARQtextos: PROPAR-UFRGS, 2002. Ströher, Ronaldo de Azambuja. As Transformações na Tipologia e no Caráter do Prédio Bancário em meados deste século. Porto Alegre: PROPAR-UFRGS, 1999. (Master’s thesis).
- Xavier, Alberto. Depoimento de uma Geração. São Paulo: ABEA/FVA/Pini, 1987.
Ficha catalográfica
5º Seminário Docomomo Sul: anais: o moderno no contemporâneo: herança e prática [recurso eletrônico] / organização: Ana Carolina Pellegrini, Carlos Eduardo Comas. Porto Alegre: Marcavisual, 2016. Disponível em: www.ufrgs.br/propar/anais-do-5o-seminario-docomomo-sul/. ISBN 978-85-61965-40-2

