Last October, the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who was nearing 90, was interviewed by the Spanish newspaper El País about his six-decade career. By then, Mendes da Rocha — whose buildings include São Paulo’s subterranean sculpture museum, Museu Brasileiro da Escultura e Ecologia (MuBE), completed in 1995, with its 197-foot stretch of gravity-defying concrete that spans the open plaza, and the levitating concrete disk of the city’s Paulistano Athletic Club Gymnasium, built in 1957 — had been canonized as not only the most important living architect in Brazil, or perhaps in all of Latin America, but also as the world’s most significant practitioner of Brutalism — a word, ironically, that he has always disavowed. “Ask an intellectual what they mean by Brutalism, and the majority won’t know,” Mendes da Rocha told the reporter. “Brutalism is nothing.”
New York Times: The unexpectedly tropical history of Brutalism
An army soldier guards the Planalto Palace in Brasilia on Sept. 5, 2013.
