Memories of Ibirapuera

And, suddenly, flicking through Modern Architecture in Brazil, by Henrique Mindlin, I see a flying saucer with a thousand hatchways and an abrupt cut as an entrance. Intrigued, I went to visit it. Surprise: the building receives me with a boulevard of cylinders, straight, direct, elemental, powerful, compressed between two smooth plaques. The edges of the upper slab do not touch the dome's concavity, an eyelid facing the elliptical cut, insinuating a pictogram of an eye. Exactly halfway along, the ramp signals the transverse axis. The primordial plans come alive, the line, the cross, the circle; the centripetal and centrifugal impulses even out. Defined as an independent skeleton, without visible beams, the archetype of the directional spaces is inscribed in the archetype of the focal or radiant space, defined by the lowered dome. The echo of the Greco-Roman temple is repeated in a ziggurat whose platforms evoke the hexagons of Guarini's (1) baroque chapel and the projection of a pillow with its evocations of rest.
The boulevard and the ramp stabilize the unusual voids in the mind, dramatically changing; constant limits that only disappear at the top with a nautical rail, platform and observatory of the heavens, now unfettered by the vaulted cover and, apparently, unlimited. As one goes up, verticality dominates the height of the columns. The horizontal stratification of the space gains strength on descending, reaching its maximum at the subsoil. With the perforated foundations, a cavernous environment, the subsoil generates at the top, by contrast, a kind of rooftop open to the sky. The scheme is tripartite on the cross-section, and its middle part reminds us both of an artificial mountain and of a primitive decorated cabin, that comes from the Dominó scheme with which Le Corbusier updates Laugier (2).
There is architecture as microcosm (the house monumentalized like a body) and architecture as macrocosm (the house monumentalized as second nature), one inside the other, like those glass ball paperweights containing something. Confirming Lucio Costa's pronouncement (3), Niemeyer makes modern architecture into an inclusive proposition in terms of origin, sensitivity and types of structure, where a static Mesopotamian-Mediterranean and dynamic Nordic-Oriental tradition meet and are completed. And it's not only about the fundament of the discipline, conventionally associated with the sacred monument. In the end, in an exhibition pavilion, contemplation is never disconnected from the experience of an itinerary. Allusions to vehicles or vision also have a programmatic specificity.

An exhibition pavilion is a kind of museum without a collection, and the allusion to the ziggurat also links it to Le Corbusier's Mundaneum Museum. Moreover, the São Paulo museum comes without walls and presupposes panels and exhibitors - like that of Mies for a small city -. In the end, Niemeyer appropriates the components of the museum typology, just as it was defined by Schinkel in Berlin, modifying its size and articulation. The dome is no longer the cover of a void flanked by two wings of architecturally joined structure. Blown up out of proportion, the dome is here the whole building, the wings are condensed in an interiorized block. The name may change: Palacio de las Artes, Aeronautical Museum, Oca... The architecture lesson is the same: architecture doesn't do without memory, precedent is the trampoline for invention. Niemeyer is a cannibal, not a noble savage; disciplinary culture is a project-based instrument.
Oca is a very appropriate name, associating the dome with another type of primitive dwelling, this time real and Brazilian, and inside, some wonderful exhibitions are produced. Unlike the person responsible for the Aeronautical Museum's modest and inconsistent installations, no curator seems to have appreciated that exemplary boulevard of columns, but it's still there, intact, witness to the intelligence and sensitivity of its maker. Who knows if, in an upcoming show, it will once more be the star to raise all of our spirits. Whoever experiences it will find out. Carlos Eduardo Dias Comas

(1) Specifically, the Santa Sidone chapel, in Turin.
(2) Laugier's primitive cabin was a libel against the excesses of rococo; the structural scheme of the Dom-ino house (1915) was a liberation (libero) from the excesses of eclecticism.
(3) The idea of modern architecture as an inclusive proposition first appears in Memory of Brazil's University City (1937), incorporating a Greco-Latin or Mediterranean spirit and a Gothic-Oriental spirit. In Considerations on the teaching of architecture, published in 1945, Lucio covers an organic-functional concept such as that of Gothic architecture (where visual expression flowers like plants) and a visual-ideal concept (where expression is dominated and contained) such as classical architecture. In Considerations on contemporary art (1952), the beauty of the flower is articulated like that of crystal, the static Mesopotamian- Mediterranean-rooted conception like the dynamic Nordic-Oriental one, with baroque included in the latter. See "Sobre la arquitectura", Porto Alegre: Uniritter, 2007 (1966).