A dialogic tricontinental: Niemeyer, Molyvann AND Zevaco

The understanding of modernity as a global and symbiotic event is what justifies this paper. It is global because, as a cultural outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution, it reached all corners of the world more or less connected to the world order, and symbiotic because, despite the hegemonic Eurocentric discourse, we declared the constant feedback of the processes of artistic experimentation that equate all continents’ continents. We will discuss comparatively the work of Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012), Jean-François Zevaco (1916-2003) and Vann Molyvann (1926-2017) in an essay organized in two sections. The first seeks aspects driven by the reading of the territory, understood as the conjunction of physical and human factors of the place in which architecture develops, pointing out strategies for accepting the vernacular contribution and its interpretation in the light of modern instruments. The second advances on the constructive terms of architects’ thinking, locating structural contextualism as a deliberate plastic action.