Empreendimentos Transatlânticos

The Portuguese interest in Brazilian modern architecture is a topic on which some authors have lent valuable contributions. The presence of modern Brazilian architecture among the Portuguese is best measured through publications, testimonies, and writings of the architects, then by the built work. The works done by some in the land of others are erratic. Those conceived by the Portuguese, influenced by the modern Brazilian architectural culture, are restrained to short periods of modern interest in Portugal. On the other hand, modern Brazilian architects were more interested in the roots of colonial architecture. Lucio Costa would seek, however, among the Portuguese, these roots. Regardless of the mutual interest between architects of both countries, reality shows us that they followed different paths, intrinsically linked to historical events (social and political), national and international. The report that is made in this article establishes a (necessarily incomplete) narrative that goes from the 1930s to the projects for the museums of Álvaro Siza in Brazil (Iberê Camargo, 1998), and of Paulo Mendes da Rocha in Portugal (Museu Nacional dos Coches, 2007). The second part of the article intends to frame the path of Paulo Mendes da Rocha in this Portuguese-Brazilian transit, on the way to his international rise. The transition of the XX-XXI centuries brought us a rediscovery of modern Brazilian architecture, in which one hears about re-foundation, whether in teaching, research or even in the influences that practice will seek to absorb. Mendes da Rocha represents for Brazil and Portugal the radicality and integrity of a modern that resists because it has never become complete, and that is situated in the antagonism between a strictly formal interest and another subversively moral.