The Board of Directors of Venice's Biennale chaired by Paolo Baratta, upon recommendation of the Curator of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition Alejandro Aravena, announced yesterday that architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha will be the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
The motivations note highlighted the "timelessness" of his architecture, a concept we should try to apply and purse also in other fields. The notes also state: "Many decades after being built, each of his projects have resisted the test of time, both stylistically and physically. This astonishing consistency may be the consequence of his ideological integrity and his structural genius. He is a nonconformist challenger and simultaneously a passionate realist. His fields of interest are beyond architecture, in political, social, geographical, historical and technical realms."
Born in 1928 in Espírito Santo, Brazil, Paulo Mendes da Rocha studied in São Paulo graduating from the Mackenzie Architecture School in 1954. He won a national project competition in 1957 for the construction of a gymnasium, the Clube Atlético Paulistano. This work brought him public recognition and also won the Grande Prêmio Presidência da República at the 6th Bienal of São Paulo in 1961.
In 1968, the architect won the national project competition for the Brazilian pavilion at Osaka Expo 70 and traveled to that city to follow the construction development in 1969. The recipient of many awards, he has designed in his career houses, schools, apartment buildings, museums, furniture (one example is the chair "Paulistano", published in the magazine New Furniture. Neue Möbel. Meubles Nouveaux, Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart, 1958, and now industrially produced by French company OBJEKTO), theatre sets and several urban projects.
The Golden Lion will be awarded to Paulo Mendes da Rocha on Saturday May 28th 2016 at Ca' Giustinian, the headquarters of La Biennale di Venezia, during the awards ceremony and inauguration of the 15th Exhibition, which will open to the public on that same day.
Apart from 63 National Participations in the historic Pavilions at the Giardini, at the Arsenale and in the historic city centre of Venice, four countries will be joining in the Architecture Biennale for the first time – Philippines, Nigeria, Seychelles and Yemen.
As mentioned in a previous post, the event is entitled "Reporting from the front" and is accompanied by a symbolic picture of a lady standing on the highest step of a ladder gazing over a broad horizon. The image is inspired by Bruce Chatwin's trip to South America where he encountered an old lady walking the desert carrying an aluminium ladder on her shoulder. It was German archaeologist Maria Reiche studying the Nazca lines. Standing on the ground, the stones did not make any sense as they were just random gravel; but from the height of the stair those stones became a bird, a jaguar, a tree or a flower.
"What does the lady see?" wonders Baratta in an official press release, "I think mainly desolated land comprising immense swathes of human habitation which no human could be proud of; great disappointments representing a sad, infinite number of missed opportunities for humanity's ability to act intelligently. Much of this is tragic, much is banal, and it seems to mark the end of architecture. But she also sees signs of creativity and hope, and she sees them in the here-and-now, not in some uncertain aspirational, ideological future."
The theme of this year's Biennale is maybe less conceptual than previous ones, but extremely relevant to our times, since it aims at reconciling architecture and civil society, encouraging positive messages and tackling a series of core issues - from segregation and inequalities to peripheries, access to sanitation, natural disasters, housing shortage, migration, informality, crime, traffic, waste, pollution and the participation of communities. It will be definitely inspiring to see how the different countries involved in the Biennale will react to Aravena's brief.
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