A surface for breathing — Lucio Costa and Parque Guinle, Brazil
Fernando Diniz Moreira
b est known for Brasilia, Lucio Costa is certainly the most important figure of modern Brazilian architecture. He played a major role, commonly underestimated, in what made Brazilian architecture so remarkable during the mid 20th century, particularly the association of modern architecture and local traditions. In his studies of colonial architecture, Costa was not looking for exceptional baroque churches and monuments, but for anonymous, simple and functional buildings, appropriate to their time and place. Costa claimed that the main principles of colonial architecture could be incorporated into modern architecture, and that the latter was able to recover the core of nationality formed during the colonial period. This bridge between modernity and tradition is especially evident in his buildings from the late 1930s to the mid 1950s, particularly a series of houses built around Rio de Janeiro, such as Saavedra, Hungria Machado and Paes de Carvalho houses. Combining modern and traditional materials and devices and pro- moting an appropriate relationship between indoor-outdoor spaces with terraces and courtyards, Costa created great examples of this synthesis between tradition and moder- nity.
Parque Guinle addressed all the points of modern architecture proclaimed by Le Cor- busier: prismatic blocks located in greenery, a freestanding concrete skeleton, free plan, pilotis and the free façade. It even suggests a concretization in miniature of Le Corbusier’s 1929 dreams for Rio de Janeiro. The Parque Guinle’s façade also incorporated the innovations brought by modern methods of construction, which liberated the façade from expressing load-bearing and aesthetical requirements, reducing the size of piers and increasing the dimension of the windows.This evolution dematerialized the façade, transform- ing it in a cover or transparent membrane and blurring the difference between window and façade wall.
A more complicated problem, however, was to adapt these principles to larger and more complex programs than houses.The opportu- nity to address these issues came when an aris- tocratic family commissioned Costa to design some rental aparment blocks in Rio de Janeiro in 1948.This initiative, called Parque Guinle, consisted of a group of apartments for the high middle class built on the family property. The site was an oval depression quite complicated upon which to build. Costa maintained this depression as a park, and created prismatic building blocks around it, in a circle, keeping the family mansion on the highest ground, as the focus of the composition.The blocks were united by a sinuous street.The great conflict was to reconcile the view of the park with a good solar orientation, solved by making the blocks face the park, while creating a system for solar protection. In a moment in which apartment buildings were starting to replace houses in Brazilian cities, this plan represented a sort of experiment, attempting to adapt the traditional house into a new form of living.
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O n S ite review
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I ssue 9 2003
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