Back from São Paulo, we went this evening to Charlotte Verity’s beautiful, small and thoughtful exhibition of John Nash’s, and now Ronald Blythe’s, garden, BOTTENGOMS, which Christine Nash, John’s half-German wife, found deserted down a track in Suffolk in 1943.   Charlotte was commissioned to record the garden by the Garden Museum between September 2016 and July 2017 and her watercolours are displayed in an aisle not far from an exhibition of Cedric Morris’s much more showy paintings.   I don’t know if I was allowed to take photographs of the work, but did, through the glass, in spite of the (purple) reflections:-

The exhibition is accompanied by a booklet designed by the Ben Weaver studio and with a journal of her visits which is as precise in its observations as her art.

My last post from São Paulo is of SESC Pompéia, Lina Bo Bardi’s final major architectural project, which she started work on in 1977 and was opened in 1982. It was an old industrial site, a drum factory, converted into the Centro de Lazer Fábrica da Pompéia, a very upmarket and much more idealistic version of a British municipal leisure centre, inspired, to an extent, by the Centre Pompidou and much influenced by Bo Bardi’s residual communism. She, like Mendes da Rocha later, sandblasted walls and brought the old buildings back to their original condition:-

She added a huge great concrete block to the west which contains a swimming pool and, I assume, other facilities above (it’s a big building):-

It’s a building of spectacular obduracy. To the south is another block which presumably contains more leisure facilities:-

What makes the project not exactly playful, more Piranesian, are the concrete walkways which crisscross the space in between:-

It’s like using concrete as line drawing.

I don’t think I have ever seen a more purely postmodern building:-

Totally arbitrary, highly polished, no sense of form, a wilful breach of conventions:-

It was designed by Ruy Ohtake, the son of the eponymous Tomie. He is half-Japanese, half-Brazilian.

As part of my crash course in Brazilian modernism, I have been trying to teach myself what I can about Paulo Mendes da Rocha, the author of the revived Pinacoteca de São Paulo, a project which involved stripping away all of its classical components, leaving only the unadorned brickwork, with the courtyards glassed over and the spaces connected by metal walkways.

The answer seems to involve the stripping away of the social concerns of architecture, the tradition in which he was trained at the São Paulo School of Architecture, towards a much more minimalist and reductive focus on form, treating architecture as sculpture, interested in the pure materiality of building, not its delivery of purpose.

Yesterday, I visited the building he did for the Museu Brazileiro de Escultura, a building as purely sculptural as it’s possible to be. I can’t say I liked it. Too abstract. Too arbitrary. Too concrete:-

There will be more on what I saw today, but there’s a limit to the number of posts I can do in a day.

But I want to record my last stop while it’s fresh in my mind, which was a visit to the Galeria Sé in the heart of the old historic downtown – it is apparently in the oldest street in São Paulo:-

There was a welcome small espresso upstairs:-

Then I was taken next door:-

Into the artist’s space:-

The artist showing work was Arnaldo de Melo.   But I was (annoyingly) at least as interested in the view out of the window:-

And the quality of light in the front room of the gallery next door:-

Just up the hill from the Glass House is the Capelo de Morumbi, which we were encouraged to visit while waiting for a guided tour. Weirdly – I can scarcely believe it – it was built in 1950 to the design of Gregori Warchavchik, a Ukrainian who was trained in Rome and arrived in Brazil in 1923 full of the joys of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe and where he published a manifesto on ‘Futurism ?’ in 1925. In 1927, he designed the first modernist house in São Paulo. So, what is it ? A piece of radical historical revivalism ? A jeu d’esprit ?

My first stop today was a project space in a well-preserved modernist house designed by Gian Carlo Gasperini in 1957 in the foothills of Morumbi en route to the Glass House.   It was showing work by Tunga and Cecily Brown.   I was envious of the library:-

Having missed several tours of Lina and Pietro Maria Bardi’s Glass House during the week, I came at the weekend for one of the formal tours.  

The house was designed in 1951 by Lina Bo Bardi, not so long after she and her husband had emigrated to Brazil. While she was a communist, he had been a member of the National Fascist party, so they may have had to leave (he had also just divorced). I was shown a picture of him accompanying Mussolini:-

At the time, the area was still apparently rain forest, but is now a posh, hill-top suburb, not so far out.   An early (1951) photograph shows the house on bare hill-side, projecting on stilts:-

It’s now overgrown:-

Unfortunately, one isn’t allowed to take photographs of the interiors, which are perfectly preserved – one large room with the view, a huge, industrial sized kitchen and small bedrooms and – I guess – servants’ quarters at the back. He lived there and she worked there. They held parties there. He died in 1999.

Just to complete these posts on attitudes to Brazilian modernism, I was intrigued to read in Richard Williams’s now out-of-print book on Brazilian architecture that Colin Buchanan, the town planner and author of Traffic in Towns, visited Brazil in 1967 and published an article on Brasilia in the RIBA Journal under the title ‘The Moon’s Backside’ (a reference to an apocryphal city described by Jean-Paul Sartre) in which he inveighed against the problems of the newly built city, with raw sewage pouring into newly built apartments and flats looking like prison cells: a dislillusionment with the modern from an arch modernist, which antedates the attacks of the early 1970s.

Much more influential in forming attitudes to Brazilian Modernism than the exhibition of paintings in London in 1944 was the exhibition Brazil Builds at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, curated by Philip Goodwin, a beaux arts architect who had worked with Edward Durrell Stone on the design of the new MOMA, and with accompanying photographs by G.E. Kidder Smith, a fellow architect from Birmingham, Alabama who seems to have travelled round Brazil while serving in the US Navy.   The exhibition opened on 13 January 1943 and filled the whole ground floor of the museum with models, prints and sketches which brought an awareness of new Brazilian building, including the work of Niemeyer, to the world.