Visitors to the recently opened 17th Architecture Biennale in Venice passed one of his last and most beautiful works in the Arsenale, which was celebrated there in large photographs.

In fact, the “Sesc 24 de Maio”, located in the middle of Sao Paulo, is one of the most interesting public buildings of today.

It opened three years ago and is a mixture of a cultural center, a public living room, a stacked city with restaurants, playgrounds, climbing walls, a library and, at the top of the roof, a swimming pool for 400 people, which is ideal for those hot Brazilian summer days the crowds are rushing.

Niklas Maak

Editor in the features section.

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    Unlike the Seattle library or the Helsinki library, which are similarly amazing social machines, the Brazilian house is not a new building, but the conversion of the administrative headquarters of a furniture store that MMBB and Paulo Mendes da Rocha planned three years ago in Sao Paulo.

    Today the building, which has been converted into an educational and meeting place with state funds and by a trade union organization, is visited by up to 10,000 people every day.

    An incomparable style

    The curators of the Architecture Biennale present it as an example of how and in which places the welfare state can bring together an economically drifting society. But the house is also an example of how wisely you can convert existing buildings - a topic that is becoming more and more urgent in view of the numerous soon-to-be-vacant office and commercial buildings that will in future be ruins from the time before home offices and online retail will shape the image of many cities.

    It is perhaps no coincidence that Paulo Mendes da Rocha has repeatedly built such houses that have given society and its public rituals, its educational wishes and togetherness a framework.

    Born in 1928 in the Brazilian city of Vitoria, Espírito Santo, he grew up after the war at a time when the state saw itself as a social farmer.

    Mendes da Rocha studied in São Paulo and opened his architecture office there in 1954.

    With his first building, the Club Athletico, he established an incomparable style, which he continued to develop until his sculpture museum in São Paulo in 1988 and which is itself extremely sculptural.

    As if the concrete block was lifting

    Initially shaped by Oscar Niemeyer, his concrete buildings became more and more raw, like rock walls, and gave modernity, which had been decried as nonsensical, an almost baroque surface depth. The Minimal Art of the sixties also shaped his work. The buildings of Mendes da Rocha - stadiums, churches, offices, cultural buildings - were always places of common celebration, factories for densification, machines for the functioning of the social construction of the city. His Poupatempo, built in 1998, is a three-hundred-meter-long concrete block with offices and a police station, in which administrative procedures can be dealt with much faster than usual. The name means “save time”. "One of the later works is the Museu Brasileiro de Escultura, the architecture of which is perhaps its most important exhibit - a sixty-meter-long concrete block,that hovers ghostly above the ground.

    In general, this is probably the defining motif in Mendes da Rocha's work: that something that looks incredibly heavy lifts off seemingly effortlessly, as if one had succeeded in overcoming gravity. In his homes, the fireplace hangs like a ledge in the room; in Osaka, at the 1970 World's Fair, he had the Brazilian pavilion balanced on a hill, and his sports stadiums, authorities and museums also leave a lot of space below them.

    There is also a political claim behind this. Mendes da Rocha, who tended to belong to the left-wing political spectrum, has repeatedly emphasized that land should be public and, as a resource that cannot be increased, it should not be privatized and withdrawn from the world. With his last renovation, the Pritzker Prize winner from 2006 also showed how, beyond demolition and new construction, you can deal intelligently with what is there and create an architectural framework for a more relaxed, solidarity society. Paulo Mendes de la Rocha, who, despite his old age, had not retired, died in his hometown last Sunday.