The Copan Building as an Urban Intervention
If a “shared space requires a specifically architectural form of sacrifice, severing some part of the enclosure form common use,”[1] “can a single building contribute to the formation of common ground?”[2] From Unité d'Habitation de Marseille to Niemeyer’s numerous early project agenda, it is apparent that “spatial flow is always measured against the limits it seeks to bypass or break through.”[3] Building on that notion of a building serving as an architecturally shared platform for the whole of the city at urban scale, in this paper the capacity of design as a tool of both unification and segregation will be discussed.
Since the emergence of the homo Sapiens, our civilizations have been forming from more than one epicenter. “As part of a widespread process of decentralization, cultural manifestations emerging from economically peripheral countries were altering the course of what was being produced within the developed centers.”[4] That radical rupture with history, acted as a catalyst in the formation of what is today perceived as Brazil’s modern style of architecture. Despite the numerous debates that initiated, that irrationality in the architecture of Brazil during the beginning of the 20th century, enabled a clean, crisp and more importantly precise outcome to emerge, forming what we today associate with as Brazil's Modern Architecture.
According to Leatherbarrow, “for the sake of our cities and the cultures they represent, there is no more pressing task than the clarification of the conditions under which communicative space can be re-imagined.”[5] Brazil’s new architecture however, “presented certain specific characteristics that made it independent of, and distinct from, it’s European sources.”[6] It expressed a ‘utopian hedonism’ and was seen internationally as ‘the model for an entirely “other” way of life’.”[7] A life however, which was lacking certain elements of communal integration.
If “common ground would seem to exist by virtue of spatial flow through transparent facades and across orthogonal or non geometries”[8], then Niemeyer’s portfolio of telluric dimensions leading order to be established through scale or the lack of the architect in “loading material with any expressive charge”[9], rejects just that. Copan, may be conceived as a multifactional urban apparatus, but it does that within its very own and strictly defined enclosure. The sinuous volume of the building’s north façade acts as a continuous and autonomous volume, a shield eliminating any short of spatial communication or tension between the wall and the street.
According to many scholars, “Brazilian architecture acquired its desire to ‘merge the functional with the representational’, or, in other words, ‘the resort to the technical with the celebration of technique’.”[10] There is no debate about Niemeyer’s approach in emphasizing solely in the individuality of his very own building project. He “disregarded the Functionalist principle of the building as a series of generic cells reproduced many times over and presented each building as a unique and indivisible whole.”[11]
Palladio’s design “resists the notion that common ground is an inheritance; instead, we should see it as a task.”[12] If that is the case then, maybe Brazil failed to reject its own tendency “towards exteriors which are created not necessarily at the expense of function.”[13] As a result, the adoption of the form seems like a consequence of “Brazil became modern almost instantaneously and without any questioning of, or distancing from, the process”[14], depriving the country from a communal public infrastructure.
[1] David Leatherbarrow, “The Sacrifice of Space,” in David Chipperfield, ed., Common Ground (Venice: Marsilio, 2012), 28
[2] ibid
[3] David Leatherbarrow, “The Sacrifice of Space,” in David Chipperfield, ed., Common Ground (Venice: Marsilio, 2012), 27
[4] Guilherme Wisnik, “Doomed to Modernity,” in Brazil’s Modern Architecture (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 22
[5] David Leatherbarrow, “The Sacrifice of Space,” in David Chipperfield, ed., Common Ground (Venice: Marsilio, 2012), 38
[6] Guilherme Wisnik, “Doomed to Modernity,” in Brazil’s Modern Architecture (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 26
[7] Guilherme Wisnik, “Doomed to Modernity,” in Brazil’s Modern Architecture (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 26
[8] David Leatherbarrow, “The Sacrifice of Space,” in David Chipperfield, ed., Common Ground (Venice: Marsilio, 2012), 27
[9] Guilherme Wisnik, “Doomed to Modernity,” in Brazil’s Modern Architecture (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 23
[10] Guilherme Wisnik, “Doomed to Modernity,” in Brazil’s Modern Architecture (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 30
[11] ibid
[12] David Leatherbarrow, “The Sacrifice of Space,” in David Chipperfield, ed., Common Ground (Venice: Marsilio, 2012), 31
[13] Guilherme Wisnik, “Doomed to Modernity,” in Brazil’s Modern Architecture (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 22
[14] Guilherme Wisnik, “Doomed to Modernity,” in Brazil’s Modern Architecture (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 29