A variable in Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s single-storey houses

Abstract

At the age of twenty-nine years old, the young Paulo Mendes da Rocha had already designed notable projects, and it was at that age, in 1958, when his work became widely recognised by winning the competition for the Paulistano Athletic Club Gymnasium with a project that soon became a reference in the national architecture context. This moment of maturation in his work corresponds to a period of significant events at the international level. Just two years before, events at CIAM 10 suggested that the generational tension pointed out by Le Corbusier led to the advent of numerous new perspectives affecting international architecture production. In parallel, some authors have already noticed subtle variations in Mendes da Rocha’s work that appeared in the 1970s and share ideas that had arisen in the new international context. Revisiting the twenty-one built and unbuilt single-storey house projects designed by the architect (all of which were designed between 1961 and 2012), by analysing the relationship between the interior ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces, it is possible to identify variations that mirror shifts at the international level. Noting that there is a divergence of solutions proposed by Mendes da Rocha in his first houses when compared to his latest designs, this paper joins recent contributions of other authors showing heterogeneities in the architect’s work and showing possible new directions in his work that appeared during the post-CIAM years.