Last December, ten days short of his 105th birthday, Oscar Niemeyer died in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro. For over seven decades, the celebrated architect had churned out iconic designs at a prolific clip, amassing a body of work that has become virtually synonymous with his country’s particular brand of architectural modernism. After such a prodigious career, Niemeyer’s passing inevitably posed the question: what will Brazilian architecture come to look like in his wake?
An exhibition at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt hazards the first provisional answers to this question. Nove Novos – Neun Neue: Emerging Architects from Brazil presents recent work by nine young firms that, as the exhibition materials would have it, stand to make the greatest impact on the country since the late Niemeyer. Apparently, it’s a good time to be an architect in Brazil. The country’s hard-earned political stability, coupled with its steady economic growth, has ushered in a new era of construction, giving young architects the unique chance to build extensively and to build big. Projects featured include a courthouse complex (Corsi Hirano Arquitetos), a sports center (BCMF Arquitetos), and a museum for a chocolate manufacturer (Metro Arquitetos Associados), designed by architects ranging in age from their mid-20s to their mid-40s.
So, what’ve Brazil’s promising young architects taken from their most celebrated predecessor? Based on the small survey on display in this show, the answer seems to be: none of the signature stuff. All of the basic modernist innovations are there (reinforced concrete, curtain walls, the occasional brise soleil), but gone are the flowing lines, gone are the bright, whitewashed facades, gone are the pilotis and the other reworked trappings of the International Style that defined Niemeyer’s work. Instead, the architects featured in Nove Novos seem to have a lot more in common with the Paulista School, that loose network of São Paulo-based architects that began to challenge Niemeyer’s sensuous functionalism with the blunt language of brutalism in the mid-50s. While none of the works on display are as stark or confrontational as those of the Paulistas, the prevalence of raw materials (especially unfinished concrete), the largely muted color palette, and the almost uniform reliance on straight lines and cubic volumes all contribute to a harder aesthetic that shares more with the likes of João Batista Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha than with their forbearers.