The Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha asks a group of students if they know why the pyramids were built. After all of the traditional answers have been hesi-tantly proffered and rejected, with Mendes da Rocha all the while shaking his head, he goes on to say, “The pyramids were built because someone pointed at a giant rock lying on the ground and asked, ‘How can we get this up there?’ ” and then he points up into the sky.
The exhibition of getting this up there is a recurrent theme in his work, which inevi-tably involves masses that are not simply floating but, at times, appear to be caught between ascent and descent, hovering over plazas, pools, and even other buildings.
Because concrete, his material of choice, is intrinsically very heavy, to see it float is to witness an almost supernatural event, with viewers’ responses being more of a subjec-tive, emotional order than an objecsubjec-tive, rational one. Still, the levitation of mass demands a resolution in physics, and Mendes da Rocha supplies these resolu-tions … sparingly.
One encounters the importance of mass at the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture in São Paulo. If the neoclassic museum required a grand portico to signify its entrance as well as its importance, Mendes da Rocha uses a giant beam spanning the site to mark the presence of this important museum.
This hollow beam, delicately supported on its two end walls with seven steel joints, houses lighting and storage for outdoor events, while protecting from sun and weather the plaza that is in turn the actual roof of the museum as well as its principal exterior public space. Investigating this hulking yet buoyant block, one discovers the primary interior spaces of the museum
below, carved into the gently sloped site on a corner of a residential neighborhood.
The block provides the museum with its symbolic portico, yet preserves the scale of the neighborhood by reducing the bulk of the museum itself.
Similarly, the huge steel blade that soars above the entrance to the underground pas-sage in Patriarch Plaza in São Paulo protects the escalators and stairs from the elements while sketching an elegant arched entryway over what might otherwise have been just a hole in the ground. The huge square arch that marks entry into this important space seems almost to twist and crack as it sends two brackets downward to support the asymmetrical, curved arch over the stairs.
This arch then frames views from within and through the space, ironically providing a human scale from beneath while present-ing a monumental scale when viewed from the city, a monumentality that suggests the importance of the gallery buried below, giving access to one of the city’s primary urban parks.
The main gallery block of the Cais das Artes (Arts Quay) in Vitória, designed with METRO Arquitetos, seems to leap and frolic above the pavement of the quay, permitting views of the bay beyond and contrasting with the resolute groundedness of the audi-torium cube. Supported only on three pairs of columns, the massive hollowed concrete side walls (gigantic trussed beams, actu-ally) support the interior floors, their varying heights indicated by the steps of the walls. Light reflected from the plaza below lights the galleries through the gaps between the staggered floor slabs. One moves about within the museum with the same grace the museum moves about the quay. Once more, Mendes da Rocha derives lyricism from massiveness.
Concrete becomes cloudlike.
Mendes da Rocha: Underground passage entry on the Patriarch Plaza, São Paulo, Brazil, 1992
Mendes da Rocha & METRO Arquitetos: Cais das Artes, Vitória, ES, Brazil, 2008
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Mass SubtractiveBy cutting into a solid, its thickness is revealed; massiveness is disclosed by the removal of substance that allows one to perceive its dimensions.
Architectural poché, on the other hand, is the occupiable space that appears to be excavated within the mass. Typically, it is hierarchically secondary in programmatic significance yet introduces another spatial layer within the “ground” of the mass whose surfaces define the primary spaces of the building. This ground can often become a figural accomplice to the shaping of architectural space.
The Nolli Plan of Rome, for example (see chapter 11), represents the city as a solid mass within which a series of figural voids has been conceptually excavated. There, the city is conceived as the inhabitable poché of everyday life whose building surfaces produce the background for the figural voids of civic and religious spaces. Here, the public interior spaces of the city are given for the first time equivalent status as public exterior spaces, producing a seamless spatial condition of quotidian market, palazzo courtyard, religious sanctuary, and ceremonial piazza, all defined by the backdrop of the inhabitable mass of the city.
In Ethiopia, Bete Giyorgis (or the Church of St. George, twelfth century) has been carved from the solid volcanic rock in which it is located.
Here, the construction of mass
and space results from a subtractive process, a literal excavation that simultane-ously produces the mass (solid) of the church and its occupiable spaces (voids).
The showers, toilets, and cupboards of Pierre Chareau’s 1928 Maison de Verre in Paris, France, occupy the poché that sculpts the spaces of the principal bedrooms and bathrooms.
Their volumes reveal their programmatic contours and dimensions while establishing the spatial perimeters of the spaces that their surfaces define.
Conceptually understood as an initially solid volume from which discrete masses have been removed, the resulting voids in I. M. Pei’s 1973 Johnson Museum in Ithaca, New York, are spatial inscriptions and extensions
of the regulating lines and data of the surrounding context: extensions of existing campus paths, views that align the building with the distant landscape, and parapet heights of adjacent buildings.
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE
Characteristics
Density and gravity are terms that are most commonly associated with mass—the impene-trability of a volume or its perceptual weight.
Density
A sense of mass can be achieved through material or spatial density, as in a stone wall or a medieval village, where the heaviness of the material and the relationship of solid to void contribute to the perception of density.
Monolithic form can also convey a sense of
mass—however here density is not equated with weight or lack of space, but rather with opacity and lack of scale.
Gravity
While all buildings are in a perpetual state of resisting gravitational forces, an awareness of this resistance can be amplified through detaching or articulating a structure from its ground. It is in this condition of apparent weightlessness that a sense of massiveness can be most evident.
are conceptually carved from a geological mass, producing an occupiable landscape that mediates between the scale of the building and the scale of the city in which it is embedded.
surface, privileges the reading of a solid mass—one where scale and detail give way to profile and silhouette, a monolith set against the distant snow covered mountains. Alejandro Aravena, 2003–05 Grafton Architects’ sectional
study model for their 2008 Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, demonstrates a spatial density where both the primary auditoria and
“streets” between buildings
The “Siamese Towers” of the Technology Center at Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, are clad in a series of skins, an outer one of clear glass and an inner one of fiber cement. The collectively opaque, yet constantly transforming Pacific Ocean. The perimeter
walls that also define its primary spaces not only serve to locate its services and circulation, but they become the primary screen through which the landscape and gaze is framed and mediated.
In Pezo and Von Ellrichs- hausen’s 2005 Casa Polli in the Collumo peninsula of southern Chile, the cubic mass of rough concrete emerges from its site as a lighthouse might on the rocky precipice of the
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Mass The two shells ofMassimiliano Fuksas’s San Paolo Apostolo in Foligno, Italy (2001–09), are simultaneously heavy and light. The exterior concrete shell is a seemingly impenetrable box that
Mario Fiorentino and Giuseppe Perugini’s Fosse Ardeatine, the 1945–52 cemetery and monument outside Rome, marks the mass execution of Italian civilians by the German occupation on March 24,
Lina Bo Bardi’s 1968 São Paulo Museum of Art lifts the volume of the museum’s primary galleries and suspends it from two enormous beams supported on four pillars. The resulting space captured between the lower ground plane (in which detaches its industrial
context from its interior sacred space. The idealized interior is suspended within this exterior shell by strands of concrete shafts that, in turn, draw exterior light to its interior.
1944. Here, the solemnity of the event is given presence through the mass of the enormous concrete sarcophagus that hovers above the graves and beneath which the visitors pass.
are embedded the museum’s auditoria and supporting spaces) and the hovering mass above creates the Belvedere—an urban piazza that connects the Paulista Avenue to the city of São Paolo and the distant mountains beyond.
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE