context, relevance, provenance
As my review of SESC 24 de Maio begins, three overarching topics have emerged as the foundations of my research of its role in mediating cultural experiences:
- Care and the fate of architecture;
- Histories and modernisms; and
- Heritage and adaptive reuse.
The variety of resources I have engaged thus far involve exhibition catalogues (Critical Care and Infinite Span); architectural history surveys (Modern Architecture in Latin America and Brazil’s Modern Architecture); an edited volume of essays from architectural historians and theorists on the autonomy and social responsibility of the profession of architecture (Out of Site); recent conference proceedings on SESC 24 de Maio itself; and journal articles pertaining specifically to SESC 24 de Maio as well as more broadly to the histories of “adaptive reuse” and “cultural heritage” in Brazil. Between architecture and historic preservation, cross-disciplinary attempts to define and scrutinize these terms draw attention to the complications that arise in relation to the value of “cultural heritage” and which symbols of heritage are adapted or demolished.
My research diary posed the question of how SESC 24 de Maio, with all of its recent acclaim as an adaptive reuse project, “cares” for its public. This question traces to a proposition made by Joan C. Tronto in the Critical Care catalogue:that contemporary architects and planners are not uncaring but “caring wrongly.”[1] The catalogue then takes a critical position on the state of architecture as an anthropocentric discipline, asserting that architecture must begin caring—and caring the “correct” way—if it is to continue. I am skeptical of these historians’ perspectives on care and architecture’s autonomy in fulfilling these aspirations. They propose SESC 24 de Maio as a case study of caring architecture, praising it as a model for a better future designed through architecture. My questions is now not whether SESC 24 de Maio cares, but rather: Is this actually the most productive question to be asking of architectural projects? This review of SESC 24 de Maio will scrutinize notions of caring architecture in relation to long-standing questions of architecture’s responsibility as a discipline. In Out of Site, Kenneth Frampton and Margaret Crawford return to modernist and postmodernist understandings of architecture’s autonomy in order to call into question whether architecture can ever truly be socially responsible. Crawford writes that this is just not possible, presently, and proposes what would need to fundamentally change about the profession and theories of architecture for that to ever be possible. I think it is useful to juxtapose these concerns with the more recent, more pointed, and yet less convincing argument for a more caring architecture.
Perhaps it is argued that SESC 24 de Maio cares because it is an adaptive reuse project, rejecting modernist notions of building from a clean slate. However, Brazil’s Modern Architecture (2004), Modern Architecture in Latin America (2015), and Infinite Span: 90 Years of Brazilian Architecture (2019) each identify modern and postmodern architectural projects in Brazil which sought to preserve cultural heritage through adaptive reuse. These three publications endeavor in their own ways to provide some framework for a twentieth century history of architecture in Latin America. An essay in Infinite Span provides new texture to the narrative of acclaimed SESC 24 de Maio architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha by asking readers to approach his career as a case of architectural discourse rather than recognize it principally for its architectural forms. More foundational in approach, these publications should historically inform my review of SESC 24 de Maio and prompt questions as to where the project is located in the history of adaptive reuse in São Paulo as well as within the history of Mendes da Rocha’s practice.
Although praise is abundant for SESC 24 de Maio as a representation of the SESC cultural heritage mission and longer traditions heritage-focused building in Brazil, criticisms are surfacing in relation to this project’s choices on which aspects of the original building should be demolished and what was worth preserving. More dubious of adaptive reuse as a dedicated heritage preservation project is Marta Peixoto, who has written since 2018 about SESC 24 de Maio to map an understanding of the different scales of heritage projects in Brazil more broadly. She questions whether physically preserving a structural element of the building is enough. One original building of the SESC 24 de Maio site was destroyed entirely, and with it the history of its interior spaces. Should the original spaces of adaptive reuse and heritage projects be ascribed greater architectural value? Peixoto’s line of inquiry is valid, and it provides a refreshing counter to the refrain of articles such as Steffen Lehmann’s, which accounts for Lina Bo Bardi’s own SESC commission (SESC Pompéia, 1982) as a paradigmatic shift toward a sustainable, reuse and heritage-driven agenda. Journal articles including and beyond Lehmann’s, which problematize methods and motives for adaptive reuse, should shape my understanding of the plans for SESC 24 de Maio to be more than a center for recreation and leisure but a site that could encompass both heritage and future.
[1] Tronto, “Caring Architecture,” in Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 27.
bibliography
Andreoli, Elisabetta, and Adrian Forty. Brazil’s Modern Architecture. London: Phaidon, 2004.
Fitz, Angelika, and Elke Krasny, eds. Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019.
Ghirardo, Diane Yvonne, ed. Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture. Seattle: Bay Press, 1991.
Lara, Fernando L., and Luis E. Carranza. Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology, and Utopia. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015.
Lehmann, Steffen. “An environmental and social approach in the modern architecture of Brazil: The work of Lina Bo Bardi.” In City, Culture and Society 7, no. 3 (September 2016): 169-185.
Peixoto, Marta. “Three times Modern: three projects, three different spheres, and scales; three different stories.” In Joelho: Revista de Cultura Arquitectónica 9 (2018): 173-184.
Peixoto, Marta and Carlos Eduardo Camas. “The SESC Project: Going Modern as a Contemporary Movement.” In Metamorphosis – The Continuity of Change: International Docomomo Conference 15, August 28-31, 2018:375-379. Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Serapião, Fernando, Guilherme Wisnik, Anton Stark, and Mário Seabra. Infinite Span: 90 Years of Brazilian Architecture. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2019.
Melanie R. Ball 