Pompidou Paraná. Solano Benítez

Among colleagues: the assessment of Pedro Mendes da Rocha

Solano Benítez's design for the Brazilian headquarters of the Centre Pompidou prompts us to reflect on the expression and essence of architecture, its tectonics, its spaces, and its insertion into the territory, refuting the idea of ​​a building asserting itself solely through appearance. At the same time, it revisits materials consecrated in the history of buildings, which reclaim our reflection on ancestry and universality, and which rejects the Tordesillas line, which was distorted to impose three different names on a vast territory and a single nation, clumsily dividing what was once one. The trigon of rivers, the meeting of waters, affirms this fluidity and moves toward blending, mixing, and synthesis. 

Benítez's proposal fuses a construction that appears ethereal at first and gradually gains shape toward the core, always affirming its vegetal condition, born of the earth, made of earth, of that earth, and born planted with its roots and branches gaining power, robustness, and density. It poses questions about how to take possession of the territory, mark a place without being alien to it, and, at the same time, be universal. The tectonic dimension of the work exalts a technique that adopts ancient materials (or rather, an ancient material). aggiornada with modern resources that express the nakedness of the adopted procedures and, in this way, oppose the gratuitous formalism that hides the sincerity of materials and processes and, furthermore, masks them, in incredible resources resulting in works with stratospheric budgets and without constructive truth.

The implementation of the new museum suggests a materialization of its earthly arms from the dense and lush vegetation of the surroundings and the sky that takes shape in the voids of its branches, with centripetal energy and, at the same time, in the opposite direction, the explosion of these arms, originating in volumes that dematerialize, evoking the centrifugal energy of the expansion of a growing plant.

Thus, the whole thing is established: little by little, we begin to perceive its tentacles in the forest, a mimicry of the earthen ground, the trees with the density of their leaves and branches, nature that wants to be a building, a building that wants to be nature.

This manifesto of dialogue in continuum with nature, in a moment of supplication for the urgent salvation of the planet, makes us reflect on the human condition and, above all, the appropriation of its crust in the heart of the monumental, and emblematic, Atlantic forest.

Like Frank Lloyd Wright's vigorous 1939 building facing Central Park – for the Guggenheim Museum –, a flower embedded in the immense and regular grid of Manhattan, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, by Piano and Rogers, in the heart of Les Halles, Solano Benítez planted his flower in the Atlantic Forest next to the triple meeting of the waters that will promote the encounter of all the peoples of the world.


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