Nelson Kon

OBJECTIVE

If, on the one hand, the project should respond to the demand of a brief that includes various new types of use related to the musical and performance arts, it should also respond, in a clear and transformative fashion, to a pre-existing situation of physical and spatial nature, which encompasses intense life and a strongly present community. Further still: It should regenerate degraded spaces, create new grounds for shared living, derived from urban geography, the history of the place, and the contemporary values of public life. In this case, we can say that to design is to capture and invent the place at the same time, in the same gesture.
Beginning at the center of the block, the new building unfurls in three directions – Anhangabaú Valley, São João Avenue and Conselheiro Crispiniano Street. As an octopus, it extends its tentacles and occupies spaces. The main element to establish dialogue with the remaining buildings of the block and the surrounding area is a set of pigmented, exposed concrete edifications, with a total area of 28,500 square meters, suspended over the urban walkways.

CONTEXT

Our project begins from within and outward, from the bowels, and takes shape in them. It presents itself to the city as denouncement of a bankrupt urban model which no longer functions; it is no longer applicable to the scale of our metropolis. Houses and small buildings with backyards and ample lots are no longer justified, as they end up giving place to useless hollows. Thus, we have tried to understand that which was obsolete, useless; what had expired of this ancient city planning. The new plan was to make that our raw material in the project. Out of these leftovers or, better yet, out of this bagasse the city had crushed, we built Praça das Artes.
Because of this inception, as a denouncement, the hollows at the ground level were not occupied, not even by columns. Instead, we created a great public passageway out in the open – a place for gatherings, the plaza that names the complex. The new buildings are supported by structures on the edges of the lots, as a result of a form of architecture molded by adversity and restriction, but also, an architecture that does not require scorched earth to serve as pedestal.
The aspects that brought us to this conceptual decision were, precisely, the nature of the place and the understanding of its spaces as products of social-political factors that have been in play for decades – if not centuries – in the development of the city. Everything matters, once you begin to realize that a place is not only a physical thing, but an arena of tension, conflicts of interests, underutilization, and even abandonment.