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Paulo Mendes da Rocha takes 2017 Riba Royal Gold Medal
'Brazilian brutalist' who modernised Sao Paulo will receive top architecture award next year
Brazil's Paulo Mendes da Rocha, the architect known for his brand of "Brazilian brutalism", has been named the winner of the 2017 Riba Royal Gold Medal for architecture.
"Revolutionary and transformative, Mendes da Rocha's work typifies the architecture of 1950s Brazil – raw, chunky, and beautifully 'brutal' concrete," said Riba president Jane Duncan.
John McAslan, who seconded the nomination, said in his citation that Mendes da Rocha's structures "are never designed to shock, but rather engage as directly as possible with ordinary people, ordinary lives, ordinary settings".
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The Brazilian himself wrote that he has always been attracted to poverty and the "humility" of simple things. "I think everything superfluous is irritating," he says.
Unusually, the architect has achieved an international reputation despite almost all his buildings being in his native Brazil.
While he has built few significant structures outside of his home country, Mendes da Rocha is "largely responsible for the modernisation of Sao Paulo", says Dezeen magazine.
One of Mendes da Rocha's finest achievements, said McAslan, is his transformation of the city's neo-classical Pinacoteca do Estado art museum, "which magnificently retains, to this day, a freshness and quality of raw beauty".
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Born in 1928, Mendes da Rocha established his Sao Paulo office in 1955. One of his earliest and most important projects is the Paulistano Athletic Club of Sao Paulo, built in 1957.
Consisting of six concrete blades supporting a thin circular concrete roof supported by 12 slender cables, it makes a startling impression. The Guardian's Oliver Wainwright calls it "a remarkable circus balancing act that pushed the limits of what was physically possible".
He last year completed the long-awaited Lisbon Coach Museum – "a gargantuan concrete hangar", says Wainwright, and one of his few works outside Brazil.
Other important works include the Cais das Artes in Vitoria, Sao Paulo's Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, and a dramatic canopy structure at the Patriarch Plaza, also in Sao Paulo.
The architect has already received two other major awards this year: Japan's Praemium Imperiale prize and the Venice Architecture Biennale Gold Lion.
Riba awards the gold "for a body of work, rather than for one building or for an architect who is currently fashionable". The only other Brazilian recipient is Oscar Niemeyer, who picked up the award in 1998. Previous winners include Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Sir Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid.
