Oscar

The man just turned 100 last year and the entire country knows it. Quite a fine tribute for a mere architect. We found out that his house in Canaos was open to visitors from a lady at the gift shop of one of his museums in rio. It was a trick to find the address, but eventually a taxi took us there and dropped us off. We rang the bell unannounced and waited. After several minutes we slipped the gate and walked down the driveway. When we encountered the caretaker he wasnt so much upset that we got in but rather just questioned us on Niemeyer. When it seemed that we truly liked the guy he treated us as a best friend.


I sketched this plan. The one that at the top of this blog. It was an incredibly liberating experience; so diffrent from most plans drawn today. It had the feel of the hand to it versus today where so much of the work is so heavily modeled. Such amazing lines, and after seeing the curves of the mountains and beaches all around, the intesity of those hip shaking sambas, the curves found naturally all over this city. Niemeyer's house was a passionate and spiritually wakening.

The sketches do no justice and here are some more photos.

Landed in Rio

Ouro Preto

Before they saw us off to Rio they took us to the nearby town of Ouro Preto. Alejandre had gone to college here. They knew the town well. The town is famous for its colonial architecture which Brazilians believe to be more authentically local because it shrugs off some of the templates brought directly from Portugal and embraces a mixology of forms and elements. Hero to the area is was a mixed race bastard child of a famous local architect who despite becoming a cripple early in life was embraced by his father and given the opportunity to built in this booming gold town. I think it is that generosity, that embrace of all races and physical deformities and the mix of it, that is perhaps why Brazilians love this man so much. Who knows. the town is quite beautiful.


We really loved our time with these two. We listened to Bossa Nova the whole way to Ouro Preto and back. I truly hope that we have the opportunity to have them stay with us here in LA. We will see. And before i press on, one of the most astonishing things about Minas Gerais (the country province we are in) is that the food is nearly identical to Southern cooking. God Bless did i eat. Fried Chicken, Gravy, Greens, Corn, a type of homony made from some local plant since wheat is scarce, rice and beans. i mean on and on. It really impressed me how similar in many ways the music, our fat fightin' man with his mandolin in Belo and all of these greens and puddings ii was like being back on the Mississippi Delta foot stompin' and lickin' greasy fingers. This great Mix and how much our cultures have in common.

Belo

Paula and Alejandre, architects. So much of our love for Brazil is beacause these two were impeccable hosts.

and i drew their house which was a wonderful concrete structure from the 60's.

and they took us to this local bar.Where we heard traditional Brazilian Country music.
Astonishingly toward the end of the show this guy's mistress comes bellowing from the crowd cursing at him knocking over tables and swinging. The owner of the place and guy's wife was pissed, and started yelling. He jumps off the stage and chases her out of the joint waving his mandolin around. A typical night i am told...

They told us to go here.

RIO

Inhotim.2

The juxtaposition of landscape, architecture and art at times made your vision-mind swirl. All of these senses blended together in new ways and served as a vibrant counterpoint to the quiet banal of the traditional art gallery walls. Like how Sir John Soane had brought his bit of the Grand Journey back to his Brownstone on Lincoln's Inn Fields covering every nook of his tiny house, here the world of art is brought to Brazil and presented with equal intensity married to the landscape of this wild country.



This pavilion features handmade tiles by the artist Adriana Varejão. The building is quite well done so i sketched it.


In another pavilion is artwork by Doris Salcedo where with a heavy pressure machine chainlink is pressed into the sheetrock wall of the gallery space. The affect is astounding, beautiful, minimal and overwhelmingly powerful.

Inhotim

The contemporary art park Inhotim was the reason for our visit to Belo Horizonte. We had come to meet up with the executive architect for a pavilion that we had designed for an artist who was to be shown there. Set in a lush rainforest, Inhotim has all of these pavilions scattered about each holding artwork from a worldwide array of artists.

Brazil

Our stay in Argentina has come to an end. We pack up our things leave them at the airport and hop onto a flight to Brazil. We will be going to the countryside, beaches, and concrete jungles of Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janiero and Sao Paulo.

We flew into Brazil and the landscape dramatically changed. For years i had looked in wonder at the beautifully graphic forms of landscape architect Burle Marx and here flying over Brazil immediately his blobs of red and curves of green had context.


The soaring concrete cantilevers of Belo Horizonte airport and we had arrived into Brazil.


Development in Brazil has been moving at an astonishing speed. This city 30 years ago was fields and sparse single family residences. Between then and now the city filled completely with a carpet of single family, then 4-5 story apartments, and now with 20-30 story towers. It is interesting to see Los Angeles make just now a partial conversion from single family and all the trouble that comes with that. Then you see a place like this, a place with serious growth and it is just amazing to see how it has evolved.


I like the lines of the streets, every country does it slightly different. Do not be fooled by the order of the streets, ladies of the night stand under trees...Where ever you go in Brazil there are always several orders working at any given moment or place.

Do you know Xul Solar?

My newest hero. Very inventive guy, artist created his own language, characters, and dreamscapes for his paintings. Hung out with Duchamp in Paris and Borges in Argentina.

We went to his museum in Palermo which was originally his house but massively renovated by a contemporary Buenos Aires architect. The space was amazing, but completely overkilled, flaunting south america's propensity (and skill) with concrete form in this orgiastic Carlo Scarpa meets California deconstructivism.

But it was a fun and intense space, much like Xul's work. The space and the work ask you to totally immerse yourself and the journey is pretty amazing.

For Xul's bio and work i give credit where credit is due. I did not write this. It is from Giornale Nuovo (check out my links)

Xul Solar (1887-1963) was an Argentine painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor; a visionary utopian; an occultist and astrologer who yet remained catholic; an accomplished musician who was fluent in seven languages, two of which were of his own devising; and a minor character in Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The following images are scans from the catalogue Xul Solar: Visiones y revelaciones, which was published in 2005 to coincide with a major exhibition of his work, staged in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Mexico City and Houston.


'Palacios en Bría,' watercolour by Xul Solar, 1932.

Xul’s preferred medium was watercolour, although he also sometimes painted with tempera. Kandinsky and Marc’s Der Blaue Reiter almanac was a powerful early influence on his work, and his mature style is somewhat reminiscent of Paul Klee’s. ‘There are paintings of alternative universes, cities floating in the sky or on lakes, creatures that are half man and half airplane, angels, pyramids and whatever else came to him in his reveries’ (source)


'Vuell villa,' watercolour by Xul Solar, 1936.


'Ciudá lagui,' watercolour by Xul Solar, 1939.

Xul was driven by a restless zeal for revision and reform: considering the Spanish language to be ‘several centuries out of date,’ and moreover, ‘a cacophonous language composed of words that were overly long,’ he developed Neo-Criollo (Neo-Creole), whose vocabulary was mostly drawn from Spanish and Portuguese, but which also incorporated elements of French, English, Greek and Sanskrit. He composed texts and even conversed in this invented tongue which, however, was continually changing, with each successive elaboration of it being different than the one before.

The most important works in Neo-criollo are the San Signos (Holy Signs), a collection of sixty-four visionary texts based on the hexagrams of the I Ching. These texts were written at the request of Aleister Crowley, after a series of meetings between the two men in Paris in 1924. In a letter he wrote to Xul five years later, Crowley reminded him that ‘you owe me a complete set of visions for the 64 Yi symbols’ and added ‘your record as the best seer I ever tested still stands today.’ Although Xul had completed a first version of the San Signos by 1930, only a few short excerpts from them were ever published.


'Zodiaco,' watercolour by Xul Solar, 1953.


Pan-tree (front),' mixed media with watercolour by Xul Solar, 1952. Pan-tree (back),' mixed media with watercolour by Xul Solar, 1952.

In the ’40s, Xul devised a second, even more ambitious language-project: Pan-lengua, a proposed universal idiom with numeralogical and astrological underpinnings, utilising an invented script and a duodecimal number-system, whose entire lexicon could be expressed on the board of Panajedrez (Pan-chess), a game meant to be played on a 13x13 board, but which, according to Xul’s friend Jorge Luis Borges, was impossible to learn, owing to frequent and confusing amendments of its rules.

Aside from language reform, Xul conceived architectural projects, proposed changes to musical notation, and rebuilt musical instruments after his own idiosyncratic design. His need to remake and ‘improve’ extended beyond the artistic & intellectual. ‘With ingenuity and a sense of humor, […] he proposed changes in football: “Why play with one only ball, and not with three or four, and divide the field into six or twelve parallel sectors, like in rugby, and that each player wear a shirt with different letters so that words and phrases are formed?”’

Siphon

Throughout Argentina when you go out to a big beef dinner and you ask for some sparkling water often they will bring to you this fantastic contraption wrapped in metal gauze that will squirt water out of its nozzle by pressing a lever. Last seen in the U.S.A. by the 3 stooges with Moe squirting Larry in the eye, in Argentina they still use them often. And we fell in love. So last week we went to the market in San Telmo and we bought one. A brilliant blue one- oh so gorgeous.

Upon bringing it back we promptly filled it full of soda water, pressed the lever and waited for it to work. Well- it did not work. And after a bit of digging we find these things are basically a dead technology where these bottles were factory filled of water then gas. But its so pretty- and we are not the type to have decorations. It must work to be loved. The shocking thing is that no one on the internet seems to be curious to get these things working. Everyone just wants to look at them- suckers. But after a long talk with my engineer father and a winded discussion of Boyle's Law i think we have a strategy that is only moderately dangerous. It is based on the original patent:

our siphon

Uruguay

Laid back Uruguay. Seemed as if sand was everywhere. We had gotten there via a ferry from BA to Montevideo. We were curious to go to a church designed by architect/ engineer Eladio Dieste. The church was in a small town called Atlantida. The bus driver's eyebrows raised when we stepped off the bus.

We ate lunch and asked where the church was, figuring that the architectural masterpiece would be the towns main church. The waiter quickly responded that it was not far and we started walking. Of course the church is not the one we want. Now the problem is- is that all we know is that the church is in this city and every architecture book calls it just the Iglesia Atlantida.

We have no idea where it is and no clue what to call it. So we draw pictures. Crazy curvy pictures of plans and a blurry axon. Its not so good, but after talking to a few people and waving our arms around a bit, someone figured out that we were architects and that we wanted to go to the church outside of town. They told us to walk 3 kilometers straight ahead. Past goats and cows for 45 minutes we walked, very unsure if we would ever see it. Quietly musing that it is incredible that we would just head out on this dusty road with really no clue were we were going.

It was nice though- it reminded me of when i was a kid as i walked aimlessly along a country road staring down horses and jumping every time a dog raced the fence.

Obviously by the pictures we make it. You tell me it was worth it. What an amazing structure. All masonry, very simple, but super articulate structure. As we were there they prepared for a baptism.