Il disegno del vuoto per costruire una città democratica. L’esperienza di San Paolo in Brasile come paradigma per la città europea

Alongside the uncontrolled expansion of the Brazilian megalopolises are building projects inspired by a sense of the collective. These projects open to the city, they let themselves be invaded, offering Europe possible models to look to. On the theme of social housing, the research carried out by the architects belonging to the São Paulo school shows a common approach, which binds the issue of housing to that of the city, and links architectural scale to urban scale in an inseparable manner. Building a habitation means building the cidade, grafting onto the consolidated or peripheral urban fabric new fragments of city conceived of as “micro-realities”. Inspired by the ideas of Artigas, the new generation of architects shows the desire to bring architecture and urban planning back to the centre of the collective debate, interpreting the design of the city as an instrument of social action. This paper intends to present the outcome of an in-depth study, centred on paulista architecture, to propose as a possible model of moral coherence – that of the school – capable of generating formal clarity and structural rigour, essentiality and rejection of superfluity; of transmitting a cultural identity through constructive realism and poetic sobriety. Critical illustration and the comparison between some projects, public and residential, will offer the starting point for a broader reflection on simplicity – volumetric and material – and spacial continuum between interior and exterior, building and city, as instruments for giving not a private but a collective character. The projection of habitational space is confused with that of public space: comunal patios, internal streets and squares are conceived as the extension of the urban fabric, they connect what is built to the megalopolis. Such architectures can be crossed without entering them: the street becomes a square and it’s the building that defines it, that towers over it without invading it; the building rises from the ground, delimits, but doesn’t close off. The projection of space, then, becomes a potential instrument for creating continuity between dwelling place and urban context, in a vision of the city free of preconceived schemes, one that is open, democratic and capable, in the words of Mendes da Rocha, of accommodating the “imprevisibilidade da vida”.