Primitive Artifacts: Six unknows for the study of the project strategy in the work Paulo Mendes da Rocha

Abstract

The possibility of understanding the meaning of the design strategy in architecture lies in discovering which are the abstract principles that order the concrete operations capable of determining the formal and spatial conditions of an architectural idea. This article seeks to highlight the poetic and aesthetic value of technical order as a fundamental principle of a strategy. For this the work of Mendes da Rocha is studied —as a relevant character of the Ibero-American disciplinary context—, and six unknows are proposed that —in the form of conjectures— highlight the relationship between the technical, diagrammatic and symbolic orders in architecture. This reference expresses in a strong way two fundamental aspects of the discipline: 1. The essential sense of architecture in its primitive condition, that is, the establishment of a place in the world as part of a territorial continuity; 2. The face-to-face sense of the project as evidence of a technical order, that is, the constructive tension translates into the aesthetic recording of the architectural fact. In this order of ideas, the design strategy of Mendes da Rocha becomes an architecture of a paradigmatic nature, it is the result of a dynamic tension between a representational essence and a diagrammatic presence.