Museu do pão: arquitetura, cultura e lugar.

Abstract

This paper constitutes a study about the Museu do Pão museum, developed by Brasil Arquitetura’s office in São Paulo, with an emphasis on verifying the relations set between architecture, culture and place. At the museum, built between 2005 and 2007 in Ilópolis, small town in the mountain region of Rio Grande do Sul, there’s a clear and conscious intention by the authors to relate the works with the local culture, as well as to systematically use the aspects of said culture as project and architecture form elaboration criteria. It is an example where context aspects enter the architectural synthesis alongside other aspects that transcend it, on the dialectic process between the author’s architectural culture and context culture. This synthesis is recurrent in other works and it is determinant to the works of Brasil Arquitetura - of which the works of Ministério da Educação e Saúde Pública by Lúcio Costa and SESC by Lina Bo Bardi are references. Aiming to establish this links or ‘connections’ with context cultural aspects as a way of qualifying their architecture, architects seem to contribute to the construction of a place, a ‘place of memory’, actually. Starting from the premise that context and culture aspects are inherent to the architectural mechanism and that the different forms through which a work can relate to the surrounding place and culture was a theme of great importance on a certain moment of modern architecture; the Museu do Pão analysis explores how this intention, by the authors, manifests in the professional M.O. of Brasil Arquitetura’s office and in the produced architecture, and seeks to identify the aspects that seem to contribute to the construction of a ‘place of memory’.