In the late 50’s a group of brazilian architects based in São Paulo led by João Vilanova Artigas and made up of professionals like Rino Levi, Lina Bo Bardi and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, founded the basis of the Paulista School.
This architectural movement fought against the smoother curvy surfaces of the Rio (Carioca) School, so they searched for an objective, ethic, scientific and even marxist architecture where structure and concrete were the main characters.
The scale of the American territory encouraged the desire of building a common space between territory and people in order to humanize the nature. Its formal expression was marked by elementary geometry and abstraction.
The vast and special American territory encouraged the desire of building an active void that was given by two independent elements in dialogic relationship: floor and ceiling. So the important thing was the emptiness, not the material.
This group based the movement in four points: topography, unit volume, spacial structure and void.
-They had to change the topography to make kinder the nature, so they built an interior space opened to exterior landscape and in touch with the rectified topography which conformed a continuos line between terrain and architecture.
-They projected buildings which were single volumes where roof and façade were the same thing. This buldings were big and heavy because they wanted to fuse it with the ground.
-These architects bounded to São Paulo decided to project big buldings with large spans using complex structures because in this city the school of arquitecture was linked to engineering.
-The void allowed a free-flowing space. They liked to use ramps to transmit the idea of an urban space into a closed one. Also big concrete beams allowed to create a free first floor which symbolized the main door of the buildings
The School defined an architecture located in a specific territory to orientate the citiziens and an architecture where it is posible to observe the exterior from the interior. They projected new geographies where they built compact volumes wich defined new physique and social horizons.
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