Mairinque Railroad Station: the design and the interventions

Abstract

The second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries architecture faced the challenged of responding to the demands and the technical and aesthetic innovations associated with the emerging industrial reality. This panorama of transformations and formal experimentation was associated, among other things, with the diffusion of Art Nouveau. In Brazil, the style had little appropriation among the architects, gaining distinction, however, through the architecture produced by Victor Dubugras. Numerous projects conceived by the architect incorporated a language that combined an impressive resourcefulness, in what refers to the articulation of the aesthetic formulation with the constructive development, synthesis found in one of its most symbolic and representative designs: the Mairinque Railroad Station. This article makes a reading of the plastic and constructive characteristics of this building. It also investigates how a series of interventions executed in the building compromised the original design as a single, sober and cohesive element. It shows how, a landmarked building, the structure of the construction is preserved, but the subtle composition of its spaces and details – colors, textures, frames, etc. – was lost and with it, perhaps, the main quality of the design.