PA House: between Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Metro Architects

Abstract

In 2003, the PA House was built in São Paulo, designed by Metro Arquitetos Associados, office founded in 2000, and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who graduated in 1954. The house gains importance because references and practices from two different generations of architects were blended in it. Potentially, it can be considered a 'radical' work, once it embodies a dialectical movement with modern ideals references and, at the same time, its negation or overcoming. To measure this 'hybridization or radicalism’’, the concept of 'type' is used in architecture and the way it became to be used in the modern design conception. More than a design pre-figuration, the type started to be adopted as a formal structure open to investigations that allow deformations and overlays incorporations of types or 'fragment of types’’, already tested in previous designs. Due to this procedure, in a sequence of an architect’s designs, it is possible to identify a 'mother type' and the interference of a model to build another, mainly through the arrangement and reuse of 'wing-types' and the insertion of irregular composition elements (stairs and hydraulic cores), whose function and proportion promotes or prevents the free design of the plan. Based on that discussion, the paper aims to identify how houses built before the practice of Mendes da Rocha and Metro interfere in the PA House design, understanding this analysis as a privileged procedure to discuss the design as a reflective practice.