"Arquitetura Nova’s vault house. Within and against the Casa Paulistana" a Lecture by Davide Sacconi / TPOD
Event details
| Date | 08.09.2025 |
| Hour | 18:00 › 20:00 |
| Speaker | Davide Sacconi |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
| Event Language | English |
Abstract
Between 1961 and 1971 the intense collaboration between Sérgio Ferro, Flávio Imperio and Rodrigo Lefèvre – later labelled Arquitetura Nova – produced an exceptional body of work. Within a Brazil under construction, they experimented with theatre, painting, pedagogical projects, construction techniques and the organisation of the building site, reframing the role of the architect as a producer and designing architecture as a tool of political action.
Against the false hopes of development and its promise of an open democratic society, Arquitetura Nova pursued an architecture for the people grounded in the needs and means of the uprooted labourers amassing in the Brazilian megalopolis. Working on the rationalisation of popular construction techniques and reclaiming building as a form of collective self-determination, they envisioned the construction site as the place where workers could fight against the alienation and exploitation of their labour.
Arquitetura Nova’s project materialised in the archetype of the vault-house, developed through a series of single family houses built in the 1960s and 1970s. While mostly designed for bourgeois intellectual friends, the vault-house challenged the canons and the hierarchies of the bourgeois domestic space, prefiguring a culture of building and dwelling suitable for the working class.
Arquitetura Nova’s vault-house stands out in the genealogy of the urban villa in São Paulo. From the eclectic Palacete Paulistano of the mid-19th century to the early modernist experiments and the full-blown development of brutalist and post-modern variations, the Casa Paulistana has fundamentally shaped the city as much as the power projected by its ruling class over two centuries. Working within and against this typology, Arquitetura Nova demonstrated that a new subjectivity could be produced by rethinking the way architecture is designed and built.
Bio
Davide Sacconi explores forms of buildings, cities, production and research through designs, exhibitions, books and pedagogical projects. He is particularly interested in the political economic relationships that take place between architectural form and its modes of production, representation and use. Taking a position within this complex field of political and aesthetic relationships the architect has to take a position and rethink its role vis-à-vis the current planetary crises. Davide has been teaching in UK since 2012 at the undergraduate and postgraduate level, including the MArch Urban Design at the Bartlett UCL, the BArch at University of Liverpool and the Syracuse University London Program, of which he has been the director for five years. At the RCA he has run ADS10 since 2017. ADS10 explores the idea of a Savage Architecture: an architecture that is not merely shelter and comfort, nor display and reproduction of wealth, but rather the material and symbolic basis of mankind’s necessity to come together and engage in collective rituals.
Image: Rodrigo Lefèvre with Ronaldo Duschenes and Paulo Madeira, Dino Zammataro House, São Paulo (1970).© FAUUSP Archive.
Between 1961 and 1971 the intense collaboration between Sérgio Ferro, Flávio Imperio and Rodrigo Lefèvre – later labelled Arquitetura Nova – produced an exceptional body of work. Within a Brazil under construction, they experimented with theatre, painting, pedagogical projects, construction techniques and the organisation of the building site, reframing the role of the architect as a producer and designing architecture as a tool of political action.
Against the false hopes of development and its promise of an open democratic society, Arquitetura Nova pursued an architecture for the people grounded in the needs and means of the uprooted labourers amassing in the Brazilian megalopolis. Working on the rationalisation of popular construction techniques and reclaiming building as a form of collective self-determination, they envisioned the construction site as the place where workers could fight against the alienation and exploitation of their labour.
Arquitetura Nova’s project materialised in the archetype of the vault-house, developed through a series of single family houses built in the 1960s and 1970s. While mostly designed for bourgeois intellectual friends, the vault-house challenged the canons and the hierarchies of the bourgeois domestic space, prefiguring a culture of building and dwelling suitable for the working class.
Arquitetura Nova’s vault-house stands out in the genealogy of the urban villa in São Paulo. From the eclectic Palacete Paulistano of the mid-19th century to the early modernist experiments and the full-blown development of brutalist and post-modern variations, the Casa Paulistana has fundamentally shaped the city as much as the power projected by its ruling class over two centuries. Working within and against this typology, Arquitetura Nova demonstrated that a new subjectivity could be produced by rethinking the way architecture is designed and built.
Bio
Davide Sacconi explores forms of buildings, cities, production and research through designs, exhibitions, books and pedagogical projects. He is particularly interested in the political economic relationships that take place between architectural form and its modes of production, representation and use. Taking a position within this complex field of political and aesthetic relationships the architect has to take a position and rethink its role vis-à-vis the current planetary crises. Davide has been teaching in UK since 2012 at the undergraduate and postgraduate level, including the MArch Urban Design at the Bartlett UCL, the BArch at University of Liverpool and the Syracuse University London Program, of which he has been the director for five years. At the RCA he has run ADS10 since 2017. ADS10 explores the idea of a Savage Architecture: an architecture that is not merely shelter and comfort, nor display and reproduction of wealth, but rather the material and symbolic basis of mankind’s necessity to come together and engage in collective rituals.
Image: Rodrigo Lefèvre with Ronaldo Duschenes and Paulo Madeira, Dino Zammataro House, São Paulo (1970).© FAUUSP Archive.
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- Pier Vittorio Aureli