Monumental Modernism

After two fantastic years my stint as a visiting professor in the Escola de Arquitetura is coming to an end. I managed to do less than half of what I had planned, but taught five different classes, launched a blog, and am slowly putting together what I hope will be a long essay or small book on the mining and extractive industries. To mark the end of this journey, I decided to rent a two-bedroom flat in the Edifício JK, named after Juscelino Kubitschek, former governor of Minas Gerais and ex-president of Brasil. Designed by Oscar Niemeyer in the 1950s, it is a complex that towers over the city. Composed of two blocks, the tallest rising to forty stories, it’s reinforced concrete structure is by any measure monumental in scale with both buildings elevated on duck feet columns of Stonehenge proportions. Home to  five thousand inhabitants distributed in a thousand apartments, it’s original programme was inspired by Charles Fourier’s Phalanstery, a utopian idea of a city within a single building that contains all the necessary facilities a  citizen might require. It was a concept that inspired successive generations of modernist architects. The Russian Constructivists encapsulated the idea in the theory of the ‘social condenser’, a building or planned neighbourhood with integrated collective facilities that would help in the transition to a new way of life. The most famous example is the Dom Narkomfina housing commune in Moscow (1930), a scheme that I have visited obsessively over many years and a key reference point for Le Corbusier in his design of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (1952). Technologically innovative in the use of concrete, both buildings were also pioneers in terms of their social agenda in the provision of different flat types and communal services such as restaurants, kindergartens, and roof top terraces. The JK is their architectural sibling and driven by the same ideological agenda. It has thirteen apartment types, from cross-section duplexes to large four-bedroom family homes, and when first opened, boasted a museum of modern art, public offices, retail outlets and leisure facilities. The original drawings are well worth looking at and remind of the heroically idealistic sketches of Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth flats and  Cumbernauld new town. I’m on the seventh floor with full height glazing in all the rooms, but thankfully situated on the south elevation thus avoiding the suffocating heat gain in the apartments that face north. Like many of Niemeyer’s projects, it is a highly photogenic building, but the highlight for me so far in my explorations, is the emergency staircase and waste disposal system in the circulation tower, a wonderful example of free-flowing sculptural concrete.