Highly decorated Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and RIBA Gold Medal, has passed away at the age of 92.
The architect died in a Sao Paulo hospital of lung cancer on 23 May 2021.
Described as a "role model" for architects, Mendes da Rocha was the recipient of many of architecture's highest accolades.
He was globally recognised as a major architect of the 20th century, despite rarely building outside his native Brazil.
Mendes da Rocha's most famous buildings are in São Paulo, including the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, the Brazilian Sculpture Museum and the Athletic Club of São Paulo. His cultural buildings are credited with modernising Brazil's largest city. Top: Mendes da Rocha won the Praemium Imperiale. Photo courtesy of Japan Art Association. Above: the architect in his São Paulo studio in 2017. Photo by Marc Goodwin
Because he worked with large expanses of raw concrete ? a cheap and abundant material in his home country ? his name was often linked with Brazilian brutalism. But it was a label Mendes da Rocha rejected.
"Brutalism is nothing," he said in a recent interview with El Pais. "Ask an intellectual what they mean by brutalism, and the majority won?t know."
Athletic Club of São Paulo. Photo by Leonardo Finotti
Mendes da Rocha was outspoken about the devastating effects of the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état, where the military overthrew the president.
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