Powerfully penned by Guilherme Wisnik. Original text is in Portuguese.
 

The ruins of Congonhas
William Wisnik

In the foreground of the ground, an uneven and cracked asphalt, taken by waste accumulated adrift, as boxes, bags, newspaper sheets, clothes and debris of fallen walls destroyed themselves just ahead. Then a sequence of columns lined concrete, even without horizontal beams or cradles that unite. Behind them, a shapeless mass of structures (mainly buildings) and fairly diverse in terms of their heights, but uniform in appearance plastic, forming a kind of wall to the second stage. And finally, above all, a very dirty white sky, which does not seem to offer redemption to the feelings of melancholy and abandonment that dominate the picture. Incidentally, everything is scratched and grimy image, feeling is intensified by granulation something dreamlike this series of black and white Mauro Restiffe made in the city of São Paulo.

The scene is located in Vila Congonhas, in the vicinity of the airport of the same name, and the sequence of columns down the valley toward Journalist Roberto Marinho Avenue, as part of the structural works of the Monorail Line 17 CPTM, still under construction, which Jabalpur to bind the Morumbi. However, nothing in this series of columns, amid a bleak scenario suggests an uplifting project. Arranged in a seemingly chaotic pace, and gradually sinking into the framing of the scene, they suggest us, as everything else in the picture, the less sense than building from ruin. So even the waits of iron rods over the columns, elements necessary for future mooring beams, appear less as indices of future than as signs of improvisation and abandonment. Construction and ruin, therefore, are not antagonistic terms here, but fraternized, pointing to a state of ruinous building featuring well São Paulo's urban experience.

By repeatedly looking at this picture, I can not help thinking about those unfinished columns as strange ruins of classical temples amid a modern urban landscape, as in the Roman Forum, for example. In this case, we see the garbage accumulated in the foreground corresponds to the remains of capitals, pediments, entablatures and stems, which always populate the ground these ruins. And maybe that feeling is not all wrong, considering that our constructions seem today to be closer to cardboard, plastic and corroded than the Mediterranean marble structures. Much the way, was this same work Monorail, not far from Vila Congonhas, a beam crashed killing a worker in June this year.

Our world "classic" will not be destroyed by barbarians. He is destroyed by us every day, eroded, imploded, sabotaged.And the aesthetic result is something that is far short of what art history calls "picturesque" .///

Guilherme Wisnik architect, critic and professor of FAU-USP. He was curator of the tenth edition of the Architecture Biennale in São Paulo in 2013.