Designed Future and Selected Writings brings together, for the first time in comprehensive English translation, the essays, interviews, and lectures of Paulo Mendes da Rocha — one of the most searching architectural minds to emerge from the Americas in the past century.
About This Book
This is not a monograph of built work but something rarer: direct access to how Mendes da Rocha thought. Spanning urban life, the role of the Americas in modernity, the relationship between old and new continents, and the idea of design as a civilising act, the collected writings reveal a thinker for whom architecture was inseparable from political and social imagination. For architects, theorists, and students of Brazilian modernism, this volume closes a significant gap — Mendes da Rocha's ideas have long circulated through built form; here they are articulated in his own words, rigorously translated and gathered into a single, navigable whole.
Key Features
- 248 pages of essays, interviews, and lectures in comprehensive English translation
- Published by Monade, 2021
What You'll Discover
- Mendes da Rocha's conception of design as a forward-looking, future-shaping discipline — not a discipline of aesthetics alone
- His sustained engagement with cities as the defining site of modern life, and what architecture owes to urban thinking
- A distinctly American perspective on modernity, shaped by the specific histories and geographies of Brazil and the wider continent
- How one architect's intellectual journey — across lectures, essays, and conversation — articulates a coherent and provocation-driven architectural philosophy
About the Author
Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1928–2021) was a Brazilian architect and one of the central figures of São Paulo modernism. He was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2006 and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2017, and his influence on successive generations of architects in Brazil and internationally is profound.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 248
- Dimensions: 22 x 15.5 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789899948563
- Publisher: Monade
- Publication Date: 2021
Perfect For: Architects and students of Brazilian modernism, architectural theorists, and anyone tracing the intellectual foundations of late twentieth-century Latin American architecture.