The Chair Drawn Without Lifting the Pen
Architects tend to be remembered for their largest gestures. For Paulo Mendes da Rocha, those gestures were made of concrete and steel: a pavilion in Osaka whose ground rises to meet a single vast roof, a steel canopy suspended over the Patriarch Plaza in São Paulo, museums shaped by one decisive span. It is easy to forget that one of his earliest designs, and the one that has travelled furthest, can be lifted with one hand. It is made, almost entirely, of a single line.
That line is the Paulistano armchair. Mendes da Rocha, born in Vitória in 1928, qualified as an architect in São Paulo in 1954 and was still in his twenties when he and his partner João Eduardo de Gennaro won the competition for the gymnasium of the Clube Atlético Paulistano, one of the city's sports and social clubs. The building, a broad roof carried by six concrete pillars that narrow as they reach the ground, brought him the Grand Prize of the Presidency of the Republic at the sixth São Paulo Biennial in 1961. For the club's living rooms he drew an armchair in 1957, and the chair kept the name of the place it was made for.
The construction is easy to read. The frame is one solid steel bar, 19 millimetres thick, bent into a continuous line that becomes legs, arms and the outline of seat and back. The cover, cut from canvas or leather, is pulled over the frame from the top and simply hangs there, its shape set by the tension between the curves of the bar. To change it, it is pulled off again in the same direction. The seat sits low, 38 centimetres from the floor, which makes the chair less a place to perch than a place to lean back into.
The finish says as much about this attitude as the form. The original frame is phosphated carbon steel, a surface that is not a coating in the usual sense. In phosphating, steel is treated in a phosphate solution until a thin crystalline layer grows on its surface, grey to dark grey depending on the process. In industry the layer is mostly invisible, a protection against corrosion and a key for the paint that follows. On the Paulistano it is left as the finish itself, so the bar keeps the dark grey of treated metal rather than the uniform colour of a painted object. Today the frame is also made in polished stainless steel and in black or white powder coat, and the Steel Mesh version replaces the cover with chain mail of stainless steel rings, seven millimetres across, so that the whole chair is metal.
Mendes da Rocha belonged to what is often called the Paulista school, the generation of São Paulo architects around Vilanova Artigas who built in raw concrete and treated structure as the main expression of a building. The chair follows the same discipline at a smaller scale. There is a structure, it carries the load, and very little is added to it. When the Pritzker Prize jury honoured him in 2006, it noted that he builds with exceptional economy, a phrase that fits the gymnasium and the armchair equally well. The chair belongs to a long line of seats that tell us how their makers thought about the body and the room, a lineage this journal traced in From Throne to Object.
For decades the Paulistano was rarely seen outside the club. Since 2004 it has been produced by Objekto, a French publisher based in Provence that works with a small group of architects and designers, many of them Brazilian. In 2007 the Museum of Modern Art in New York added the chair to its collection, as a gift of Objekto and the museum's Latin American and Caribbean Fund. The museum also holds the original technical drawings from 1957, given by Mendes da Rocha himself. The canvas version uses a heavy cotton woven near Épinal, in the historic textile region of the Vosges, while the leather version uses full grain, vegetable tanned hide that darkens slowly with use.
Almost three decades after the armchair, Mendes da Rocha returned to the same material. In the mid 1980s he visited a spring manufacturer in São Paulo and saw wide coils of steel as thin as a sheet of paper. He imagined a body lying on such a sheet, held just above the ground. The result was the PMR chaise longue: two thin steel sheets running side by side with a gap between them for the spine, linked by transverse bars that allow three different inclinations. In his own account, dated December 2009 and published by Objekto, the idea did not come from new research but from continuing the thinking behind the Paulistano.
An idea focused on steel flexibility properties.
Seen this way, the two pieces are one argument. The armchair bends a bar, the chaise longue bends a sheet, and in both cases the springiness of the steel is not hidden under padding but becomes the comfort itself. It is the same thinking that let him design buildings where a roof, a beam or a slope of ground does most of the work, and where the person moving through the space is meant to notice it.
The chair sits within a wider body of Brazilian modern design that Objekto has gathered over two decades. The FDC1 armchair by the artist and architect Flávio de Carvalho, whom Le Corbusier described as a romantic revolutionary, dates from the 1950s and stretches leather straps across a round steel frame. The Eclipse lamp by Mauricio Klabin, made from a single band of plastic rolled up on itself, has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art since 2006. Each of these objects starts from one material and one simple operation, and each makes that operation visible.
Mendes da Rocha received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2016 and died in São Paulo in May 2021, at the age of 92. His buildings remain where they were built, bound to their sites, their climate and the cities around them. The chair he drew for a sports club in the 1950s now stands on a hotel terrace above Copacabana, in gardens and in quiet rooms far from Brazil. It carries the same idea wherever it goes: a structure that does the work, a material allowed to behave as it naturally would, and nothing added that does not need to be there.
Images: Courtesy of Objekto
