Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon and virtually on the equator, is a marvelous place not for any one building or monument (I show no pictures of it here) , but simply as an organism. Beginning life as a Portuguese colonial port and naval base, and benefiting like Manaus from the 19th century trading boom, it has not however become a 21st century industrial city. Its teeming, smelly market halls are extraordinary - you find witches there, selling potions - but perhaps the most impressive mark of modernity is not any new building, but the conversion of a huge range of dockside warehouses (once again, originally British-built) into a restaurant quarter, a gastrodome. To judge by the clientele, there’s money in Belem. To judge by the incredibly tight security surrounding the place, there’s plenty of others wanting to get hold of it by any means possible.
The flight between Belem and Sao Paulo overflies Brasilia, allowing you to see the formal Lucio Costa plan - itself like an aeroplane - spread out below you. The arid countryside stretching for hundreds of miles around makes it clear just how ambitious a project this was. Building it was the 20th century’s logistical equivalent of building Manaus.
Sao Paulo, well south on the Tropic of Capricorn, is huge, daunting, and polluted: an industrial and financial services city of a thousand medium-rise skyscrapers, surrounded by shanty towns, a permanent traffic-jam of a place. But it has its architectural moments. For me, the city offered the chance to see work by Oscar Niemeyer that is unfairly neglected (because it is not in fashionable Rio or Brasilia) and to see if Lina Bo Bardi’s 1960s art gallery there was everything it is cracked up to be.
There’s early (1950s) and late (1980s) Niemeyer to be found in Sao Paulo. The late stuff - a 1989 cultural complex collectively known as the Memorial da America Latina - is somewhat decadent: shape-making for its own sake, with too much blisteringly hot concrete plaza around it, the whole bisected by a busy road. The interiors are good, calm places, but it is not a place to linger. Cultured Paulistas tend to roll their eyes and advise against going there.
But they, and you, will have no problems with Niemeyer’s inspired 1950s work for the Sao Paulo Biennale in the Parque Ibirapueara. His concept is instinctive and fluid: three main exhibition buildings - two rectangular, one a characteristic domed circle - are linked by a bravura covered way of reinforced concrete, weaving and swooping its way through the park, providing shelter from rain and sun alike. It is the sort of place that would be impossible in northern latitudes - too dark, too damp. Here, despite the immense depth of the canopy at its widest point, the ambient light is quite sufficient to illuminate the interior, which remains quite cool. The Paulistas like to gather there to socialize on the weekends, and the place becomes busy with street vendors.
