|
history
The project
The history of Centro Cultural São
Paulo begins in the seventies, when a 300 thousand square
meters ground was given over to the City Hall. The area was
a product of disappropriations caused by the subway construction,
and was target of many speculations. In 1973, the Vergueiro
Project was launched, and its purpose was to promote the urbanization
of the area. The plan was to build an office complex, hotels,
a mall and a public library in five years.
Two years later, the following city administration
cancelled Vergueiro Project. The only thing that remained
from the old plan was the construction of a public library.
It was installed a comission composed of librarians, teachers
and the architect Aron Cohen. The group's idea was to build
a modern library where the reader would have free access to
all the material. The objective was to open the collection
to the public. The architect Eurico Prado Lopes won the competition
opened in 1976, and the construction began in 1978.
The following city mayor, Reynaldo de Barros,
decided to reformulate the project and adapt it to a multidisciplinary
cultural center similar to the ones arising in the entire
world, such as Georges Pompidou, founded in 1977 in Paris,
France. Mário Chamie, who was São Paulo culture
secretary at that time, claimed that the localization was
ideal to install an institution like that. Besides, the building
would be too large to be only a library. It was decided that
the cultural center would have a cinema, theaters, a space
for recitals and concerts, ateliers and exhibition areas.
The architects Eurico Prado Lopes and Luiz Telles remained
in charge of the project.
The
conception of the cultural center was based in an extense
research, in order to understand what the access to information
meant in a country like Brazil. The building was projected
within the goal to ease the approach between the public and
what would be offered. Therefore, the architecture did not
obey pre stablished patterns, focusing on wide dimensions
and multiple entrances and paths.
The construction
Centro Cultural São Paulo was built
in the last years of the Brazilian militar dictatorship. The
proposal to value the multidisciplinary aspect of the spaces
and avoid the compartmentalisation was polemic. In the words
of architect Luiz Telles: "We were always alert to see
the repercussion of our plans. It isn't that we were subversive,
it's that the others were retrograde".
The
project was largely discussed in the midia because, besides
presenting concepts like integration and multidisciplinarity,
its construction had a few technical problems, since it introduced
many architectonical innovations. Researches and experimentations
were held in order to achieve the final product. To viable
the bold shapes intended by the architects, a lot of unusual
materials were used, like glass, steel, concrete, acrilic,
bricks and fabric.
The
structures planned in the project demanded modifications in
the traditional execution concepts, giving way to specific
new techniques, in a process that was almost a craft. During
the construction of the building, Emilie Chamie, Mário
Chamie's wife, created the Centro Cultural's logo. The drawing
is the representation of the union of curves and was created,
according to its creator, taking into account the structures
of the building.
The opening
The conception law of Centro Cultural São
Paulo, promulgated on May 6th 1982, stablished that its attributes
included: plan, promote, encourage and document artistic and
cultural creations; gather and organize an information structure
on human knowledge; develop researches on Brazilian culture
and art, providing subsidies to their activities; encourage
the involvement of the community, in order to develop the
creative capacity of its members, allowing simultaneous access
to different forms of culture and supporting educational,
scientific and technological development.
The inauguration took place on May 13th 1982.
The city mayor Reynaldo de Barros and culture secretary Mário
Chamie received a great public composed of guests, workers
and citizens. After the cerimony, they went through the dependencies
of the building, watched musical concerts by Coral Paulistano
and the pianist João Carlos Martins and had the opportunity
to assess the works exhibited in the Art Gallery.

In 1982, São Paulo had approximately
8,5 million inhabitants, with a great number of them living
in the suburbs. The intention of the rising cultural center
was to gather these heterogeneous people, providing an area
where everybody had access to different cultural genres.
In his speech during the inauguration
cerimony, Mário Chamie highlighted all the work the
building had demanded, pointing out that "for two years,
ten months and a day in the morning, the afternoon and the
evening, people had worked in that space". According
to Chamie, it was necessary to provide popular and academic
culture and all kinds of manifestations from different groups
and communities, in order to reflect "all the Brazilian
cultural equality that is made precisely of the differences".
|