Assistant Professor Vanessa Grossman was one of the speakers at a seminar entitled “Brazil: Powered by Design,” organized jointly by the Consulate General of Brazil in New York and New York University's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, under the direction of Professor Maria Cecilia Loschiavo dos Santos of the University of São Paulo. This one-day seminar, held on March 11, 2024 at New York University's King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, sought to explore Brazil's unique design heritage by focusing on key themes such as sustainability, spirituality, and Afro-Brazilian heritage. The seminar will result in a forthcoming publication of the same name.
Grossman's contribution, “Design as Ontology: The Constructed Geographies of Paulo Mendes da Rocha,” addressed the seminar's theme by recalling the approach proposed for the exhibition she co-curated with distinguished New York University faculty member Jean-Louis Cohen. Titled “Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha,” the exhibition is currently on view at the Casa da Arquitectura in Porto, Portugal, and has been extended until September 2024.
Both the exhibition and the forthcoming exhibition catalogue, which is a scholarly edited volume, grew out of the hypothesis formulated in Mendes da Rocha's design for the Brazilian Pavilion at Expo ‘70 in Osaka, in which an expansive concrete structure floats above a tortured ground. Echoing this ephemeral but timely object, his work is understood as inscribed in a dynamic space determined by the horizontal expansion of the earth, with which buildings and design at all scales, from small residences to the largest public facilities, engage in conversation. Rooted in the original reading of modernity proposed by the architect and designers of São Paulo, this strategy allowed Mendes da Rocha to effortlessly resist postmodernism and formulate an early perception of the risks of planetary environmental destruction and the position of the Americas within it.
Grossman’s paper assesses how, for Brazilian architects like Paulo Mendes da Rocha, design was an ontology that channeled the capacity to create the world into ways of being and doing. This interpretation takes its cue from Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar, who postulates an ontological approach to design from a Latin American perspective in his 2018 book Designs for the Pluriverse, as follows: “Design is ontological in the sense that all objects, tools, and even services that are designed bring about certain ways of being, knowing, and doing.”
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