The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale has been given to Paulo Mendes da Rocha – REPORTING FROM THE FRONT.
The Biennale Board of Directors chaired by Paolo Baratta has taken the decision upon recommendation of Alejandro Aravena, the curator of the exhibition.
One of the reasons is that “the outstanding quality of its architecture is its timelessness. Many decades after their construction, each of his projects resisted the test of time, both stylistically and physically. Such consistency, that may result from his ideological integrity and his structural abilities, makes Paulo Mendes da Rocha a maverick provocateur and a passionate realist too. His fields of interest are beyond architecture, in political, social, geographical, historical and technical areas. The representative role he played for many generations of architects in Brazil, Latin America and in all other places is that of a person able to join shared and collective challenges and to persuade people to fight for a better built environment”.
Paulo Mendes da Rocha will be awarded on May 28, 2016 at Ca 'Giustinian, the historical location of Venice Biennale during the opening and award ceremony.
Born in 1928, the Brazilian architect won several awards including: the Grande Prêmio Presidência da República during the sixth São Paulo Bienal in 1961; the national competition for the construction of the Brazilian pavilion at the Osaka Expo 70 in 1968; the Honorary Fellowship of the Conselho dos Arquitetos Internacional de Língua Portuguesa; the Mies Van der Rohe Foundation Prize for his project of São Paulo’s Pinacoteca. Moreover, in 2000 he was selected to represent Brazil at the 7th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. In 2006, he received the Pritzker Architecture Prize. In Brazil, the architect was honored twice, in 2004 and 2013, with the Ordem do Merito Cultural . He also twice received the Troféu APCA (Associação Paulista de Criticos de Arte), in 2012 and in 2015.
While he was working in studio, Mendes da Rocha joined the academic world enhancing the School of Architecture of the Universidade de São Paulo.
Besides his architectural and urban projects, he designed furniture too: one example is the "Paulistano" chair, now industrially produced by the French company Objecto.