the opening line of Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto da poesia pau-brasil” [Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry], is perhaps the best tip for anyone looking to identify aesthetic facts on the park landscape. The marquee does not impose itself as a completed work, a final draft or defined space, but rather as a fact, an event, a happening. It is an allegory for democracy, freedom of expression, an invitation to blend into the place. Inside the park, we see that the meaning resides within us, in what we do and how we do it. It’s a blank page waiting for the most varied scripts. A blank page—solemnly blank—waiting to receive all manner of fleeting facts and banal moments of downtime life. A blank page with curvy contours that sweep out of sight, mixing the covered and the uncovered, the dry and the wet, the here and the there on a patchwork landscape; this marquee, with its doorless interiority, is the experience of new human-scale values in an urban space. Liberty found its architectonic expression in the marquee. It juts in all directions. If the buildings look dated, or are at least identified with a legible moment in the history of Brazilian modern architecture, the marquee is timeless. Though connected to them in space, it drifts free of them in time: it is modern, contemporary, futuristic. With its meanderings, it spills across the park like liquid, hugging the contours of the landscape and expanding it, like the representation of a logic of infinite expansion, bending around chance or any imaginary obstacle, a flat canopy above a flat park, as planar as the terrain on which the city’s new capital would be built. On the vast level plain surrounding Pampulha Lake, or on the boggy margins of Ibirapuera’s watercourses, ponds and meanders, or on the central plateau of Brasília, the marquee becomes the surface or national entity elected to receive the shade modern architecture alone is capable of throwing. With modernism, the ground was added to Brazil’s poetic repertoire as both form and content. The Ibirapuera marquee is no simple connector or promenade between illustrious buildings: it is the very synthesis of the landscape, meaning condensed into a stretching form—rambling like Brazilian territory and as free as the paths we could imagine the nation taking. The body is the measure of scale for the city, not the geometrical mind. Hence the marquee is a path, and as a path, a metaphor for the country. A force of will to synch our watches with the First World.
on the park’s design There is a paradox to every city park implantation project: the sowing, the attempt to put down roots in eroded soil, is a human endeavor—or an artifice—and its success is measured by how natural it looks, how neatly it seems to belong in and identify with the place, as if it were a work of nature which man undertakes to preserve, carefully tending to its splendor. And every relation between man and this fenced-in patch of nature is measured by the layout of routes and paths. The design of any park is an exercise in disguise and its art is essentially that of laying down paths. The art of narrative par excellence. 216