The proposal for a New MASP in São Paulo, a project made by Oscar Abrahamsson at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is suggesting a new home for Museu de Arte de São Paulo in Brazil. It is an exploration in explicit shape, décor and adornment and new ideas of the urban ground in creating a museum that lowers the threshold between culture and life in the street.
The modern project and the universal cities it produced, utopian in their nature, has imposed an alienating effect upon us. The result of modernism is cities where we don’t feel like home. The New MASP is trying to find ways of re-introducing this sense of belonging into the city by creating new models of urban life, while dwelling within the context of urban fragmentation in the megapolis of São Paulo. Two simple triangular shapes constitute the building volume – forming new, elevated, grounds – habitable sloped planes that are displacing the urban ground onto the top of the building. Massive, opaque and black, the figure of the building merges in its muteness with the ground. No apertures are present to confuse the simple volumes. Natural light still pours in through the massive skylights established by the “color dips” on the top of each of the triangular shapes. The “color dips”, glazed but highly reflective, are introducing new datums that are further shifting the perception of the ground through acting as fake horizons.
Décor is normally the a...