Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

Architectural lettering: from information to identity:
a study on Gregori Warchavchik’s Condomínio Cícero Prado
D’ELBOUX, Jose Roberto / Post-graduate student / Faculdade de Arquiteura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo / Brazil
Architectural lettering / Gregori Warchavchik / São Paulo architecture
/ 1950 architecture / Typography
This article sets out to do a case study of the Condomínio Cícero
Prado, a complex of buildings by architect Gregori Warchavchik,
built in 1954 in São Paulo, and has the final goal of performing an
analysis of its lettering, as a formal element of information and
identity in the built architecture.
1. Introduction
In Western civilization, the Romans were the first to use lettering
in a truly architectural way (Bartram 1976: 7), through inscriptions
on buildings such as monuments, where the feats and
achievements of leaders were recorded.
According to Bartram, after the Baroque period, no major breakthroughs
occurred in the use of lettering as an architectural element,
with some exceptions, during the Fascist period in Italy,
where italians tried to revive the grandeur of ancient Rome, and
also in several attempts in Russia, Germany and Holland during
the beginning of the twentieth century, which were mostly restricted
only to proposals. ‘Even this early modern interest - and
it was an important part of the general philosophy of the New
Design to consider the relationship of all visual elements - seems
to have died out.’ (Bartram 1976: 8).
This paper’s aim is to reflect about that, from the study of a particular
case, the Condomínio Cicero Prado, designed by Gregori
Warchavchik, located in downtown São Paulo. Warchavchik was
born in Ukraine and introduced Modern architecture in Brazil
during the 1920s.
This building, although considered of little representation in the
whole work of the architect, acquires a relationship at least interesting
from the perspective of architectural lettering, by arousing
the interweaving of themes such as modernism and ornamentation.
It’s through this work that we intend here to analyse
the relationship between lettering and architecture over a period
of great architectural production and consolidation of the city’s
verticalization.
The objective of this work is not to value architectural or artistic
movements, but rather to propose a brief analysis of how certain
architectural styles took advantage of the use of lettering, creating
aesthetically rich results, and providing a better relationship
between architecture, the city and its inhabitants.
Definitions
The term typography, should be understood, in this article, in a
broader sense referring to the set of practices and processes
involved in the creation and use of visible symbols, related to
orthographical characters (letters), and paraorthographical
(numbers, punctuation, etc.) for reproduction purposes (Farias
2004), and also the characters obtained through processes
classified as lettering (painting, writing, casting, etc.), and not
just those obtained by automated or mechanical processes
(Gouveia 2007: 2).
Architectural lettering should be understood generally as typographic
manifestations designed together with the building,
and made to last as long. Neither the building nor the typography
should seem complete without the presence of one another
(Baines & Dixon 2008: 118).
We are specifically interested in one of the subdivisions of architectural
lettering, which is the nominative typography, or the
permanent writing whose primary function is to identify a building
(Gouveia 2007:3).
2. The Condomínio Cícero Prado lettering
Done by architect Gregori Warchavchik, it’s located at Av. Rio
Branco, 1661, having been built in 1954 by Construtora Warchavchik-Neumann
Ltda., on request by the Cia. Agrícola Industrial
Cícero Prado.
The complex, whose name actually is Condomínio Edifícios Albertina,
Cícero Prado e Cecília (Fig. 1), home to nearly 150 apartments,
is distributed in three large vertical blocks, implanted
in U-shape, over a horizontal block that occupies the entire lot,
designed to house a movie theater.
The extreme orthogonal rigidity of the three vertical blocks is
broken by a series of concrete balconies, which are projected on
diagonal lines, finishing with rounded ends. In the central block,
the balconies are located in the center, while in the side blocks
they are located at the ends near Av. Rio Branco. The balconies
are also adorned by moldings and planters in the side blocks,
and the central block by hollow elements in the railings.
On the roof of the horizontal block, there is a garden, which can
be seen by the apartments in the three residential blocks, and
in the centralized alignment with the street, the name Co. Cícero
Prado can be seen in large size concrete letters.
Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies / Proceedings of the 8th Conference of the International Committee for
Design History & Design Studies - ICDHS 2012 / São Paulo, Brazil / © 2012 Blucher / ISBN 978-85-212-0692-7