Prestes Maia (Amparo SP 1896 - São Paulo SP 1965)
Prestes Maia was a civil engineer, architect and urban planner. He graduated as an engineer-architect from the Escola Politécnica de São Paulo - Poli in 1917. He began his professional career with a construction and real estate firm. In 1918, he was appointed engineer at the Secretaria de Viação e Obras Públicas [Department of Transportation and Public Works], and soon became director of Public Works (DOP). In 1924, he was hired as an interim professor at Poli, where he taught geometric and freehand drawing, architectural drawing, sketching from life and perspective drawing, a course whose chair was held by the architect Victor Dubugras (1868-1933).
In the municipal administration, Prestes Maia developed studies of São Paulo's road and transportation system, based on the Perímetro de Irradiação [Radiating Perimeter] project proposed by the engineer Ulhôa Cintra (1887-1944) in 1924. He became a tenured professor at Poli in 1927 but, owing to the ban on holding more than one public office, he left the school in 1937, remaining at the Secretaria de Obras Públicas. In 1930, he presented the Estudo de um Plano de Avenidas para a Cidade de São Paulo [Study of an Avenues Plan for the City of São Paulo], known as the Plano de Avenidas [Avenues Plan], which received an award at the 4th Pan-American Congress of Architects, held in Rio de Janeiro. That same year, he founded the Instituto Paulista de Arquitetos, serving as its vice president in its first two-year term (1930-1931). He also took part in the 1st Housing Congress of the Instituto de Engenharia in 1931 and, in 1933, gave an expert opinion on the plan for Recife drawn up by the Pernambuco architect Nestor de Figueiredo, later publishing Os Melhoramentos do Recife [The Improvements of Recife].
In 1935, he helped found the Sociedade Amigos da Cidade, becoming its first president. At this organization's request, the Comissão do Plano da Cidade [City Plan Commission] was created in 1937, which made it possible to implement, albeit partially, the Plano de Avenidas after he was appointed mayor of São Paulo in 1938, at the nomination of the federal intervenor Adhemar Pereira de Barros (1901-1969). Prestes Maia remained in office until 1945, under the intervenorship of Fernando de Souza Costa (1886-1946), and carried out a series of works foreseen in the plan, such as the avenues Nove de Julho, Vinte e Três de Maio and the Radial Norte, later named Prestes Maia, forming the Sistema Y [Y System], which structured the city's growth.
He began the channeling of the Tietê River and created the Divisão de Rios e Águas Pluviais [Division of Rivers and Stormwater], authorizing the expropriations needed for the works, including the construction of the riverside avenue. In 1939, faced with the non-renewal of the transportation contract with the Light & Power Company, he created the Comissão de Estudos de Transportes Coletivos [Public Transportation Study Commission], which led to the creation of the Companhia Metropolitana de Transportes Coletivos (CMTC) in 1946. In 1941, still as mayor, he proposed changes to the Municipal Building Code regarding buildings in the central area. From 1941 to 1942, he served on the board of the Instituto de Engenharia and, in 1945, he sat on the ideas jury for the Cidade Universitária [University City]. In 1946, he returned to his work at the DOP and continued with his office, drawing up plans for several cities, such as Santos, Campos do Jordão, Campinas and Recife. In 1950, he ran for governor of the State of São Paulo for the União Democrática Nacional (UDN), finishing last.
Under mayor Jânio Quadros (1917-1992), he became a member of the Comissão do Plano do Município [Municipal Plan Commission] in 1953. The following year, he ran for state governor again, finishing third. In 1954, he took part in a commission created by the city government to study a metropolitan public transportation system and, in 1956, he and a team prepared the Anteprojeto para um Sistema de Transporte Rápido para São Paulo [Preliminary Design for a Rapid Transit System for São Paulo], a plan that was rejected by the City Council. In 1957, he ran for mayor, nominated by Jânio Quadros, but lost to Adhemar de Barros, who shelved the subway proposal. In 1961, he was elected mayor again, with the support of governor Carvalho Pinto (1910-1987). During this term (1961-1965), he proposed measures to put the municipality's finances in order and revived the subway project, creating a group to review the existing designs. In addition to his work as an engineer in public administration, Prestes Maia contributed to magazines such as Arquitetura e Construções and Investigações, and chaired the Companhia Brasileira de Cimento Portland.
Critical Commentary
Prestes Maia ushers in a new era in São Paulo's urban planning. His main project, the Plano de Avenidas, is considered a crucial document of Brazilian urbanism, defining patterns of expansion that prevail in the city of São Paulo at least until the 1990s.
In 1918, when he is appointed engineer at the municipal Secretaria de Viação e Obras Públicas, he meets the engineer João Florence de Ulhôa Cintra (1887 - 1944), a technician at the Diretoria de Obras Municipais, who becomes his partner in urban concepts and projects for a long period, as well as a kind of professional mentor. It is Cintra, for example, who makes the first urban intervention proposal to go beyond the limits of the central hill - the Perímetro de Irradiação, 1922 -, a ring road inspired by the studies of Eugène Hénard (1849 - 1923), the "father of French urbanism". A few years later the pair takes up this project again, publishing a series of articles titled Um Problema Atual. Os Grandes Melhoramentos de São Paulo [A Current Problem. The Great Improvements of São Paulo], in the Boletim do Instituto de Engenharia de São Paulo. According to scholars of São Paulo urbanism, these articles contain the main ideas of the Plano de Avenidas, as the Estudo de um Plano de Avenidas para a Cidade de São Paulo came to be known, presented in 1930 in a lavish 356-page volume, with numerous photographs and illustrations and 17 plates of colored drawings.
The Plano de Avenidas is the main urban planning proposal for São Paulo up to that time, since it is the first time the city is conceived as a whole, in a project of intervention and spatial organization aimed not only at the central area but at a true general plan. Although the name, Plano de Avenidas, may suggest a narrow view of interventions - focused on the problem of traffic -, it is Prestes Maia himself who clarifies the breadth of his concerns, saying that "any street project involves, implicitly or explicitly, a conception of the city, its structure, its development". Building on earlier work and showing familiarity with the best literature of the time, Prestes Maia proves to be a kind of virtuoso of modern urbanism, seeking to combine diverse influences and varied proposals, drawing on examples from more than twenty cities, in order finally to construct a formal model adapted to São Paulo's existing urban structure, derived from its radiocentric layout.
The urban planner divides his plan into ten chapters, and in the introduction, a kind of justification, he explains that the plan is for the future and for the whole city. Maia looks to the real city for guidelines that can steer growth and ensure good functioning, unlike, for example, the proposals of Le Corbusier (1887 - 1965), which are on the horizon of modern urbanism at the time and call for the destruction of what exists in order to create a new city and, one might say, a new society. On the contrary, the engineer "sought to build an urban model that would allow a form of coexistence between the archaic city, the pre-industrial space, and the metropolis that was taking shape", as the architect Samuel Kruchin explains, in an "eminently conciliatory" project whose aim "is the right balance between the old ideology, which has had its day, and the new one, which has not yet proven itself", in Maia's own words. Thus, the ten chapters are divided among "legislation", "road solutions", "transportation" and various "complements", trying to account for the multiplicity of the real city.
The main part of the plan is undoubtedly the one devoted to road solutions, and the order of presentation reflects the author's priorities. First comes the "radiating perimeter", taken from Cintra's proposal: a circuit of new, wide avenues and viaducts around the historic hill and a new center in the Praça da República area, intended to be both a road solution and an embellishing intervention. This circuit receives the flow of the "radial roads" before they reach the center, preventing it from becoming congested. The main radials include existing avenues and others opened to perform this function, connected not only by the radiating perimeter but by two other supplementary perimeter circuits, one inner (passing along Avenida Paulista) and one outer (the origin of the future riverside avenues along the Tietê and Pinheiros rivers), concentric with the first.
Another important feature of the road system developed in the plan is the so-called Sistema Y, which in fact defines and guides São Paulo's growth from then on: an avenue that, unlike the other radials, crosses the center in a north-south direction and forks into two valley-floor avenues on the southern slope (Nove de Julho and Vinte e Três de Maio) - a solution, incidentally, that becomes established in São Paulo and will guide the opening of new avenues.
The Revolution of 1930 changes the political situation, and the project submitted to the City Council has to wait some years before being taken up again. It is only in 1938, when Prestes Maia is appointed mayor by the federal intervenor Adhemar Pereira de Barros (1901 - 1969), that the plan is partially carried out, in an administration notable for its pursuit of greater efficiency in the administrative machinery through balanced finances and the valuing of technical staff. Remaining in office for two terms, until 1945, Prestes Maia carries out a series of works foreseen in the plan, defining the shape of São Paulo's growth.
In the 1950s, the engineer clearly embodies a line of urban intervention tied to the idea of unlimited expansion, which looks to major urban works for the city's solutions, in opposition to another important São Paulo urban planner, Luís Inácio de Anhaia Mello (1891 - 1974) - an advocate of controlling urban growth by means of a green belt around the city -, and to the French Dominican priest Joseph-Louis Lebret, also a key name in local urbanism, who would create, based on the Economia e Humanismo [Economy and Humanism] movement, a line of urban planning essentially linked to the social question. Maia becomes mayor once again in 1961, when he once more proposes measures to put the municipality's finances in order and revives the project for a metropolitan transportation system that he had drawn up in 1956 as head of the city commission, but which is only carried out in the 1970s.
Source: Itaú Cultural
