Sérgio Rodrigues (Rio de Janeiro RJ 1927 - idem 2014)
Furniture designer, architect.
In 1947, he entered the Faculdade Nacional de Arquitetura of the Universidade do Brasil - FNA, in Rio de Janeiro. In 1949, he worked as an assistant to professor David Xavier de Azambuja, who in 1951 invited him to take part in designing the Centro Cívico de Curitiba with the architects Olavo Redig de Campos and Flávio Regis do Nascimento, through whom he met Lucio Costa (1902 - 1998). Rodrigues graduated in architecture in 1951. He moved to Curitiba, where he founded Móveis Artesanal Paranaense in partnership with the Hauner brothers, who in 1954 hired him to head the interior design department of their new company, Forma S.A., in São Paulo. During this period, he came into contact with the work of several European designers and met Gregori Warchavchik (1896 - 1972) and Lina Bo Bardi (1914 - 1992).
In 1955, he left Forma and returned to Rio de Janeiro. He nurtured the idea of creating a space for producing and selling Brazilian design, which materialized with the opening of Oca in 1955. In the 1950s, he created the Mole, Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer armchairs. From 1959 to 1960, he made the first studies for SR2 - a System for the Industrialization of Prefabricated Modular Elements for Wooden Housing Construction. The prototypes were exhibited at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro - MAM/RJ. The system was used in 1962 to build the Iate Clube de Brasília and two lodging and restaurant pavilions at the Universidade de Brasília - UnB.
With a variation of the Mole armchair, he won first prize at the Concorso Internazionale del Mobile [International Furniture Competition] in Cantù, Italy, in 1961, chosen from among more than 400 entrants from 35 countries. The award brought international recognition to his career as a furniture designer. Produced in Italy by ISA, the armchair was exported to several countries under the name Sheriff.
Aiming to sell mass-produced furniture at affordable prices, he founded the company Meia-Pataca in 1963, which remained on the market until 1968. That year, he sold Oca and set up a studio in Rio de Janeiro, where he worked on interior design for homes, offices and hotels and carried out projects for the Banco Central in Brasília and the headquarters of Editora Bloch in Rio de Janeiro, as well as developing furniture lines for industrial production. He took part in the exhibition Mobiliário Brasileiro - Premissas e Realidade [Brazilian Furniture - Premises and Reality] at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand - Masp.
In 1987, he received the Premio Lápiz de Plata [Silver Pencil Award] at the Buenos Aires Architecture Biennial for his body of work. With Lucio Costa and Zanine Caldas (1918 - 2001), he took part in the exhibition Brasile 93 - La Costruzione de una Identità Culturale [Brazil 93 - The Construction of a Cultural Identity] in Brescia, Italy. In 1991, in the exhibition Falando de Cadeira [Talking about Chairs] at MAM/RJ, he presented several works made since the 1950s. In 2006, he won first place in the furniture category of the 20th Design Award of the Museu da Casa Brasileira, in São Paulo, with the Diz armchair.
Critical Commentary
One of Brazil's most important furniture designers, alongside names such as Joaquim Tenreiro (1906 - 1992) and Zanine Caldas (1918 - 2001), Sérgio Rodrigues played a decisive role in the history of Brazilian furniture. The author of a vast body of work, he began his career as a designer in the 1950s, in Rio de Janeiro, a period when modern architecture was being consolidated. In explicit criticism of eclecticism, he developed furniture suited to the new architectural spaces.
Two very well-known creations date from 1956: the CD-7 or Lucio Costa chair, in turned solid wood with a cane seat - named in tribute to the architect, a great supporter of Rodrigues's work - and the PL-7 Jockey or Oscar Niemeyer armchair, with a wooden frame and woven cane, arms carved as single pieces and an anatomical design, a constructive solution considered authentically Brazilian by Lucio Costa (1902 - 1998), although similarities can be seen with certain works by the Danish architect and designer Finn Juhl (1912 - 1989).
At a time when criteria of nationality and originality guided aesthetic judgments in architecture and the visual arts, several commentators on Rodrigues's achievements, among them Lucio Costa, spread an interpretation of his work as an example of Brazilian singularity¹.
His most famous creation is the Mole armchair, from 1957. Comfortable and sturdy, it is considered a symbol of Brazilian design. This sense of Brazilianness is reinforced by the jury report of the 1961 Cantù competition, which justified the first prize awarded to the piece on the grounds of modernity and expression of regional identity. The desire to conceive a piece of furniture expressing national identity was professed by the designer himself and emphasized by several commentators and scholars,² who associate the armchair with a Brazilian way of sitting, with ideas such as laziness and relaxation, and stress the harmony between Rodrigues's furniture and the relaxed, informal and rebellious new lifestyle of the youth of the 1960s. They regard it as original, although the Mole recalls creations such as the 670 by Charles Eames (1907 - 1978). In fact, the piece contrasts with the standards of the time, with their slender stick legs, bringing the thickness and sturdiness of a turned wooden frame, with leather straps forming a sling to hold the large cushions, also in leather, which allows users to mold their bodies anatomically as they sit. The armchair, which is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art - MoMA in New York, is still a best-seller today.
In 1958, Rodrigues was invited to design pieces of furniture for the National Congress building in Brasília, then under construction. For the waiting room, he designed the PO-3 armchair, later called Beto, with a chrome-plated steel frame, hardwood armrests and foam seat and back. In 1960, he produced the table that became known as Itamaraty, for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brasília, designed by Oscar Niemeyer (1907 - 2012). With small variations, the furniture is used at the Brazilian Embassy in Rome.
At the invitation of Darcy Ribeiro, then rector of the Universidade de Brasília - UnB, he created in 1962 the seats for the Candangos auditorium, designed by the architect Alcides da Rocha Miranda (1909 - 2001), for which he found a creative constructive solution: the use of rocking mechanisms, which provide more comfort and make it easier for people to pass. Of similar conception is the armchair created in 1965 for the auditorium of the Instituto dos Arquitetos do Brasil - IAB/DF, in Brasília, which received an honorable mention in the IAB competition that year and has been used in several Brazilian auditoriums, such as the Anhembi and the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo - Fapesp, in São Paulo.
Another famous armchair is the Tonico, created in 1963 for Meia-Pataca, with a round cushion supporting the neck, held by adjustable straps. The Leve Kilin PL-104 armchair, in solid wood with a canvas or leather seat and back, dates from 1973 and received an IAB award in 1975.
In the 1980s, he designed projects for hotels, such as the DAAV chair and the Júlia armchair. In the 1990s, he continued designing furniture, such as the Chico and Adolpho chairs, made for the Editora Bloch meeting room. The irreverence that marks his projects has accompanied him throughout more than 50 years of uninterrupted career, as seen in pieces such as the Nina chaise longue of 1992, whose design recalls one of Pedro Álvares Cabral's caravels and which emphasizes the search for restful comfort, complete with a book rest.
A review of his vast furniture production reveals a preference for wood as the main material, often combined with leather or cane, at other times with upholstery in natural-fiber fabrics such as cotton and canvas, and less frequently with metal. Besides the innovative character of the pieces produced for Oca, the importance of that company for the development of the modern furniture industry in Brazil should be noted, for its contribution to spreading Brazilian design and to its acceptance in the market. Created in 1955 as an interior design studio and art gallery, Oca emerged spurred on by the excellent phase Brazilian architecture was going through.
Of his work as an architect, relatively overshadowed by his fame as a furniture designer, the creation of SR2 stands out: a system of prefabricated wooden elements for housing construction. In the 1960s, hundreds of units were produced and assembled, many of them in the Amazon rainforest, including houses, housing developments, inns, clubs, restaurants and outpatient clinics³.
Notes
1 About Oca, Lucio Costa comments on how the company's name defines the project's intention: to recover the spirit of simplicity of the Indigenous house and integrate past and present in Brazilian material culture. For more details, see: SANTOS, Maria Cecília Loschiavo dos. Móvel Moderno no Brasil. São Paulo: Studio Nobel, 1995.
2 On the search for Brazilianness, see the studies: SANTOS, Maria Cecília Loschiavo dos. op. cit. and SANTOS, Maria Cecília Loschiavo dos. Tradição e modernidade no móvel brasileiro visões da utopia na obra de Carrera, Tenreiro, Zanine e Sérgio Rodrigues. Doctoral thesis, Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo, 1993. For the researcher, Sérgio Rodrigues sought to think about Brazil through design, especially in his comments on the Mole.
3 On this activity of Sérgio Rodrigues and SR2, see: GALVÃO, Tânia Nunes. Sergio Rodrigues: arquiteto e desenhista de móvel. Master's dissertation, Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de São Paulo, 2001.
Source: Itaú Cultural
