Magic MASP

London’s Tate Modern, Bilbao’s Guggenheim, Paris’s Pompidou Centre, the possession of an iconic art gallery, where the building is as renowned as the collections, is an essential part of the architectural repertoire of any aspirational city. MASP, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (1968), performs just such a role, a maverick starship of a building amidst the identikit banality of corporate architecture that otherwise dominates the Avenida Paulista. Designed by Lina Bo Bardi, the elevated museum hangs from massive red concrete goalposts over a deckchaired plaza. A city postcard, it is also a landmark in the development of Brasilian modernism. Home to a large archive of European art, think Van Gogh, Renoir, and Picasso, MASP has recently acquired a solemn vertical extension, that bookends the site like a tribute to the sentinel at the beginning of Kubricks’ 2001. Inaugurated in 2024, the fourteen storey reinforced concrete tower, clad in perforated graphite steel, matches the footprint of the original building and provides new administrative headquarters, five floors of galleries, an educational centre, restaurant and inhabited entrance stair. Co-authored by São Paulo’s METRO Associates and Júlio Neves, it references the materiality of its predecessor, and explores contemporary thinking on environmental systems and public museums. As a poignant introduction to this years COP30, hosted by Belém, gateway city to the Amazon, the current exhibition Histórias da Ecologia, unites activist-artists from across the world who through their work critically interrogate the catastrophic consequences of climate change and environmental destruction, the full savagery of which is unfolding at an alarming rate throughout the Amazonian rainforest. Illegal gold mining, oil exploration, drug trafficking, drought, hunger, rampant deforestation, disease, it is a horror that is only matched by the crass stupidity of individuals who have declared this existential threat to human existence to be no more than a wild hoax.