The construction of the Rita Maria Bus Terminal, the winning entry of a national architectural competition, dates back to the late 1970s, a period coinciding with the development of the Baía Sul Landfill on Santa Catarina Island, in Florianópolis. The landfill, which featured a landscaping project by Roberto Burle Marx, was part of a contemporary strategy to overhaul the city's road system.
The winning architectural proposal for the competition, organized by the State Secretariat of Transportation and Public Works in 1976, was designed by a team led by Uruguayan architects Yamandú Carlevaro (1934) and Enrique Brena Nadotti (1937), in collaboration with Argentine architect Ricardo Monti. Due to the structural proposal, construction required complex logistics and, following several interruptions, the terminal was finally inaugurated in 1981.
The Rita Maria Bus Terminal is designed as a large nave, featuring two distinct facades in its layout: one that welcomes urban users – facing the city –, where it stands as the final landmark seen by those leaving the city before reaching the bridges; and the other, the bus area for departures and arrivals – the urban rear – aligned with the waterfront.
The use of a large reinforced concrete structure, stripped of any cladding, was meant to display the technological updates required for a city striving to become a metropolis. The architectural language adopted for this machine designed to receive passengers translates into a refined Brutalism, deliberately shaped in high-performance exposed concrete. This was no longer the combative Brutalism that championed the “truth and/or honesty of materials,” but a polished Brutalism in exposed concrete, adopted here as an urban aesthetic.
The discourse of technical rationalism permeates all the accounts recorded in the authors' publications, sounding like a declaration of principles. These are principles of architectural design, but also of professional conduct, applied to designing a complex building that serves as a major piece of urban infrastructure with outstanding internal coherence.
In the proposal for the Rita Maria Bus Terminal, aligned with the global modern trends of the period, the assertion of rationality as an aesthetic expression is clear. The poetics of Brutalism served as a counterpoint to technical advancement – not only in structural feasibility but also in systems and services – as a corollary of modernity.
Ironically, despite its waterfront location, the new urban facility turns its back to the sea. This apparently set a trend that led to a proliferation of institutional buildings on the Baía Sul Landfill, all invariably adopting a layout that ultimately denies the site's maritime identity.
An icon of Brutalist architecture in the capital, the terminal now faces the preservation challenges typical of recent heritage, suffering from common Brazilian issues such as a lack of maintenance and alterations to essential bus station functions. Moreover, it pays the price for its avant-garde nature, having introduced new materials and construction systems that, at the time, had been barely tested for durability.
Its compositional integrity has not been altered or compromised, and the building maintains its status as an architectural landmark in that landscape – like a vessel anchored on the landfill…
* Text written in 2017.
** The photographs were published in the printed yearbook ArqSC 10th edition
-
Architects: Enrique Brena Nadotti e Yamandú Carlevaro
- Year: 1976
-
Photographs:Ronaldo Azambuja
