The Galeria da Cidade is hosting the exhibition Lelé: um Projeto de Brasil (Lelé: A Project for Brazil), featuring the work of architect João da Gama Filgueiras Lima. The exhibition presents and honors a career spanning over half a century, celebrating an architect who masterfully united conception, design, and construction, always with a focus on climatic conditions and a dialogue with geography, energy efficiency, and raw material conservation. The virtual opening will take place on February 11 at 6:00 PM on the Escola da Cidade YouTube channel. The exhibition runs from February 12 to May 20, 2022, with free admission and mandatory mask-wearing.
Curated by architect and professor Anália Amorim and architect and professor Valdemir Rosa, the exhibition offers an analytical look at Lelé’s trajectory and his continuous search for spatial improvements, maintaining a constant conversation between form, material, structure, environment, and the construction site. Based on the premise that architecture begins with problem formulation and program development, the exhibition invites the public to explore the close relationship between design and construction—two elements that fed into each other throughout the architect's body of work.
The exhibition features panels, videos, and models previously displayed in A arquitetura de Lelé: fábrica e invenção (The Architecture of Lelé: Factory and Invention), held at the Museu da Casa Brasileira in 2010. It also includes part of the collection from the "Expedicionários do Lelé," a group of architecture students from Escola da Cidade who spent four years of their vacations conducting field studies at the Sarah Network Technology Center (CTRS), one of Lelé’s factories. The chronology of works assembled at the MCB in 2010 has been revised and expanded into a timeline that will occupy 15 of the 30 linear meters of the gallery's glass facade facing the city. This serves as a further contribution to the ongoing, ever-evolving update of Lelé’s nearly 60-year professional career; he would have turned 90 in 2022.
