Maria Helena Estrada
No Tech was born during a course which started in a unpretentious way, classes almost always held outside, on the stairs of the MuBE, in São Paulo, with two “masters” who wanted more to be interlocutors or idea instigators than teachers – Fernando and Humberto Campana –, and a group of young people who were willing to make design with their hands.
The new fact is that for many decades we haven’t seen in Brazil what could be called a “school” or “movement” (even in arts) or, that is, a group of people, almost all of whom are young, working together on common ideas. Actually, in Brazilian design, we can only recall the “White and Black” movement, during the sixties, comprised of a group of architects who were also furniture designers and worked together on the same esthetic and formal concepts. Apart from this example, no “school was created”, nobody founded the bases of Brazilian esthetics.
Now a group of youngsters, almost without realizing it, managed this achievement.
Everything started with the classes, or better, the workshops. The Campana brothers brought with their farm boys’ memory, this way of working with the hands, using whatever was left over or any twig found close at hand; a look that traverses the material and redefines its destiny. A particular attitude of doing, experimenting, entering each material’s soul in order to understand what it wants to say.
It was this intuitive knowledge that contaminated their students and which enabled those classes to give rise to a collection of objects with its own language, coherent between themselves, expressing an identical intention.
Brazilian esthetics? Perhaps. Nothing was invented. Various designers in other countries employ transposition of materials’ utilization. What is new is the Brazilian look – free, light, unfettered, colored, gentle and good-humored.