Tropicalis Universalis / Triptyque

Tropicalis Universalis is a collection of greatly varied expressions and practices, all manifestos of a new sensibility. The tropicalist movement emerged at the onset of the 21st century in the great metropolises found between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. It is the expression of a new approach to life, of a new modus vivendi, of a new relationship with reality. A new way to see constructs, art, architecture and material objects. A new urban condition.

This way of thinking and feeling takes reality as its starting point and goes on to invent a new landscape: the tropical metropolis. It forges new life forms to set against the ailing and failing modernist or post-modernist project.

It is resolute in embracing the warmth of tropical life and its social ethos. It is an antidote to the pallor of post-modernism. Its intensity is life-awakening.

Tropicalism is a bundle of practices, and entropism is the banner under which it marches. Tropicalism conceives architecture as the very expression of entropism. It recasts the lifeless remains of modernism into the life-forming mold of entropism, ready to firm up in the fire of creativity.

This architecture is not the expression of order, nor the expression of chaos. It expresses the burning desire to take up arms against a society with too great an order. Is it the expression of Oscar Niemeyer’s sopro, the expression of the La condition humaine (1933), written by his friend, André Malraux.

Photo: Thiago Souto, Astúrias, Guarujá-SP