Bernardo Paz returns to the Brazilian forest. Discover the plans for his second artistic utopia

At five in the morning, in the mist that closes over 126 hectares of newly turned earth an hour from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, an old man in white linen trousers who evokes a visual straight out of Genesis stands among a dozen diggers, watching 20-metre trees lowered into holes. In the country's heartland, where iron ore mines devour the nearby mountains, this is extraction in reverse, regeneration at an industrial scale, at breakneck speed in the service of one man's dedication to beauty.

The white-haired man, revered by his workmates, is Bernardo Paz. He has done this before, on a plot of land ten minutes' walk away. His first tilt at heaven on earth became known to the world as Inhotim - one of the most extraordinary contemporary art parks in the Southern Hemisphere.

Museu Bernardo Paz - its creator's past, present and future

The sprawling 140-hectare open-air museum at Inhotim took him a quarter-century to build and converted him into Brazil's most improbable Medici. It no longer belongs to him. In 2022, he gave it all away: some 500 works in 23 galleries, the land, the whole painstakingly landscaped apparatus, signed over to new stewards.

Now, at 76, after selling his business interests for US$300m, he is doing it again, faster. He does not have another 20 years, he insists. On an adjacent area of land roughly the same size as his previous creation, he wants the first 20 gallery spaces finished before he checks out on a life spent shaping not one but two utopian landscapes.

'What I learned is that I'm going to die,' he says when asked what his inspired attempts to shape nature have taught him. The sentence hangs over everything the architects around him are trying to build.

There was no master planner this time, no deep conversations with his old friend Roberto Burle Marx. His 'Forest Museum' will carry his own name - Museu Bernardo Paz - and it has been shaped in his head, hand-in-hand with a dozen digger drivers. The first phase will include pavilions dedicated to Michael Heizer, Anna Maria Maiolino, Sonia Gomes, Pedro Moraleida, Sandra Gamarra and Laura Belém, alongside large-scale sculptures and environments by Frida Orupabo, Mario Garcia Torres, Torkwase Dyson and Giuseppe Penone.

He and his team have been planting since December 2024 - 15,000 trees, sourced from Mexico to Uruguay. Hiring someone to take charge of his vision was never a consideration. 'No, I didn't do that,' he says. 'I created all the areas where the pavilions would go, and the restaurant. But you don't see it. The "islands" are there, and they are galleries, areas where we could build.'

Shaping the Museu Bernardo Paz

The 'islands' keep shifting because plans keep evolving - and fast. Three weeks: that is how long Bernardo gave his niece, Maria Paz, to deliver the design for the museum's reception building, a structure that plays second fiddle to the bulbous baobabs - African by origin, shipped south from northern Brazil - that greet visitors to the Paz family's artistic Jurassic Park.

'We developed this design in three weeks,' she says. 'We had talked to structural engineers, we had renderings, we had the text, we had diagrams, we had plans and elevations. And yeah, he is in a big hurry, and he said we are taking too long.'

She is no longer surprised by her septuagenarian uncle's energy levels. Her partner at their joint firm PMCKM, Mark Mueckenheim, is in Germany; she is in San Francisco, ten time zones adrift; the studio works around the clock, much to Bernardo's liking.

This is the central tension of the whole enterprise, and each of the architects circling it - Paz, Sol Camacho of Raddar (she recently gave Pacaembu stadium in São Paulo a makeover) and Belo Horizonte-based architect Fernando Maculan - has had to make their own peace with it. How do you build beautiful things for a client with infinite will, finite time and no patience for the conventional? How do you design for a landscape that changes faster than the drawings can dry?

A race towards discovery

To Bernardo's delight, his daughter Sofia has become the translator between her father's ever-shifting master plan and the people trying to build it. As vice president of the new creative enterprise, she, a filmmaker, is not only helping him realise the dream but will be tasked with preserving it.

Work on the new museum began in earnest in June last year, and has been in development ever since. At the family house there is a giant map on which Paulo Miyada, the artistic director lured from Instituto Tomie Ohtake (the institution honouring Ruy Ohtake's mother, a painter), has plotted where every gallery goes. Then Bernardo decides overnight to do something entirely different, and the architects start ringing Sofia to ask whether they should start, stop, or start again. She says: 'We have to be fast, but we also have to be careful.'

A finite sense of how long Bernardo has left may be driving him on, but Sofia isn’t so sure: the doctors keep telling her father he is in perfect health. 'The man will kill us all before he dies,' she jokes. But the fear propels him forward. 'I know in his head he could close his eyes and envision it perfectly to the detail, and he just wants us to see that. So it's like we're fighting against even his better instinct - because he wants to make it fast, but he also wants to make it this vision of a beautiful, gracious and gorgeous land.'

The physical energy Paz has unleashed on the landscape is matched by its artistic potency. 'There is a creative abundance at Museu Bernardo Paz - a distinctive and radical sense of discovery - that will be astonishing in both scope and imaginative force,' says Allan Schwartzman, the museum's chief curatorial advisor and a co-founder of Inhotim. The intention, he adds, is 'to occupy the land and to move visitors through the land in ways that present a different kind of relationship of pavilions - visitors one day passing smoothly between the two institutions, into experiences that do not simply multiply what Inhotim already did.'

The material answer, for now, is an architectural response that gives him the speed he craves while smuggling in the care he has no time for - mapping the ground for water and load-bearing before projects arrive, so that drilling, such as that which delayed Inhotim's Yayoi Kusama pavilion by two years, never delays anything again. It is project management as diplomacy, learning from Inhotim's mistakes without ever saying so out loud.

The invisible building

Maria Paz's answer to the need for speed lies in the aesthetic: if the project's pace screams urgency, the architecture should whisper. Her Kusama pavilion at nearby Inhotim - built for one of the artist's Infinity Rooms, the sort of work that generates a queue around the block in New York - is really two very small rooms and a vast sheltered space for the queue to enjoy the wait. 'It was meant to be almost invisible,' she says, 'almost as if it's part of the garden.'

Like many of the buildings now being designed for Museu Bernardo Paz, it was a building shaped to be overtaken by nature - the right gesture for a place where the landscape is the fastest-moving thing on site.

The reception for Museu Bernardo Paz is envisioned to have more presence because it is the 'front door,' but the vernacular is the same: everything enclosed, compressed into a central core, all four sides thrown open, water ponds standing in for walls. 'It's not a building that's enclosed; it's not conditioned,' she says. 'It's just a shelter to house people for all these activities.' The lesson comes straight from Inhotim, where the reception is now too small; her answer is bigger and more open at once.

Plans keep evolving. The reception, originally to the left of the baobabs, moved to the right; other projects sit on ground that may or may not be flattened, to a level nobody can yet name. 'You have to deal with constantly also being able to adapt and change,' she says. 'Things here in California are so slow, and it's so difficult to do something a little more creative. And there you're constantly challenging your creativity.' It is, she concludes, 'a good challenge.'

The house in the town

If Maria's project is about deferring to the forest, Sol Camacho's is about bringing the forest into harmony with those who live beside it. The Mexican founder of Raddar (Research as Design, Design as Research) arrived at the project in October to a proposition that surprised her. 'They told me, what do you think if we start before even opening the museum,' she says. 'The first public gesture of the whole enterprise would not be a gallery at all. It would be a house - Casa Comun - in Brumadinho.'

The town is still striving to heal from a deep wound. In 2019, the collapse of a Vale tailings dam killed 270 people and buried the valley in mud (the Brumadinho Memorial opened last year as a space for collective mourning and remembrance); the town's first instinct, Sofia says, was to direct part of the backlash at Bernardo - a miner, therefore guilty by category, though the dam was never his. 'It left a scar in the community that is hard to talk about,' Camacho says.

Nor can the disaster's perverse afterlife be politely stepped around: compensation money that sedated the town as much as it healed it. Paz wants to create stronger links to the town going forward. What art can do against any of that is uncertain, which is exactly why Camacho began not with a line but with a conversation.

It is one of the lessons of the first 25 years at Inhotim, and it has emerged stronger in Sofia's generation. Inhotim invited the community in - free Sundays, jobs, education for workers' children - and it was not enough, because the traffic ran one way. 'We need to go to Brumadinho,' Camacho says. 'If we want to impact the everyday life of these people, we need to make an effort and go and meet them where they live.'

So the house - a modest thing, ten metres by ten - becomes Casa Comun: a community centre in an existing structure adapted rather than demolished, made beautiful without much being built. Camacho's team held round-tables with thirty or forty residents, collecting a Santa Claus list of wishes - a computer lab, a reading room, soccer games - and translating them into the harder question: what can art bring to your lives? The wager is that when an artist comes to live and work in the neighbourhood for two months, the barrier dissolves. 'Now we can talk in the same language,' she says. Even against a tragedy of that scale, she calls it 'a beautiful, even if a small, effort within the city to think that art can be a way of understanding.'

Casa Comun is due to begin operating in April 2027, the programme built up over a year or two before anything new is constructed. It is the antithesis of Bernardo's steel-frame velocity - research first, patience as a design principle - and Camacho notices the difference this particular project's effect has on the client. 'It feels like we can have a conversation, travel, talk, come back, think.' Then she catches herself. 'And suddenly Bernardo goes, "I want forty big trees coming here, I want them by next month".' The two clocks run at once. The institution is trying to hold both.

Maintaining focus

Ask how many buildings there will finally be, and the number keeps moving. Maria was told eight projects; Sofia has heard forty pavilions, plus a hotel awaiting investors, a small hamlet of beautiful homes, a wattle-and-daub cultural centre, an orchid facility and a seed bank. There's talk about connecting to a Quilombola community forty-five minutes away, a research institute and a library.

The art collection is already vast beyond reckoning. Bernardo has accumulated 3,000 works, some produced in secret by an army of sixty or seventy young Brazilian artists he pays and elevates. Michael Heizer's pavilion is due first off the conveyor belt. PMCKM is shaping a concrete temple for two monumental sculptures, Displaced Replaced Mass #3 and Negative Wall Sculpture #1, that will be the artist’s first permanent installation in Latin America. Works by Doris Salcedo, Otobong Nkanga and Laura Lima wait for a pavilion, and each pavilion waits for the ground to hold still.

'If you don't have focus, you don't reach the place you need or want to reach,' Paz says. 'That focus draws from your reasons to do anything, which for me is to change people's lives just a little bit. Very little, but that very little is enough.'

Back in the mist at five in the morning, Bernardo is not thinking about any of this. He is watching his team of twelve people and a dozen trucks plant a forest, feeling, for the first time in years, fully alive. 'What I'll draw from it,' he says, 'is the hatred of death.' The architects around him are building against that hatred - a shelter that vanishes into a hillside, a house that listens before it speaks, a forest planted at the speed a mountain was once destroyed.

pmckm.com

raddar.org

fernandomaculan.com

inhotim.org.br