This research aims to investigate the discourse of technique of the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha (Vitória, 1928). Firstly, some of his statements from the 2010s are mobilized, in which the phrase that triggers the research is the statement that the main goal of architecture is to exhibit the success of technique. This sentence leads to the analysis of the architect s first project, the Paulistano chair (1956). Mendes da Rocha s discourse on the chair, in turn, reveals the conditions of production in a context undergoing a marked process of industrialization: the São Paulo of the second half of the 1950s. In the midst of these transformations, in parallel with the construction of Brasília, the production of the Paulistano articulates, on the one hand, the production of modern industry and, on the other, the work of the craftsman in a modest workshop. In this way, we observe in Paulistano s design discourse the passage from the private scale of furniture to the scale of the metropolis. This passage effectively takes place in the architect s career with the construction of his first building, the Paulistano Gymnasium (1958), on which we also detain ourselves, while raising questions about authority, autonomy, originality, and the very concept of technique, with the support of authors such as Richard Sennett, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. With this cut we seek to question the meaning assumed by technique in Mendes da Rocha s discourse, which in exhibiting and success points to a condition of visibility not only of technique, but of the human need to summon it and, ultimately, of humanity itself.