Beach as Model

enduring urban images

spmb_projects
Copacabana is more than a neighbourhood. It is the limit between the city and local enclosures. Copacabana moves between the sensorial, the externally visible, offered through forms, colours, architecture, traffic and people, and from the other side, the spaces are reduced to the invisibility of everyday life where thousands of people submerge, anonymous faces stamped by unknown life. —Wilson Coutinho

The aerial view above is from Manchete, a Brasilian popular news magazine from the seventies, which we, spmb_projects, use almost as a logo, as a central reference for our practice. The beach engages public space in the most radical sense, where territoriality is blurred by a new possibility of spatial negotiation. It is also one of our favourite spaces in the world. Here the inhabitants of different backgrounds, cultural formation, racial roots and social classes share one same landscape in relative harmony. The beach becomes the image of the ideal urban social equaliser – a spatialised democracy in a sense. Other qualities that constitute this ideal land/urbanscape are: warm air, natural and human soundscapes, soft surfaces, views, informal infrastructures – beach vendors, ocean water, pick up soccer and kiosks; formal infrastructures – abundant transportation systems, boardwalks, health and safety stations, public washrooms, life guards, restaurants and bars, security, and large events like concerts, parades or celebrations.

The iconic design of Roberto Burle-Marx was completed in 1970, and Copacabana was redefined through the expansion of the public space by stretching the surface of the beach and the promenade through the use of traditional Portuguese mosaic paving stones, creating the now famous pattern. Based on the achievement of Copacabana beach as an exemplary case of engaging urban design, and for its renowned quality of an urban environment, this experience could even suggest a new field of exploration that we refer as Beach Urbanism. It serves us as a model for the ways we practice in public space: the beach as an urban infrastructure.

spmb_projects. 'Beach as Model' On Site review, no. 18 Fall 2008
©Eduardo Aquino, Karen Shanski and On Site review

São Paulo's Water Ways

redefining the power of São Paulo's infrastructure
Fernando de Mello Franco
On the verge of summer, when pluviometric rates in São Paulo are at their highest, the chronic problem of flooding resumes. With the intense process of disorderly urbanisation, the soil has become excessively impermeable. The transformation and occupation of São Paulo Basin riverbanks and fluvial plains, which used to control water flows, just worsen the problem.

The entire population is hit by the flooding. Underprivileged populations who live close to water flows in historically depreciated areas are directly affected in their own dwellings. The risk situation of these populations represents for every public administration a reason for concern, which might be either of lower or higher level, according to their social commitment. This issue has never been tackled in an effective manner, and suffers with continual government changes and discontinuity.

The population not affected in their own dwellings is affected by difficulties imposed by a lack of mobility when the main road system, situated on a tableland and strategically placed parallel to the water ways, floods. As water incapacitates traffic flow, the problem gains a metropolitan dimension, also reaching production sectors.

As flooding is a factor of urban diseconomy, harming the efficient flow of people and goods, it belongs to the city administration plan and political agenda, to which successive governments have allocated funds, although never enough. In this investment, there is an opportunity for action, pinpointing needy areas throughout the metropolis.


Articulating Systemic and Local Concerns: the network of piscinões
The issues involving water resources — urban drainage, sanitation and water supply — are complex and demand efforts at both macro and micro levels. Since 1990 it has been dealt with by the State Plan of Water Resources (PERH) and Macro-drainage Plan for the Upper Tiete Basin.
One of the solutions proposed for city flooding is the construction of a set of large reservoirs, piscinões, to retain and control rain water, holding it back from city rivers and streams, reducing any overflow. In short, the piscinão replaces the original regulating function of the fluvial plains, now occupied and fully impermeable.
Presently, there are about 319 built reservoirs out of a total estimate of 131, which will be sable to hold 15.5 million cubic metres of water. They are distributed throughout the micro-tributary basins of Tiete River, covering the entire São Paulo water system. Many are located in peripheral areas, close to informal sectors of city occupation. Thus, in order to face the metropolitan dimension of flooding problems, there must be some meaningful public investment in peripheral areas. Finding a fit between the metropolitan and local dimensions of this question is the starting point toward any solution.
The 'informal' sectors have the most need for public spaces. In São Paulo, where disputes over space are often mediated by violence, there are still some unoccupied areas: pieces of land usually devoted to football fields, and other community activities. In the informal sectors, samba, funk dance and football matches are important events for the construction of social and communal networks, highly necessary for the strengthening of relationships to resist the adversities present in a large metropolis. They are a spontaneous manifestation that shows the value of public space in these areas.

This collection of vacant urban spaces in São Paulo can be converted into an opportunity for a new network of public spaces. For example, the piscinão is only active about 3 to 4 months out of the year, during high-water periods. For the other months it is idle. New programs can be added to the piscinão, building on the future steps of the Macro-drainage Plan.
Piscinões unit both the system of the borough's public spaces and the technical system for the drainage, treatment and re-use of water resources. They can serve as a landmark and spatial reference on the cityscape of the borough, laying water's claim to the floodplain.

Re-urbanisation of Água Branca, São Paulo, SP, 2004
Fernando de Mello Franco, Marta Moreira and Milton Braga, in association with Camila Toledo Fabrini, Guilherme Wisnik, Martin Corullon and Roberto Klein.
São Paulo will have to be consistent in managing its natural resources in a sustainable and rational manner. In this context, the effective urban reconfiguration of an area as large as the proposed new borough in Água Branca can only be achieved through the infrastructural planning of the region. However, an intervention on this scale essentially means defining the design of that urban infrastructure, giving legible form to a strategic action on behalf of the public authorities.
The association between transport and water-related issues in São Paulo surfaces here as a project theme, broached through a consequent critical deportment.

New train stations on existing lines are proposed to fulfill a strategic role as points of mediation between scales, and to serve as links between the metropolitan transport non-polluting railway system and the localities. In our project, these train stations are organised as agglomeration points for public facilities, special services and social housing.

Another matter is the definition of public spaces in this project: recreational and gathering spaces, which seek proximity with the circulation system and with the watercourses, arise out of precisely this conviction. the resulting water square holds both the system of the borough's public spaces and the technical system for the drainage, treatment and re-use of water resources. Fruit of a wellspring of non-contaminated groundwater, it will serve as a landmark and spatial reference on the cityscape of the borough, laying water's claim to the floodplain, at once technical and symbolic, rigorous and crystalline.

de Mello, Fernando. 'Water Ways' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Fernando de Mello Franco and On Site review

Public Support

Ivan Hernandez Quintela
I do not know if it is Luis Barragan’s fault, but Mexican walls facing the street tend to be huge
blank surfaces. I have nothing against this aesthetic, but I do think that a blank public wall is not very inviting or inhabitable, and I am all for architecture that is inhabitable.
As a response, I wanted to develop a project I call Public Support, an intervention that would make public façades into spaces of habitation. I took notes on how people lean against walls, whether is to rest, to wait for public transportation, or actually to find a place to sleep, and out of these notes I have shaped a series of bumps that could be stuck to facades where no urban furniture exists. The shape and height of where the bumps are placed insinuate possible positions for the body to take while waiting for the bus or a friend.
As a result, what used to be a blank façade transforms into a comfortable surface to lean on. Public Support becomes a way to gain back the street, to make of that membrane that tends to separate the private from the public, the exterior from the interior, the house from the street, a more porous surface – an inhabitable surface.

Hernandez, Ivan. 'Public Support' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Ivan Hernandez Quintela and On Site review

Carlos Raul Villanueva

tropical modernism: the power of estrangement
La Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas, Aula Magna (Convocation Hall) interior. Acoustic panels (The Clouds) by Alexander Calder.

Ruth Alejandra Moro
I remember the first time I saw blue shadows, light-diffused shadows on snow. In the warmer and brighter tropics shadows are a strong dark or a well-defined black. I arrived in Toronto in early March, still winter, and everything was foreign to me, but soon I realized that I was the foreign one, not the other way around. All my contextual understanding was displaced; in a battle between rejection and acceptance I had to both redefine the known and to make the unfamiliar familiar.

When Carlos Raul Villanueva arrived in Caracas in 1929, after finishing his studies at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, he found a predominantly rural society under the dictatorial government of Juan Vicente Gomez. The leading architectural trend among the Venezuelan bourgeoisie was historicist: neo-colonial, neo-baroque, vasque style. The figure of the architect did not exist: the engineer was recognized as the master builder.
The son of Venezuelan diplomats, he spent most of his youth in Paris, living in a diplomatic environment surrounded by arts and culture when the first modernist examples emerged in Europe. It was the primitive environment of Caracas that acted as a provocation, a catalyst, igniting the creative process and confronting him with the most fundamental principles of architecture. As I did, Villanueva reinvented himself by understanding, transforming and appropriating the unknown. Slowly he discovered tropical weather, lush landscapes and the elements of Hispanic architecture: the colonial window with its multiple layers to protect from the sun; the traditional patio for cross ventilation; the use of colour to make spaces warmer, happier.
His first works were shy, conservative and academic, a reflection of the society he had encountered. In the 1930s he built a bull ring (La Maestranza) in Maracay, that along with the Museum of Beaux Arts of Caracas and the Museum of Natural Science, were part of a historicist period of his career. These and other pavilions and galleries built during this period, generated a sensibility towards the arts that would be very evident in Villanueva’s late work.
Meanwhile the modernist influences he brought from Europe were waiting in the background. He started to slowly introduce elements of modernist language while continuing to re-evaluate and re-interpret traditional Hispanic architecture. Two events greatly influenced this change: the death of Juan Vicente Gomez in 1935 initiated a period of political openness and modernisation in Venezuela, and working with Juan Bernardo Arismendi, his father-in-law, on private residential projects allowed him to understand the local use of the domestic space.
A clear example of his architecture at this time is the revitalization of El Silencio (1941-1945), a low rise social housing project in downtown Caracas.
Although the public façade portrays a historicist language through the use of mouldings, cornices and traditional columns; the private façades (on the interior courtyard) clearly show a modern language with no disguises. Commercial gallerias on the ground floor protect from the intense tropical sun while creating a strong link with the public space. This is a space of exchange that even today remains active, in spite of the rapid and aggressive growth of the surrounding area.

It is finally in the Ciudad Universitaria, the main campus of the Central University of Venezuela (1944-1970) in Caracas where modern and traditional elements, and the sensibility he had developed towards the arts, come together to generate a truly tropical modern language in an amalgamation of art, landscape, architecture, planning and urban design. Built over a 26 year period, under Villanueva’s sole direction and design, the campus is a city within the city.
The master plan that had started by copying rigid English and American models evolved into an organic pattern, open spaces without solar protection become delineated by covered hallways, pergolas, and patios; the concept of the covered plaza was introduced to provide a transition between public and private space in which to socialise. The deliberate contrast between light and shade produced texture, and colour was introduced through the incorporation of art into architectural elements such as windows, murals and facades .
The encounter with the unknown and unexpected, gave Carlos Raul Villanueva special awareness of its surroundings and another vision of himself. Finally after many years of observation, analysis, teaching, sharing and understanding the society he lived in, he appropriated it and made it his own.
After seven years, my understanding of Canada (its people, habits and beliefs) has changed, and so has the perception — the notion — of myself. A negotiation of identity has risen from personal experience, self-reflection and a contextual awareness making what was once unfamiliar, familiar now, and what was a battle, is now a dialogue.
Displacement is not the place where we become something completely different but the place where we can share the differences and extract the best from them.
My architecture, as well, has arrived to a balanced mid-point where the fusion of both cultures, the tropical and the northern, celebrates the most unexpected but harmonious results.

‘Ultimately, estrangement is not about encountering a complete alien, but also about encountering sufficient otherness to recognize strangeness in oneself. Through displacement-in the mind in time and in space, through travel and emigration- we revisit ourselves’.
Payne, Alina. ‘Displacements: Architecture and the other side of the known’
A1, Architecture and Ideas, vol IV (Winter 2000)

Mora, Ruth Alejandra. 'The power of estrangement' On Site review, no. 18 Fall/Winter 2007/2008
© Ruth Alejandra Mora and On Site review

Scavenger Suit

clothes, trash, collections and random walks
Ivan Hernandez Quintela
I live in Mexico City and it has become my curiosity field, my ground of exploration. I live my body as a tool of perception and interaction during my city walks. Yet, even though it is through my body that I perceive, interact, and intervene the exterior, rarely has my skin been the one in direct contact with the exterior. Instead, it is my clothing that has acted as a contact tool, as a secondary skin.
Reflecting on my past random walks, where I would take pictures with my Polaroid camera of everyday conditions, events and incidents that would catch my attention, I started to feel like a flaneur, distantly observing the city through a scratched and apparently unfocused squared lens of two by two centimetres. I no longer wanted to feel so detached, so one day I had an idea of assembling a suit for myself, a suit that could help me collect objectual traces of the city. I thought of a suit covered with pockets, some big, some small, some with zippers, some with buttons; a suit that could hold all types of objects. I thought this suit could become not only a tool but a sign for my collecting. I thought that as my collection of objects found and stored in the suit’s pockets would grow, I myself would grow. I thought the suit would become a sign that I was not only keeping random objects as if I was an urban archeologist, but that the act of collecting these pieces was literally shaping me, transforming me, becoming (in a Delleuzeian way) me. As the suit became fuller, fatter, heavier, I myself would get fuller, fatter, heavier, not in a physical manner, but fuller, fatter and heavier with urban experience.
I have only taken a couple of walks using my Scavenger Suit, and so far, my collection consists of what anybody would define as a bundle of trash. I once read something on the lines of ‘show me somebody’s trash and I will tell you something about that person’, yet, I am beginning to have doubts about the final purpose and depth of my collection. I am still not even sure how my Scavenger Suit helps me as a collector, except that people on the streets look at me as if I am unstable, leaving me free to collect unbothered by questions about my intentions. Still, on thinking about culture in general, which I take it to be everything that we produce, consume and integrate into our daily life, I think of my Scavenger Suit as an appropriate tool for the everyday city walker. It is, in the end, through our clothes that we protect, project and veil ourselves from the other. It seems to me that that is exactly what culture attempts to do, to protect, project and veil for us a feeling of identity that sets us apart from the other. That if we were to unveil it, we would find we are completely naked underneath.

Hernandez, Ivan. 'Clothes, trash, collections and random walks' On Site review, no. 18 Fall/Winter 2007/2008
© Ivan Hernandez Quintela and On Site review