Sambinha Architecture, Biophysics, and Cheap Energy
To my friends and family who are unfamiliar with my town, I’ve often described it by asking them to picture the US in the pre-interstate highway era. It’d take about twice as long to drive to Seattle as it does to reach two of the largest three wilderness areas in the contiguous United States. And they are practically adjacent. But for the University nearby to keep things shaken up, it’s a fairly sleepy place. Moose have been known to wander through town often enough to delight or shock newcomers. My wife even ran into a wolf while watching owls in our favorite stand of white pine. Like I said, it’s a bit out of the way. Even so, issues of energy consumption are consistently at my doorstep.
I live a scenic distance from an inland seaport; the seaport that has over the past months been used to import enormous modules of tarsands extraction equipment. The loads are trucked overnight in order to close the long winding stretches of two-lane highway to make way for these “megaloads”
The Lochsa River somewhere near the Idaho-Montana border. Click through for image credit.
The region through which they transport this machinery is among the wildest in the US. There are very few places left where grizzlies, wolves and other predators can live, anthropophobic such as they are. That they are able live here in the Rockies is a testament to the still-healthy ecosystems—around here they are some places that are as close to unsullied as it gets: places that are the least effected by the destructive habits of capitalism. That is until you get to the extraction sites north of Edmonton, Alberta. It brings to mind historic feats of planning and industry, and then tosses them aside like broken toys. Read More…
Skins+Signs :: PART 2
AESTHETIZATIONS+GENTRIFICATION
“Observers of the contemporary city have described the late capitalist urban condition as characterized by a trend toward the aesthetization, where the primacy of the visual and the centrality of the image have reduced the city to a landscape of visual consumption, an object to be gazed upon, or a spectacle. Current urban design practices are said to nourish this appeal or the embellishment of the material world by giving precedence of the façade to the creation of urbane disguises, thereby reducing the effect of much architecture to two dimensions.”[1]
Stairs in Vila Cruzeiro; source:www.favelapainting.com
In the previous post, we discussed the role of image, looking at three particular examples of representations on urban informality. In this post, we will explore some of the implications when placing too much attention solely on representation. As Namrata well pointed out in her previous post: In Retrospect, solely focusing on physical transformations, and viewing informal settlements as purely built form can lead to an aesthetization of the area, turning informal settlements into simple representations drawn up by the “bourgeois gaze.”[2] (Roy, Ananya, “Transnational Trespassing,” pp.302)
By looking at a settlement primarily as built form implies that “upgrading” would entail a “package of environmental reforms,” and that these upgrading should be based on aesthetics that are interpretations of poverty and informality by professionals; failing to take into account the socioeconomic structure of the slums. Ananya Roy argues that one element of this aesthetic is the emphasis on architecture and on the physical expression of the settlements. The limitations are basically the focus of the built environment and physical amenities over people’s capacity or livelihoods, wages and political capacities.
Ken Lum’s from shangri-la to shangri-la, 2010 site-specific installation, Vancouver, photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram; Squatting in Vancouverism, http://gordonbrentingram.ca
“To present the stories as embodied in aesthetic structures is to imagine poverty or the informal sector as a pre-capitalist domain, free of material corruptions […] The material reality of squatting is, of course, that it is very much about territorial exclusions, about Read More…
Skins+Signs :: PART 1
[Skin+Signs]: Upgrading tool driven by aesthetics and imagery. Skins+Signs focuses on minimal interventions, such as the application of paint, ornament, and marketing to the exterior of buildings and structures, attempting to beautify and brand the existing area.
- Favela Painting, Favela Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro; Source: www.favelapainting.com
To piggyback on a previous post, Remaking Rio: favela tourism and the tourist narrative, I want to focus on aspects of representation, particularly looking at the way in which informality is viewed, imagined and represented, as well as the implications on upgrading projects and their physical manifestations. For this, I will present this exploration in two initial posts:
- 1-Learning from the ‘Informal’
- 2- Facades+ Aestitzations
PART 1: Learning from the Informal
A-The Image
Aside from the artistic qualities linked to issues of image and representation, the means and methods used to represent a particular reality – be it through photography, a sketch, a rendering, a painting, a plan, or statistical projections- reflect particular ways of thinking about society and its transformation. Here, form, function and content fully overlap.
Representations are not simply the way the world is presented, but it is the way the world is intimately known, in many ways experienced, and in certain times manipulated to achieve a particular effect or describe a point of view to the audience.
- Dionisio Gonzales Photo-montages
In this regard, Loïc Wacquant, professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, points out that “poverty is too often (wrongly) equated with material dispossession or insufficient income. But in addition to being deprived of adequate conditions and means of living, to be poor in a rich society entails having the status of a social anomaly and being Read More…
“Informal” Designers
As I noted in my last post, professional architectural design has recently come to be seen as a valid and potentially effective approach to improving informal settlements. I have long had an interest in the spatial and material qualities of built environment of informal settlements, and the recent shift in thinking about “design in favelas” presents an opportunity to expand the discussion to include architectural design as practiced by the residents themselves. As a point of reference, I would suggest that spatial constraint is typically the factor most at play in the process of architectural design in an urban informal settlement, and that its impact can be observed in every piece of the built environment.
Part of my architectural research in São Paulo focused on documenting stairs and semiprivate outdoor spaces, as these were common elements visible from the circulation spaces which showed a lot of individual expression. At first glance, designing a stair in an informal settlement might seem like a simple project. In fact, the number of factors that have to be addressed by the designer is surprisingly high. The first design decision would most likely be the selection of a location. In the spatially constrained context of an informal settlement, the builder may wish to encroach on an adjacent circulation path. These “public” spaces appear to be created and maintained by local agreement, although I have not investigated how the encroachment process occurs in that context.
But whether the stair was within the zone of a resident’s home, or encroaching in the circulation space, the guiding principle appeared to be to serve the purpose in the minimum space possible. Stairs were almost always narrow rather than wide, and within the great variety of stair configurations I documented, I rarely encountered full landings where a stair changed direction – typically, a triangular step or two would serve the purpose. As the photo above shows, the two angled treads appear to be designed to encroach as little as possible into the adjacent circulation space.
Fortunately, the best material for designing these freeform stairs is also one of the most inexpensive and readily available. Poured-in-place Read More…
The Right to the City
“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather then an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” – David Harvey, The Right to the City (2008), a postface to Social Justice and the City
I moved to São Paulo in 2010 inspired by collaborative place making, eager to study ways in which favelas are “upgraded”, creating more livable, humane, and connected neighborhoods. After a diverse and eye opening year in which I completed a post-graduate course in public housing design at Escola da Cidade, led a youth arts collective in a favela in the north periphery of São Paulo, and investigated several reurbanization projects throughout the city I felt optimistic about collective public space making and the opportunity architects have to co-design reurbanization and urban upgrade projects. Then, I witnessed reurbanization begin. I watched children climb over the wreckage of homes left in a state of half demolition and listened to families tell stories of how long it took to build their home, unsure of where they would go next.
- The Bamburral Favela during housing removal for reurbanization. São Paulo, Brazil. Credits Kirsten Larson
Despejo na Favela, a samba written in 1973 by Adoriran Barbosa, a musician from São Paulo reflects what I am experiencing in the city. I realized that I was investigating a very narrow slice of an enormous urban dilemma whose web is just as intertwined with the politics of capital and hierarchies of knowledge as it is to punctual architectural actions that reform open sewers and pave roads. I began to feel reurbanization’s potential to oppress rather than liberate, to understand the stark contrast between slick design boards and a living urban reality, to see through photos of community meetings, and to question the authenticity of community design processes. I am questioning to what extent reurbanization is a need. What is truly necessary to build healthy vibrant communities? Whose needs does urban planning really serve? And, to what extent and where has planning been used as an ideological instrument by the dominant classes? Within these unanswered questions I began to imagine the questions that may lead to alternative paradigms in planning. How can decision making be lateral rather than vertical? Where does liberation come into play? And most of all, how do we as architects and planners navigate a process where our work, our pedagogy, and our ethics directly effect the lives of oppressed citizens of the working class, a population which is not included in our beloved ‘formal city’? Read More…
Adriana Navarro Sertich
Lubaina Rangwala
Jennifer Renteria
Kirsten Larson
Proyectos Arqui5
Tucker Landesman
Namrata Kapoor
Paula Restrepo-Cadavid
Andrew Carman
Jose Antonio Ramirez
Fernando Luiz Lara
Bethany Opalach
