UTOPIAS AND URBAN FANTASIES AND THEIR REFLECT IN THE BRAZILIAN CAPITALS CONSOLIDATION PROCESS
UP 707993 2000
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A city was born or exists just because it gives the case of each of us not to be self sufficient, but lacking of many things. We gave the name of city this coexistence of too many needy. ” (Sócrates, 300 BC)
Already in 380 BC, in a dialogue about the meaning and conception of the city, Socrates shared with Plato his perception of it as an organism, an unit unable to exists without the sense of community and where individualism presents itself as an opposition to the urban materialization. Based on this principle, the planning and design of cities is established as the embodiment of a practice not only formal; but rational and functional, a reflection of social processes and phenomena where historical, economic, political and environmental aspects are presented as relevant variables to the spatial conception.
TERRITORIAL CONFIGURATION From 1800, a serie of projects have gained notoriety by presenting urban alternatives as a product of a binomial logic where the architectural world merged social and philosophical world to find answers and ways for an urban unit that could reflect in the quality of life and confront the challenges of living together albeit in an utopian way. In 1843, Charles Fourier presented to the architectural community the project for Phalansteries [image 1] where the search for a harmonic territorial occupation led him to the conception of a new way of life guided by the fusion of intellect, social aspects and the industrial production in the middle of the countryside with an economy based on the feudal trade that was never built. However, in 1850, Jean Baptiste Godin introduced the 'Familysteries ' that, based on the Fourier model and with the addition of socialist principles, worked until 1968 and established himself as a successful example of the fusion between architecture and sociology for a rational spatialization of the collective life.
phalansteries
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familysteries
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04 Some years later, in 1898, Ebanezer Howard idealized and materialized the idea of the garden cities [image 2], with an urban proposal based on the relationship between town-country and endowed with a social equilibrium maintaining policy. This plan answered to the 'british challenges' of the nineteenth century through the 'zoning' of urban space based in their use. The next project to take the attention of the architectural community followed the same functionalist principles as the garden cities but, inside of the CIAM(1) 'standards' and using the building technologies provided by the use of the reinforced concrete, the Industrial City [image 3] of Toni Garnier in 1901 was the first to think the public space as an unit proposing buildings with collective pathways and connected gardens. It turns out that the fast population growth of the great capitals came to challenge the urban space such that the density of the city came to be considered in design. Thus, in 1922 Le Corbusier proposed the "Contemporary City" [image 4], a modern city which, according to Le Corbusier, in response to the pyramidal hierarchy of society, presented a geometrically designed system with three groups of buildings capable to housing three million inhabitants and provide all the necessary infra structure to this through the organization of systems by 'LAYERS' able to host the different types of transport, pedestrian areas and facilities and also, glorifying the limelight in the 20s: the car.
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(1) . CIAM : Founded in 1928 , the International Congress of Modern Architecture was responsible to spread the principles of the Modern Movement.
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In the words of Le Corbusier, there was a 'dared dream it could be done', but the public evaluation, different than imagined, considered it a hyper reality that denied the traditional model of life to present a new model based in a system unable to contribute to the urban happiness even if providing the basic living needs of industrial models. But though the ideas of Le Corbusier for the contemporary city were not pleased, the production of modernist buildings in cities around the world with an ‘upraising’, a verticalization, responding to the challenge of demographic density was fixed and therefore , this modified the urban space . Thus, in Brazil, with the process of urbanistic production starting later, in the later 20’s and, having traced his modernist conceptions reflecting the European urban production, Vilanova Artigas describes "the search for a ' decolonization ', the escape of the remnant of the Brazil colony, where the nation wished industrialization" (Paths of Architecture, pg 104) but "watched the capitalism create new scenes of social misery in the cities" (Paths of Architecture, pg 106) that were answered within the modernist form. If at first, the country inspired designs like the ‘Agache Plan’ [image 5] by the French Alfred Agache to Rio de Janeiro and the ‘Plan of Avenues’ [image 6] by Prestes Maia to Sao Paulo, the political and economic challenges only allowed a part of the plans to bet materialized and thus, the modern architecture eventually enable the creation of isolated buildings that do not contributed to humanize the cities, leaving it remains in a random chaos of territorial occupation.
05. Avache Plan to Rio de Janeiro by the French urbanist Donat Alfred Agache that divided the city in sectors by function and, connected this sectors to the city center through the avenues and highways planned not only for cars, but also for pedestrian circulation. The plan to Rio de Janeiro was never totally built and, a curiosity is the green areas of environmental protection that today, host the favelas (slums).
06. Plan of Avenues to Sao Paulo by Prestes Maia in the right and, in the left, The urban Plan to Paris by Eugene Henard. It is easy to notice the similarities between them. Both has the radial avenues connecting to a central ring that, before get closer to the city center, is capable to distribute the flow of cars. The pan was never totally built, also.
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It has been then that the unbridled capitalist society in pursuit of fast growth has been unable to solve the social thematic and get the harmony between social, historic architecture and the heritage. Lacked cohesiveness between a social plan and architectural plan as there had been in the 'Familysterys' or in the 'Gardens Cities' and, timely ‘upraising’ generated particularities in the urban space that broke with the principle of unity, necessary to the cities [image 7] .
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As said Argan (Classic Anti-classic, 1984) "You do not get an idea of city from an idea of space: Unlike this, we search for fundamental categories of the functions of social life. It is, therefore, the methodical process that leads to the definition of space and, consequently, to the architecture."
The construction of the geographic country's capital, Brasilia, in the '50s came to break this series of incomplete projects to propose a new modernistic, functional and formal city. The need for occupation of the interior of the country in a disruption to the coastal occupation process initiated by the Portuguese colonizers led the creation of a project with bases in the Athens Charter (2) where the space came to be planned not only by its materiality, but also, by its relationship with the people and their social aspects. Brasilia [image 8] was equipped with monumentality when defined an axis thought by the community principles to house the existing governmental powers and to this axis, was added a second, which praised the individuality of the man occupying the land: dwell. Grew up in Brasilia the unit able to define the city, the urban space that through Niemeyer's and Lucio's Costa architecture, made a landmark in the Brazilian history.
However, as the non entirety executed plans to Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia also not predicted the fast population growth of a developing nation, and thus the city of Lucio Costa ended up frozen in time, remaining immutable and isolated from the peripheral nuclei today called ' satellite cities ' and, creating an easily perceptible social discrepancy in the urban space even if in a process of constant reinvention. The result of such urban discrepancies generated a need for absorption of new utopian concepts that presents an escape from the chaos, but the Brazilian production has stagnated in the modernism and what we saw in response to the European urban chaos, never could help the urban transformation necessary in the Brazilian territory. If until then, through an antropophagic process, Brazil presented an urban production that absorbed the European experience to add to this local and cultural aspects and creatively returns new proposals for our cities, the following movements can reflect some of the aspects that we live in the current urban and social situation which we struggle.
04 (2) .Athens Charter: a document about urban planning under the Modernist principles, from 1933 produced by CIAM .
08. The Pilot Plan to Brasilia designed by Lucio Costa was the first one in Brazil to follow all the Modernist principles stabilished in the Athens Chart. Lucio Costa planned to mainly axis that, in a crucifix, divided the new capital between the monumental and the services to serve the people and, the residences. However, the crucifix became a ‘plane’ when the horizontal axis turned itself into a curve following the curse of the river in a search for make the water inside the sity flow in the same direction as the river. As the Athens Chart says that in a city we must not have two avenues, highways or directions crossing themselves in the same plane. So, thinking about it, all the horizontal axis is elevated from the monumental axis and received a central avenue to fast circulation and in the borders, local avenues to the circulation of those that resides in the axis.
AFTER MODERNISM In the early 60's, an architectural movement spread worldwide with the following motto:
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more with less
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In other words, make the most out using the minimum of material. It was a quest for efficiency, the response to human needs where technology has taken the place of aesthetics not only regarding to design and architectural production, but also the production of urban utopias.
From the Greek TEKNE, or just, 'make things', the HIGH TECH architecture had as its precursor a meaningful name: Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983) who, with the proposal of a 'Dome Over Midtown' Manhattan [image 09 a] , showed to the world the idea where the urban problems could be easily break from the isolation of the city within an air dome where the weather would be controlled: there would be no pollution or temperature problems. Security and protection from an isolation membrane of reality.
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In 1967 Buckminster Fuller introduced 'The Biosphere' [image 09 b] as the American pavillion to the ' World Fair' in Montreal. The geodesic dome with 76 meters in diameter and 62 meter high still remembered some of the Violet Le Duc’s propose with structuralism: a structure that speaks for itself, without embellishments or finishings. 'The Biosphere' was, after the rejection of the 'Dome Over Midtown', the first architectural project implemented where the environment conducive to human needs seclude itself from the natural world, from the geography, biology or any surrounding element. A glass and steel structure that imposed itself in space to create a controlled environment by man. Some people say that he redefined the human understanding of space and time. Others just accept the definition that he gave himself in this project: "the world's most successful failure".
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Driven by the search for answers to the cities of the future, question this that already permeated the minds of the population and the media resources since the late 20's when films like Metropolis by Fritz Lang (1926) and Fantasy by David Butler (1930) adopted the principles of 'layering' in urban space proposed by the Charter of Athens and raised them to a social apartheid that discriminate the poor and put them underground in the city but at the center of urban problems; the Archigram (based on the AA School in London) and Superstudio (headquartered in Florence, Italy) also showed their ideas. If Archigram (3) inspired by the technology proposed for the 'Plug-IN City' and 'The Walking City' [image 10 a] the creation of a new urban reality through hypothetical projects that reflected a progressive and objectified city where human values were replaced by the ephemerality of a driven consume and isolation / independence of any natural condition dedicated exclusively to supply the human needs; Superstudio (4) with the project 'Supersurface' [image 10 b] imagined not only the city, but the entire Earth surface wrapped in a bubble and, with all the infrastructure distributed in a GRID. To Superstudio, a sense of universal community would be rescued and, ignoring the conditions of the natural environment and geographical, political, economic or cultural aspects, everyone would live in a technological controlled environment.
We could say that, emphasizing the imagined capacity for those projects to upgrade itself according to the human needs, fantasies from the 60s with the urban isolation ignores the basic relationships of human life with the surroundings and, as consequence, also ignores the community factor as Socrates said that, it would be essential to the conception of the city.
(3) .Archigram: Composed by Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene, the group was defined as futurists, anti-heroic and critical that used the technology to ‘preview’ the future cities. (4). Superstudio: Composed by Adolfo Natalini and Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, the group took the challenge to think the cities of future and presented 12 ideal cities at the magazine Superarchittettura in 1966.
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10 b If 50 years ago the cities of the future, even utopian, presented urban barriers that had objectified them, today in the present cities, these barriers already appear in our midst. We act like machines and our product is a mechanical city where no one lives, it passes through, but does not create a sense of belonging: it works like independent bodies unable to create a unit, playing an anthropophagic role with human and social values succumbing to uncertainty in a space that does not respond to our needs of urban unit. A fast look trough the spatial configuration of Sao Paulo, the economic capital of Brazil, and we easily note that the occupation of a void not only external ( landscape ) , but also internal ( human) ; inconsequently, led to the creation of supra- occupied cities, transit centers, INVISIBLE BARRIERS and consequent destructive actions based on progress. A fickle progress, which changes with each new economic reality that we experience. The new urban bubble, isolated, is not another HIGH TECH structure made of glass and steel as designed by Buckminster Fuller anymore; its contemporary name in Brazil is 'closed condominium' and more each day, they multiply. Where twenty years ago it was common to find homes with large gardens, children playing in the street, neighbors exchanging life experiences; no surprise walk today and parallel to a large condominium wall, find a stream with its Environmental Preservation Area raped and occupied by illegal settlements. And what are the walls of cities today if not elements of segregation and exclusion of interaction between people? Contradictions to the ideal of city that everyone seems to persuit. And them, analyzing one of the main axes of Sao Paulo [image 11] , the ‘Marginal Tietê’ , a high flux highway present in the Plan of Avenues as a radial avenue with high significance for the urban dynamics and internal circulation of people, what we see on its banks is not a connection of spaces which, in symbiosis with each other contributes to quality of life and population
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creating an unit of town. We sees a group of walls, enclosures that isolate its residents into a false security sphere with a false idea that everything that they need to live can be found in there and; in contrast, those who are outside, remain to the reality of social apartheid. If you are not inside the bubble, can not have your basic needs and , possibly , your right to be citizen shall be denied. We create prisons for the rich to protect from the poor and we accept that as our reality without questioning it since, do not need to be among the poor.
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The same is happening in Rio de Janeiro, our touristic capital, where the sample can be the ‘Rocinha Favela’ with 56,000 inhabitants and its neighboring Gavea [image 12} . In this case, the aggravating circumstance is that, for whom this outside the walls of a condominium, the reality of the natural environment of the hills, is much more present in the risk of collapse of the residences and the difficulty of provision of infrastructure, sanitation and public services.
IBGE (5) data confirms this reality and point out that 84.4 % of the population lives in urban space in Brazil and consequent to the economic growth and urbanization process, we live in a reality of 16,433 slums and informal settlements with approximately 30 % of the urban population. If the challenge of the past urban projects implemented until now was the prediction of a rapid urban growth, today we face the challenge of search the answer to a city that, due to economic growth and industrial expansion, grew so fast that its housing deficit created a huge number of informal settlements seen as illegal and often singled out as the problem to be cut off from the city, and not a space to be transformed. Then consolidates the contemporary challenge for urban design that directly implies in a response to social issues able to integrate infrastructure, housing, hyper population, economy and natural aspects in a single time without create isolation, occasional bubbles amid the urban space or segregation between formal and informal, legal and illegal, and again, the rich and the poor.
(5) . IBGE: Brazilian institute of geography and statistics. An institute responsible for the census of population and official data about the country.
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The utopia of the future '50s certainly is already a part of our reality, but not in a positive and technological way, just in all its questionable aspects: the segregation and isolation of the environment in which it operates. Missed to us to think our city as a set of regional, social and spatial particularities able to establish a relationship of exchange, a unit that benefits everyone and not underappreciate human relationships with the surrounding space. So with a challenge, maybe later than expected, the country starts at the '80's, trying to not respond to their problems with a single plan, but with specific strategies that in a near future can contribute to the creation of a unit city. Today in Brazil, following examples of Latin American capitals that also seeks to change the design of its urban space as Bogota in Colombia, we are developing a slew of projects in infra structure and redevelopment of slums and among them, soil studies, studies of local population and socio-cultural conditions of the same, as well as identification of geographic and climatic conditions that may or may not contribute to the efficiency of these projects. One of the examples is the project of the Brazilian group MMBB to the 'Corrego do Antonico' [image 13] in the Sao Paulo's slum called Parais贸polis with 60,000 inhabitants is seeking to break this 'bubble' created in the heart of the city through the reconnection of the isolated nucleus of the favela with the surrounding city by providing basic resources and the creation of public spaces that meet the needs of the local population of transportation, sanitation and infrastructure.
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However, to Rio de Janeiro the first challenge has been to attempt to pacify the favelas taken by crime in the absence of the public system, since the entrance to the perimeter of the slum redevelopment of space is subject to 'approval' or not of this entities of traffic. We have been seeking for change of our reality, but is only in our imagination the picture of how our cities might be the future, in the next 50 years from the projects already started.
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LIST OF IMAGES: 01. At the left the diagram of the phalansteries and in the right the familysteries. Is possible to see the similarity between the spatial configuration of them. (Elek, 1968) 02. The Garden City diagrams by Ebanezer Howard showing the relationship between city and country. (Elek, 1968) 03. Industrial City diagram by Tony Garnier and the division of space by function. (Elek, 1968) 04. Contemporary City diagrams by Le Corbusier showing the spatialization of the city based in a grid that divides the spaces and also the population by social function following the pyramidal hierarchy of life. (Elek, 1968) 05. Agache Plan by Alfred Agache. Picture from the govern of Rio de Janeiro website. 06. Plan of Avenues by Prestes Maia. Picture from the govern of Sao Paulo website. 07. Urban contrasts in the contemporary city: creation of bubbles for isolation in Sonia’s Ville - Sao Paulo. 08. Pilot Plan for Brasilia by Lucio Costa. 09. a. The Dome over Midtown ; b. The Biosphere. Both images by Buckminster Fuller. (Brayer, 2005) 10. a. Plug IN City and The Walking City by Archigram; b. Supersurface by Superstudio. 11. Analysis of occupation in the ‘Marginal Tiete’ axis in Sao Paulo. Diagrams by me. 12. Urban barrier and contrasts between Gavea and Favela da Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro. 13. Corrego do Antonico Project by MMBB. Pictures from MMBB website.
NOTE: Today Brazil has as geographic capital the city of Brasilia, however as an economic capital we have Sao Paulo and also, as touristic capital the city of Rio de Janeiro.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES: ELEK, Paul (1968). Urban Structures. Elek Books, London. ARTIGAS, Villanova (1984). Caminhos da Arquitetura. Cosac Naify, Sao Paulo. BRAYER, Marie-Ange; MIGAYROU, Frederic & NAJO, Fumio (2005). Archilab's urban experiments. Thames & Hudson, London. ARGAN, Giulio Carlo (1984). Classic Anticlassic. Feltrinelli , Milan. LANG, Peter ; MENKING, William (2003). Superstudio – Life without Objects. Skira, Milan.