Cidade Oceanica: Environment and Urbanization in Rio (MUD Studios 2015-17)

Cidade Oceanica: Environment and Urbanization in Rio de Janeiro

Edited by: Jose Gamez, Zhongjie Lin, Jeffrey S. Nesbit

Work completed by students of: Advanced Urban Design Studio: Rio 2100 (Summer 2015,2016,2017) School of Architecture, UNC Charlotte: 2015: Ashley Bonawitz, Jaquasha Colon, Alicia (Merrit) Foreman, Denisse Guzman,Ravine Mangala, Nicholas Ortiz, Noel Sumrall , Ojah Vasser, Felicity (Gaoxin) Wang , Mimi Zhou 2016: Kendel Baier, Stanford Barnes, Evan Beaty, Raaga Bhandari, Paula Campos, Zhang Chi (May), Shuxin Lin, Aline Nascimento, Alyssa Nelson, Monica Whitmire, Zhang Xunxun (Zoe), Jenna Young, Eric Zaverl 2017:Manasi Bapat, Huck Broyles, Jingyao Cheng, Bhanuja Damarla, Suruchi Gupchup, Yu Huan, May Khalife, Nitya Kolli, Bria Prioleau, Jas Warren, Jess Yester, Ginny Young Pontifical Catholic University of Rio De Janeiro: 2015: Aleksandra Martyna Kondrowska, Adalgisa Teixeira Correia, Julia Sa Earp De Castro, Luiza Xavier Pereira, Valentina Davila Urrejola, C amilia Santos Medeiros, Flavia Moretz Sohn Canthe, Erika Brum Palma Pereira 2016: �na �arolina Brasil Silveira, Anne Aune, Bruno Rocha Silva Setta, João Antônio Augusto De Souza Santos, Felipe Donato Borgerth Teixeira, Juliana Nunes Dos Santos 2017: Marcelle Azevedo Teixeira, Luísa Ellery Girão Barroso, Renata Alencar �opes, Monica Tereza Benicio ISBN: 978-1-68454-661-9 Book Designed by: Milad Rogha, Nicole Avitablie & Jose' Gamez © 2018 UNC Charlotte All rights reserved No part of this volume may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from this author.

Cidade Oceanica:

Environment and Urbanism in Rio de Janeiro Advanced Urban Design Studio: Rio 2100 | 2015 - 2017 School of Architecture, UNC Charlotte Edited By: Jose' Gamez, Zhongjie Lin, Jeffrey S. Nesbit

Acknowledgments Section I: Introduction_Rio 2100 (Jose' Gamez)

12

Section II: Cidade Oceanica: Environment and Urbanisation in Rio de Janeiro (Jose' Gamez and Jeffrey Nesbit) 30 Gallery I: Photo Essay: A Journey into Rio de Janeiro's Hills (Javier Escoduro)

Section III: A Conversation with Felipe Correa

88 106

Gallery 2: Events 2015-2017 122 Editor Biographies 138

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of many individuals and organizations. This project has benefited from the efforts of two graduate research assistants, Milad Rogha and Nicole Avitabile. Their efforts to design, draft and produce this document insured its publication. The design work that illustrates this publication was developed by the students from both UNC Charlotte and from the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Students from UNC Charlotte’s Master of Urban Design program and from UNC Charlotte’s Latin American Studies program endured the trials of a three-year research and design cycle (2015-17) during which they traveled from Charlotte to Rio de Janeiro where they met with students from the PUC-Rio’s Department of Architecture and Urbanism who are involved in the workshops: UNC Charlotte 2015: Ashley Bonawitz, Jaquasha Colon, Alicia (Merrit) Foreman, Denisse Guzman,Ravine Mangala, Nicholas Ortiz, Noel Sumrall , Ojah Vasser, Felicity (Gaoxin) Wang , Mimi Zhou 2016: Kendel Baier, Stanford Barnes, Evan Beaty, Raaga Bhandari, Paula Campos, Zhang Chi (May), Shuxin Lin, Aline Nascimento, Alyssa Nelson, Monica Whitmire, Zhang Xunxun (Zoe), Jenna Young, Eric Zaverl 2017: Manasi Bapat, Huck Broyles, Jingyao Cheng, Bhanuja Damarla, Suruchi Gupchup, Yu Huan, May Khalife, Nitya Kolli, Bria Prioleau, Jas Warren, Jess Yester, Ginny Young Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro 2015: Aleksandra Martyna Kondrowska, Adalgisa Teixeira Correia, Julia Sa Earp de Castro, Luiza Xavier Pereira, Valentina Davila Urrejola, Camilia Santos Medeiros, Flavia Moretz Sohn Canthe, Erika Brum Palma Pereira 2016: Anna Carolina Basil Silveira, Anne Aune, Bruno Rocha Silva Setta, Joao Antonio Augusto de Souza Santos, Felipe Donato Borgerth Teixeira, Juliana Nunes dos Santos 2017: Marcelle Azevedo Teixeira, Luisa Ellery Girao Barroso, Renata Alencar Lopes, Monica Tereza Benicio In addition to the energy, enthusiasm and intellect that this international group of students contributed were the efforts of a range of collaborators in Rio without whom our program would not have succeeded. Octavio di Leo, Andrea Delgado and the staff of IES Rio provided both an initial academic home and a long-term set of relationships that anchored our program and students during our first two trips. Javier Escudero and his staff at Brazil Cultural followed IES in our final year and contributed academic and cultural experiences that provided a fitting culmination to our last visit. Octavio, Andrea and Javier have become our extended family in Brazil and our anchors in Rio for future collaborations.

Of course, our vision for the international workshops would never have come to fruition had it not been for the support of Dr. Maria Fernanda Lemos, the former Director of the Department of Architecture and Urbanism at PUC-Rio, and her tireless staff. Professor Lemos added a breadth and depth of knowledge in a wide range of areas including sustainable urban planning and infrastructure, as well as a range of fruitful contacts that gave us access to a symbolic and a physical set of landscapes for study. Others contributed time, energy, and guidance in many forms ranging from academic walking seminars to site visits, design studio visits, and to participation as guest reviewers at our final presentations at PUC-Rio: Maria Fernanda POPS, Architect and Guest Critic (2015-16) Rafael Saraiva, Architect and Guest Critic (2015-17) Henrique Houayek, Architect and Guest Critic (2017) Erika Brun, Urban Designer and Guest Critic (2017) During the summer of 2017, we are honored to host Felipe Correa who led a workshop with our studio in Charlotte. Felipe’s expertise in Latin American and Brazilian urbanization provided insights into not only the student’s work but also potential outcomes of our three-year engagement in Rio. We are thankful for his willingness to share his time and reflections upon our students’ proposals. Other notable reviewers include: Nadia Anderson, Milad Fereshtenhnezhad, Chris Jarrett, Manoj Kesovan, Ming-Chun Lee, Richard Petersheim, Deb Ryan, David Walters, and Peter Wong.

A number of other programs and people from UNC Charlotte also contributed support. Jeff Balmer, from the School of Architecture lent his time, talents, and energy to our program; without his support, our final summer would not have materialized. Jeffrey Nesbit's efforts in the second half of the summers of 2016 and 2017 insured that work begun in Rio gained depth as designs developed upon our return in Charlotte; his imprints can be seen throughout this book and in the students’ work. Our gratitude also goes to Brad Sekulich, Rachel Moreau, Whitney Strickler, Joanne Zhang, and all the staff in UNC Charlotte’s Office of Education Abroad whose support insured success of these programs. Jurgen Buchenau, Chair of UNC Charlotte’s Department of History and Director of the Latin American Studies program, joined us in Rio for the first two years of our travels; his deep knowledge of Latin American history and Brazilian culture gave us a frame of reference for our experiences in the first weeks of each visit. Jerry Davila, formerly of UNC Charlotte and the current Jorge Paulo Lemann Chair in Brazilian History at the University of Illinois, generously provided guidance in the years prior to our first visit to Rio. Scott Hippensteel, from the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at UNC Charlotte, provided our students with overviews of the impacts of global sea level rise and helped us understand the degree to which Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro will be impacted by climate change over the course of this century. Finally, we would like to thank the UNC Charlotte School of Architecture and Director Chris Jarrett for their support for our programs in Brazil as well as for the support that has made this publication possible.

I

Introduction_ Rio 2100 Jose' Gamez

Introduction Jose' Gamez

Google Maps now has a tool that allows users to observe the effects of sea level rise.

By the year 2100, sea levels are expected to rise 1 to 2 meters worldwide.

Additionally, the London School of Economics’ Urban Age Project has projected that global populations will become 75% urbanized by 2050.

Much of this urbanization is occurring in developing countries, which will account for approximately 4 of every 5 city dwellers. These transformations influenced the planning and implementation of our Master of Urban Design (MUD) Program in the School of Architecture (SoA) at University of North Carolina - Charlotte in 2008-09. Our interests in sustainability began with a focus upon compact city development but has matured to include questions of resilience, climate change and ecological infrastructure. We – the MUD faculty, which at the time included David Walters as program director, myself as the director of City.Building.Lab, Deb Ryan, and Zhongjie Lin who now directs the program – believed that rapid urbanization and climate change must be brought into our curriculum; globalization demanded a global pedagogy. One translation of this vision was a required international

experience, which took the form of a summer capstone studio that involved 5 weeks abroad. This was also a part of a larger initiative in the SoA aimed at integrating international education with the school’s overall curricula.

contributes to acid rain in many villages on their outskirts.

I mention this because it shapes the context of this publication and the work within the following pages. This book and its accompanying edited monograph (forthcoming) are direct results of our attempts to introduce issues of globalization and climate change into our curriculum and our capstone studio. And, this collection of texts follows the published work under the title Vertical Urbanism, which documented the MUD program’s initial international programming based in China. Vertical Urbanism, now published by Routledge (2018) and a companion studio portfolio, focused upon emerging patterns in global urbanization by addressing questions of scale and density through exposure to the complexity of cities like Suzhou and Xiamen, and through collaborations between our students and those of Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Xiamen University, and Wuhan University.

In Brazil, I led students through Rio de Janeiro and through sites that were being urbanized often through informal forces that followed infrastructural investments. Urbanization, in much of Rio, is characterized more by its intense informality combined with its concentrated mega-event driven formal developments. In addition, our work in Rio took climate change as a significant part of the “global context” within which the city sits. Climate change and its associated impacts, such as sea-level rise, will significantly impact many of the world’s largest urban centers, which often can be found in low-lying and coastal areas. This approach led us to focus on Zona Oeste, or the Western Zone, of Rio in which World Cup and Olympic events have driven major investments in a part of the city that is at best suitable to low density (if any) development. Upon our return from Rio, Jeffry Nesbit led the final phase of design development, which is also captured in this book, but he was also influential in setting the design strategies that enabled our students to tackle the complex challenges that Rio and Zona Oeste represent.

Starting in 2012 and continuing through 2014, our students traveled to several Chinese cities and visited traditional urban forms such as imperial cities, water-towns, garden cities, and colonial cities, as well as contemporary business districts, new towns, and eco-cities. Dr. Zhongjie Lin led that international research and design collaboration, which helped to frame our work from 2015 to 2017 in Brazil. By the time of program’s first visit to China, the country had undergone intensive urbanization for nearly two decades and it seemed as if the city-building theories that we were discussing in Charlotte were being built in China. In a sense, our students witnessed emerging paradigms as they shaped new urban centers and distinguished them from traditional downtowns. What our students witnessed was the transformation of Chinese cities that tied them to global flows of culture, commerce, and place-based development. This high density urbanization had clear consequences; natural systems in both rural and urban areas have been altered and this has resulted in water, air and soil pollution.

One example: hazardous air quality plagues many mega-cities in China and

Vidigal site visit during summer 2016.

13

Rio 2100: Advanced Urban Design in the Era of Climate Change

15 Students working in studio on the PUC-Rio campus during the summer of 2016.

Leme Building on the PUC-Rio campus and the location of the Department of Architecture and Urbanism.

The third section of the book records a visit to Charlotte and our studios in July of 2017 by the noted Harvard-based architect and urban designer Felipe Correa. Professor Correa was invited to share his insights about Latin American architecture and urbanism and to provide feedback and commentary regarding our students’ research, observations, and proposed design strategies developed while in Rio. His visit took the form of a daylong workshop during which a morning session was dedicated to a review of student work followed by an afternoon conversation about urban design approaches both past and present. The book closes with a gallery of events from our urban design program’s three years in Rio de Janeiro.

The goal of this book is to illustrate our struggles to integrate pedagogical interests with pressing global practice needs and to instill in future practitioners a sense that the time for action is now. The work illustrated

within these pages represents a sample of the efforts of our students who worked alongside students from the Pontifical Catholic University at Rio de Janeiro’s Urbanism Laboratory within the Graduate Program of Architecture of the Architecture and Urbanism Department. Together, students explored the existing fabrics of the city (built and ecological) in order to identify unique characteristics that could be used to drive design integration later; we invited them to visit the city’s historic center/port area, its “informal” hillside neighborhoods, and its “formally” planned coastal areas. Given the coastal location of Zona Oeste, hydrological patterns and latent Brazilian Modernism played important roles in student investigations as well.

The value of this exercise lies in the fact that Rio is a coastal city. And, coastal cities are growing across the globe despite their vulnerability to rising sea levels, storm surges, and increasingly significant water related issues. Cities such as Rio encompass a range of urban growth dynamics and climatic conditions in which high-density sustainable built form and public infrastructure (public space, affordable housing, water management) must become integrated components sustainable urban design. In these ways, Brazil offered our program a unique opportunity to study new patterns of growth, innovative sustainable development policy initiatives, and the future of urbanization in the western hemisphere.

In order to explore these dynamics, each year’s students worked on that of previous programs in Rio de Janeiro (for example, our work in the summer of 2017 built upon the work produced in the summers of 2015 and 2016). This allowed us, as faculty, to continue to develop strategies, research questions, and pedagogical models while adding depth to relevant global case studies and international models. Each summer, we began our work in Charlotte by documenting critical case studies in preparation for our departure to Rio. For example, we took the city of Almere in the Netherlands as a point of reference in order to quickly understand how the design of infrastructure has enabled that city to content with a century of water related challenges.

Students also explored case studies (precedents), critical assessments of past design proposals, and in-depth reviews of documents such as the RIBA’s

“Facing Up to Rising Sea Levels.”

This initial 1 week period of study in Charlotte was followed by a 4 week residency in Rio de Janeiro. Our travel to Rio enabled us to examine Zona Oeste first hand and to gain an intimate understanding of the forces impacting urbanization in this part of the city. We focused upon three things while in Rio: the DNA of Rio’s unique neighborhoods, the city’s relationship to water, and the city’s relationship to the need for affordable housing that shapes much of its current expansion into sensitive ecological areas. Each year’s itineraries offered students an integrated inter-disciplinary (Urban Design / Latin American & Global Studies; North American & South American design workshop) educational experience augmented through visits with local institutions and organizations such as Studio X, + D Studio, and AECOM as well as fieldtrips, site visits, and workshops.

This book, and its future edited companion, attempt to illustrate our explorations and to provide a set of “think-pieces” that may foster discussion among a wide range of constituents about the future of cities like Rio and how those cities might address changing environmental conditions.

17

The first section of this book illustrates this in more detail—suffice it to say here that Zona Oeste is a landscape that would be best left undeveloped.

It is important to note that climate change has already contributed to the growing frequency of torrential rainfall, which, in Latin America, is equal to an annual Hurricane Katrina in many parts of the region. As a coastal metropolis, Rio faces hurricane-like conditions with increasing regularity.

Water, in this sense, is a critical factor in 21st century metropolitan design— one that requires blurred distinctions between the ecological and the urban.

The complex growth dynamics that shape Rio heighten the need to reevaluate and to integrate urban design and environmental infrastructure.

This is followed by a photo essay created by the Brazil-based photographer and scholar, Javier Escudero. Through his camera’s lens, Dr. Escudero captures compelling images of Rio’s social and cultural landscapes—landscapes that are often divided between the wealth and poor, tourists and neighborhood residents, and between highly formalized and informal developments. Our students traveled through sites like these as a part of their investigations into the fabrics that make up Rio and the photo essay is intended to provide readers with a glimpse into the contrasting places that give the city much of its character.

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Major Urban Arterial

Public Transportation in Rio de Janeiro

Major Urban Arterial

Public Transportation in Rio de Janeiro

Roads vs. Airport Location in Rio Barra de Tijuca Bus Stations vs BRT Stations in Barra de Tijuca

Major Urban Arterials Light Rail Routes

Metro Routes

Tram Routes

BRT Routes

Train Routes

Bus Stations

BRT Stations

Major Urban Arterials

Roads vs. Airport and Ferry Location in Rio de Janeiro Light Rail Routes Transportation infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro and in Zona Oesta (Kendal Baier, 2016).

Metro Routes

Tram Routes

BRT Routes

Train Routes

Bus Stations

BRT Stations

Bus Stations Barra de Tijuca

Bus Stations vs. BRT Stations in Barra de Tijuca

Bus Stations Barra de Tijuca

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Bus Stations vs BRT Stations in Barra de Tijuca

Transportation o de Janeiro

23 Residential Density Map of the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area, Zona Oesta (Huck Broyles, 2017)

Barra da Tijuca Basin and Flood-prone Areas (Virginia Young and Yu Haan, 2017)

Centro Metropolitano

VARGEM GRANDE AND VARGEM PEQUENA RECREIO DOS BANDEIRANTES

27 Lucio Costa's regional framework can be seen in Barra's contemporary development patterns.

Drawing by May Khalife, Nitya Kolli, Suruchi Gupchu

29 Projected Sea Level Antios Riseest in Barra pre voluptae da Tijuca peliquam (Aline Nascimento, si ut ad ulpario.

Monica Nam Whitmire, ististio deXunxun volut ma Zhang, sinctotatem 2016; Base si officiu drawing reptatus Source; suntur Climate sandesed Central.org). qui res eate nihictis dem suntiuntio ditiunt.

II

Cidade Oceanica: Environment and Urbanisation in Rio de Janeiro Jose' Gamez and Jeffrey Nesbit

José Gámez and Jeffrey S. Nesbit In 2014, NASA released research projecting higher than previously predicted global sea level rise due to irreversible climate changes.ii By the year 2100, sea levels are expected to rise by 1 to 2 meters worldwide.

Climate change has already contributed to the growing frequency of torrential rainfall around the world. As Architect and educator Fernando Lara has illustrated, historic colonial models in the Latin American context have contributed to a situation in which tropical cities face regular flooding.

Europeans came to the colonial arena having experienced environments that often received less than 20 inches per year of rain.iii However, many regions in Latin American experience more than twice that amount annually, and the hardscape traditions of the colonial city were not well equipped for the increased presence of rainfall. As cities like Rio de Janeiro matured, by density, extension of impermeable surface, and development measures, issues surrounding water management have become increasingly important.

As a coastal metropolis, Rio is characterized by natural water systems requiring heterogeneous networks be woven into ecological and 21st century urban design processes. Urban flooding and mudslides continue to plague the city—thereby raising questions to be addressed regarding the relationships between environment and urbanization. This is compounded

by the difficulties of providing potable water to many sprawling fringe areas and the difficulties associated with providing sanitation networks and other necessary urban infrastructure and amenities that support urban expansion.

Yet, Rio continues to allow growth in far-flung areas that are often low-lying and ecologically sensitive. This situation has been exacerbated over recent decades by mega-event driven development coupled with inter-dependent informal urbanization. These forces characterize Zona Oeste, or Rio de Janeiro’s Western Zone, making it a compelling area for design investigation.

This paper reflects upon a three-year collaboration between UNC Charlotte’s Master of Urban Design program and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio’s Department of Architecture and Urbanism. Through a discussion of three summer workshops (2015, 2016, 2017), each four-weeks in length, this essay describes fundamental strengths and challenges of international collaborations, and particularly a design pedagogy attempting to integrate ecological strategies within historical and speculative future narratives. The teams of students (including both US and Brazilian students) faced considerable challenges within the setting of design workshops, which were held on PUC-Rio’s campus. Challenges stemming from historical, cultural, and modernist traditions critically bounded the studio in both productive and limiting ways. Students aimed to avoid the trap of modernism’s grand narratives; for example, instead of solely relying on the implantation of Euro-centric urban models, the students explored urban characteristics found within Rio’s local urban conditions both past and present. This close attention to the local provided a contrast to past movements focused upon the universal. However, global contexts were not

ignored as teams of students explored ways to face rising sea levels. Their work illustrates the challenges of implementing environmentally sensitive strategies that are intended to perform in future scenarios for both pedagogy and practice within and beyond Rio de Janeiro.

READING RIO Unlike many historical urban narratives and design methodologies, such as Modernist visions of idealized city organizations, the studio began by examining and tracing the existing conditions of Rio while also aiming to read the past in the present through maps and diagrams. Rio seems to have been nestled into an iconic landscape often with little regard for climatic conditions such as hydrology and rainfall. While the city was established, and has continued to grow, as an impervious urban surface, we attempted to become acquainted with the city, its inconsistencies and hybridizations, and its relationships to water. We attempted to introduce our urban design students to a foreign context without judgment; in other words, students were tasked to quickly explore the existing fabrics of the city in order to identify unique characteristics that may drive design integration at a later date. This speedy “deep dive” initially focused upon normative urban design research (block structures and typologies of building and open spaces, for example). Further dissections of density and programmatic complexities revealed other types of urban characteristics participating in the uniqueness of Rio. Ecological and hydrological patterns, cultural legacies of colonialism, and modernism, played key roles in the intellectual development of the

33

Cidade Oceanica: Environment and Urbanization in Rio de Janeiroi

This search ultimately led to specific guiding principles, techniques, and fundamental questions. Described as a form of urban DNA, the unique cellular qualities of Rio’s various constituent urban elements provided a way to view basic ecological and urban codes. The search for Rio’s DNA was intended to prevent students from importing urban ideas rooted in a prevailing “ism” (New Urbanism, Landscape Urbanism, Modernism, etc.). Instead, this exercise was intended to provide a useful palette for engagement with the city on its own terms and through its own language of form. Then, through edits and revisions, urban transformations could be introduced. We saw this as offering an ability to re-frame the city through its existing conditions so that Rio may more readily absorb contemporary patterns of development and their consequences. In this sense, we aimed to have students understand urban design within the specific context of cultural elasticity—cultural in the sense that Rio represents a unique set of social circumstances rooted in a city that has been built through manipulations (both formally and informally) a local ecology.

It is important to note that this approach does not posit a singular future or a singular continuation of what exists through the repetitive imprinting of urban patterns. Clearly, Rio’s current context (particularly with respect to water and urban growth) is not ideal; “natural” hydrological patterns have been altered radically over time and are difficult, if not impossible, to reestablish. Areas in which new growth occurs are often impacted by

extreme development pressures ranging from the influence of politicallycharged mega events such as the Summer Olympics, the World Cup, or the Pan American Games. These formal, large scale initiatives tended to occur in the lesser developed areas of the city—due in part to the sheer scale of investment—but they were followed by inter-dependent forms of informal urbanization. This pattern of contrast between the highly formalized global force alongside an equally impactful localized trend set the stage for questions that highlighted the fragile ecology of Zona Oeste and the city at large.

In this sense, the work developed in this multi-year set of studios builds upon methods that enable designers to understand what “is” in order to project what “is possible”. As the students diagnosed existing conditions in various parts of Rio, three specific driving factors of urbanization were identified: hydrology, housing, and transit. Rio de Janeiro’s development patterns have historically followed the water’s edge and typically involved a manipulation of both topography and coastline in order to introduce new geographies for transportation networks aimed at opening up new areas for housing and development. The city’s famous Zona Sul, which includes the beachside neighborhoods of Copacabana and Ipanema, was a result of large-scale intervention along hydrological space. In fact, the city has developed over time from the historic colonial center southward through expanded engineering efforts that involved the removal of hillsides and the creation of artificial coastlines throughout areas of Botafogo and Urca (the location of a small neighborhood at the foot of Sugar Loaf mountain). This southern march of development also marks different eras of formal housing

May Khalife, Nitya Kolli, Suruchi Gupchup; 2017

35

design interrogation and led to the identification of typological variations specific to the city of Rio de Janeiro.

37 Urban pattern and fabric/network studies from Leblon, Rio de Janeiro (Eric Zavarel, Raaga Bhandari, Evan Beaty; 2016)

DNA Samples of Gavea and Vidigal neighborhoods, Rio de Janeiro (May Khalife, Nitya Kolli, Suruchi Gupchup; 2017)

39 DNA samples of a typical Zona Sul beachfront neighborhood (Jess Yester, 2017)

DNA sample of an iconic or historic site in Zona Sul neighborhood (Jess Yester, 2017)

Mixed-Use Mid-Rise Apartment:

office, retail on the bottom, cantilevered apartments family gatherings, shopping, work, dining at restaurant

Mixed-Use High-Rise Apartment: office, retail on the bottom, elevated apartments swimming, gardening, family gatherings, tennis, pingpong, shopping, work, dining at restaurant

SPECULATIVE

SPECULATIVE

SPECULATIVE

SPECULATIVE

LEGACY

LEGACY

LEGACY

LEGACY

Shopping Mall:

linear volume with courtyard shopping, dinning, bar, table games, date, social

Office:

single volume work, social,

University Building:

Mid-Rise Hybrid:

courtyard, first floor setback, multilevel roofs family gatherings, gardening , barbecue, playground Future: courtyards are connected roofs are accessible and multi-functional.

Typological and speculative studies of existing buildings in Rio de Janeiro. (Aline Nacimento, Monica Whitmire, Xunxun Zhang, 2016)

Linear High-Rise Hybrid:

balconies, elevated appartments with service on first floor, shopping, exercise, family gatherings, gardening , barbecue, playground, Future: floors become green with public space.

Waterfront Hybrid:

elevated building, balcony fishing, jogging, dog walking, Future: combining the elevated building form to create multi-level platforms for water-enjoyed space

High-Rise Hybrid Next to Main Axis Edge:

elevated building, first floor setback, access on the ground crossing the building, shopping, working, exercise, family gatherings, gardening , barbecue, playground Future: become an edge between landscape and urban form, vertical garden/zoo

41

elevated volume education, reading, working, dining

Zona Oeste: Environment and Urbanization Barra da Tijuca is a coastal area west of Rio’s famous Zonal Sul where the wealthy areas of Leblón, Ipanema and Copacabana can all be found. Barra da Tijuca lies within the larger Jacarepaquá Basin, a “double barrier systems” watershed bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, lagoons, marshes, and mountains.iv This kind of geographical area is particularly susceptible to climatic changes and sea level rise given its geological formation over time and its location along the coast.

Storms and heavy rainfall can cause strong tidal shifts and flooding, which contribute to canal blockages and lagoons overflowing natural edges onto adjacent lands. As sea levels rise as a result of rising global temperatures, Barra da Tijuca will likely become increasingly exposed to these kinds of climatic events.v Thus, urban development patterns in Barra da Tijuca amplify the need to re-evaluate and integrate infrastructure across multiple scales.

Our multi-year studios concentrated on Zona Oeste because it represents the current challenges facing the city. Although the area has remained under-developed, more recently rapid development has moved westward, formally encroaching on its land. Barra became

the primary site of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games; and, therefore, a decade prior to the games development efforts focused on and intensified investment in the area. Interestingly, Barra represents only 4.7% of the city’s total population and only 13% of the city’s overall geographic footprint but it accounts for approximately 30% of the city’s overall tax base. Rapid growth and luxury residential developments have fueled the local economy. The areas’ resulting affluence, perceived safety, and its proximity to the coast all contribute to the zone’s allure making it the fastest growing area in Rio. The allure is also tied to the area’s relative newness. The construction of the 1970s Lagoa-Barra Highway sparked development along the coastline characterized by private and gated high-rise communities, including luxury condominiums, pools, athletic courts, private groves, and private lakes.

These communities were specifically imagined as neighborhood-condo developments with each high rise residential tower serving as a private suburban neighborhood complete with active security personnel, gates, and fences. The result is a coastal area now resembling a vertical form of the North American suburban cul de sac.

Three unique urban circumstances exist within the greater region or zone of Barra da Tijuca: Vargem Pequena, Centro Metropolitano, and Recreio dos Bandeirantes. While quite different, they all share the fact water levels will rise, land is soft and often sinking, and a fragile ecosystem is threatened.

These specific conditions produce urban forms deriving from “struggles of economics against nature”—struggles shared by many global postmetropolitan regions.vi While envisioned as a Modernist oceanic utopia by Lucio Costa in the late 1960s, Barra da Tijuca fell prey to global market forces

and residential development patterns that essentially privatized and divided the entire zone into vertical gated communities connected through auto-oriented networks and interspersed with monumentally scaled nodes. This, of course, coincided with the military-government sponsorship and a legacy of nation-building movements in which urbanization was deployed (both in physical and social form) as a symbol of modernization and of a modern nation state. In order to promote growth, policies were put in place that enabled privatization of the Barra da Tijuca region and allowed a handful of development interests to dominate. In hindsight, this has resulted in development patterns that today resemble a series of what Lars Lerup has called “stims” (points of stimulation) floating within a field largely dominated by “dross”—or uninspired “economic residues of the metropolitan machine.” vii Barra da Tijuca, at the time of Costa’s planning efforts, was geographically remote and largely rural despite having been settled in the mid-1600s. In the cases of Vargem Grande and Vargem Pequena, which date to approximately 1667, the agrarian settlement patterns that continue to dominate were established by Benedictine monks. Their large landholdings persisted over time as private agribusinesses grew in later eras. A number of factors have worked to slow development since that time: unstable soils, large private agricultural land-holdings, and marshlands. However, by the 1960s, and as the country sought to modernize, Barra da Tijuca became a focus for national interests. With the introduction of the Lagoa-

Barra Highway, this became a more accessible area adjacent Rio de Janeiro’s wealthiest neighborhoods in Zona Sul. Zona Oeste was imagined as a new regional center for both the city and the state of Rio de Janeiro. Economic development and a new regional metropolitan center in Barra were seen as such important challenges that the country’s most prominent architect and planner, Lucio Costa, was commissioned to create a vision and plan for the area in 1969. Inspired by the same Modernist principals as those used in the design of Brasilia, Costa outlined development in Barra using separated landuses, monumental axial boulevards, and a system of open spaces intended to free the ground plane to public access and views to the ocean. In his words, the new regional center would become the world’s most beautiful “cidade oceanico”, or ocean-side city.viii The diagrammatic framework established by Costa’s pilot plan for the area introduced a new urban pattern unlike any other characteristics in the city at that time. The proposed morphology in the plan was so radically different from anything previously built in Rio de Janeiro that it has been described as a rupture in both the physical and social forms of city overall. For example, his plan excludes pedestrian scaled spaces and neighborhood destinations such as corner cafes or bars.ix Instead, the area was organized around two parallel primary axes, Avenida de las Americas and Avenida Sernambetida (now Avenida Lucio Costa), that framed coastal areas for urban growth.

These two axes were intersected by a perpendicular axis, Avenida Ayrton Senna, that stretched from the oceanfront to the base of the mountains, thereby forming one edge of the new regional central district known today as Centro Metropolitano. The figure-ground of Barra was similar to that

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construction from the late 1800s through the early to mid 1900s and coincides with the rise of the Brazilian nationalism, during which Rio served as the capital city.

45 Analysis of Lucio Costa's schematic plan of Barra da Tijuca (Nicole Avitabile, 2018)

Diagrams: Lucio Costa's schematic section of Barra da Tijuca (top, based on conceptual sketches) and student sectional strategy below illustrating current sea level and projected sea level rise. (redrawn by Nicole Avitabile, 2018)

47 Barra da Tijuca: View looking toward the west of Lagoa da Tijuca (right) and Lagoa de Jacarepagua' and the Olympic site beyond (Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barra_ Panorama.jpg).

The Olympic site under construction circa 2015 near Centro Metropolitano (image source: https://www.gettyimages.com/event/rio-2016-olympic-games-venues-construction-inprogress-539870753#/construction-continues-at-the-olympic-park-for-the-rio-2016-olympic-picture-id464334112).

While the morphology of the region is different from that of other iconic areas in Zona Sul such as Leblon, Ipanema or Copacabana, what Costa’s plan offered—in combination with architectural pilotibased typologies, was a new way of occupying the ground plane.

Particularly interesting was the fact that this schematic approach to the organization of this new expansion zone essentially framed the ground-plane as an open public space; the proposal formed an ‘open space parti’. Radically imaginative, Costa ultimately proposed a city whose public spaces were virtually extended from the hillsides to the beachfront by lifting all buildings off the ground and up onto piloti.

While the individual elements of this urban architectural typology (elevated urban housing combined with open ground plane) were not unique, the combination of the two in a geographic condition like that of Barra da Tijuca provided potential innovative opportunities, which fostered student design speculation during our three summers in Rio. Costa’s vision was of a green city dominated by natural landscapes. Vistas to both mountains and the coast, democratic access to a new, and extended, public realm opened the city up for social, political, and cultural revolution. It is crucial to keep his utopian goal of balancing the natural with the developed in mind; Costa’s vision involved an inter-woven pattern of landscape, infrastructure and architecture that, in many ways, is less like Corbusian “towers in

the field” than it is a precursor to environmentally driven urbanism that we see in the work of many 21st century design practices.

Centro Metropolitano While Costa had been commissioned in 1969 to design a master plan for the Barra de Tijuca, only fragments of his plan are visible on the site of Centro Metropolitano today. The few traces of Costa’s plan that do exist within this area provide evidence of his larger mega-block urban structure and a road network that connects to the larger region. Centro Metropolitano, which is located immediately northeast of the 2016 Summer Olympic site, is now emerging as a mixed-use private development spurred by the economic activity and investments of the Olympic games. However, mixed-use in this context translates to mixes of building uses within a development, rather than mixed programs within a single building (as might be more typically seen within North American contexts or other parts of Rio).

In many ways, Centro Metropolitano came to represent the most pressing development challenges facing Ozona Oeste and the city at large such as large scale infrastructural development, speculative development driven private investment and a need to address increasingly difficult challenges presented by water in its many forms. One of the prominent developers in the area engaged our second student group and actively entertained design ideas that proposed development patterns differently than convention might dictate. While his needs differed from our studios’ initial interests, this developer was struggling with two ideas that seemed in keeping with Costa’s vision for Barra da Tijuca, which drew us in: the struggle to create

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of Brasilia: one dominated by the isolated vertical towers spaced approximately one kilometer apart, which intentionally allowed large green spaces to flow freely between them.

Gated vertical communities in Barra da Tijuca (Photo by Jose' Gamez, 2015).

The two other sites that our studios explored over the threeyear studio sequence, Vargem Pequena and Grande and Recreio dos Bandeirantes, represented other unique challenges but each predate current development pressures. However, each of these sites face similar challenges relative to water: Vargem Pequena and Vargem Grande are both down slope along hillsides and, thus, face hydrological pressures posed by water moving from the hills to the ocean. Recreio dos Bandeirantes is located adjacent to a national coastal rainforest preserve and bounded by coastline on the southern edge. As the topography slopes, downward towards natural waterways and the ocean, these areas also face challenges from flooding, run-off, and associated sanitation needs. However, for the purposes of this paper, we focus upon Centro Metropolitano as it represents a largely undeveloped site, it provides a direct connection to current development forces, and it resonates with a global historic legacy (Modernism) and a local cultural history.

Unfortunately, the Centro Metropolitano itself is not suitable for conventional development. Due to a high-water table, the soft soils of the basin in which it sits, and the sensitive ecological systems that

it is a part of, standard construction and economic models are weakened.

Given the presence of water, both in the soil below and above ground (in the form of canals, lagoons and the ocean), it is easy to understand why larger site is unstable. This unstable ground has required contractors to raise the level of construction sites by 2 meters. Thought of as the solution, soils are imported and compacted to prevent future sinking. Once the new soil has been laid down, each construction site sits vacant for approximately two years so soils will fully settle before foundational construction can occur. The larger surrounding area to the south and west, much of which has been built upon, now resembles a series of gated vertical communities contrary to the open ground plane as imagined earlier by Costa.

Interestingly, Centro Metropolitano is controlled by four different major developers, each of whom owns approximately one quadrant of the overall site. The general goals of the overall development have been characterized by new high-end office and residential developments offered as a contrast to aging and congested areas of the historic city. However, the developer involved in Centro Metropolitano’s who engaged our studio in 2016 is actively seeking to challenge those conventional market-driven patterns as described previously. By seeking to find ways of breaking down the mega-block scale of his quadrant and by attempting to mix social housing models, the developer struggled to incorporate more pedestrian and environmentally sensitive forms of urbanism. Given this context, Centro Metropolitano represented the friction of contemporary development, which seemed to superficially follow Costa’s effort in plan (mega-block grid outlined by Costa), while many of the ingredients of urban form—specifically those associated with public

space—were rejected. Given Costa’s vision for this site to become a new centralized regional district, Centro Metropolitano in its contemporary incarnation represented an opportunity to reinvent architectural typologies, to integrate landscape, and to weave legacies of Brazilian Modernism into a hybrid form of flexible urban outcomes.

RESEARCH AS SPECULATION In order to initiate the studio pedagogy, research focused upon uncovering three specific topics that would ultimately lead to a series of design speculations. While studying micro urban conditions through DNA studies aimed at uncovering the elements of a local urban code, regional explorations were performed utilizing the lenses of hydrology, housing, and transportation. These larger regional network studies provided the context for understanding existing ecological constraints including the damaging impacts of development since mid-20th century to the present. These three thematic research modules guided the process of identifying both challenges found across Rio, and documenting outcomes of existing urban behavior. In other words, our students sought to identify urban consequences of the past and present by carefully tracking evidence of planning pressures within Rio’s regional geography, urban forms, and lines of infrastructure. In this sense, the aim was to begin with the existing DNA of the city itself and carefully edit in order to introduce new patterns and typologies that could be implemented in Barra da

Tijuca in ways that simultaneously remained consistent with local histories and potentially served as a transition into new forms of coastal urbanization (or into a 21st century version of a Cidade Oceanico).

• Hydrology: The geological conditions of Barra da Tijuca have been shaped by the region’s centuries old hydrological systems. Despite Lucio Costa’s vision of an ocean-side metropolitan center in which the landscape would figure prominently, a serious study of Barra’s geography, geology and hydrological networks was never conducted. One consequence has been largely unchecked growth that has ignored hydrology and natural water systems in an area marked by marshlands and lagoons. For the studio, hydrology became a primary lens through which to foreground the roles that large-scale natural systems must play. If this part of Rio de Janeiro is to grow into a more sustainable set of neighborhoods, such illumination must be met. One paradox, however, was that global climate change projections will impact this region in catastrophic ways: much of Barra da Tijuca will likely be underwater due to rising sea levels by the end of the century. This impending future bracketed all design studies; in many ways, the question of why this zone would be developed at all haunted the students. Best practices and global consciousness would suggest that Barra da Tijuca should be left un- or underdeveloped. However, market forces and political realities are such that the zone is being and will continue to be developed. That meant that the studio must play a role in illustrating how the area might grow in a slightly more productive way—but only for a limited time. Rather than attempt to engineer the region to survive 2 meters of sea level rise, students were encouraged to engage existing water systems in order to enable the area to

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a robust public realm through new neighborhood open spaces and to mix housing typologies (market rate and affordable) in an effort to break down social and class divisions that characterize so much of the urban fabric in Rio (walled boundaries between formal and informal neighborhoods, for example).

53 Typical auto-oriented development near Centro Metropolitano (photo by Jose' Gamez, 2017).

The largely agricultural areas of Vargem Grande and Pequena (left) and mangroves found through out the area and on the Centro Metropolitano site (right; photo by Jose' Gamez 2015 and 2016

55 Students visiting Centro Metropolitano during the summer of 2016 (photo by Jose' Gamez).

Centro Metropolitano with one of the axial roads envisioned by Lucio Costa under construction (photo by Jose' Gamez, 2016).

57 Dr. Lemos (left) laeding a site visit to Vargem Grande in the summer of 2015 (photo by Noel Sumrall).

Hydrological Layers in Barra da Tijuca (May Khalife, Nitya Kolli, 2017).

• Housing: As a result of regional hydrological studies, micro strategies for architectural typologies and localized public spaces emerged that were intended to address Rio’s current need for affordable and adequate housing while simultaneously providing much needed public space. Geographically constrained, Rio de Janeiro’s urban development has spread to virtually every available undeveloped area. Informal settlements cover hillsides that were previously viewed as too expensive, difficult or unsafe for conventional development. Years of economic recession have depleted the middle classes—many of whom have chosen to leave their apartments in areas like Zona Sul for less expensive areas in the city’s many favelas. Those apartments in more expensive areas then became sources of income as familial residences have been rented out in order to augment declining household budgets. In some ways, the declining middle class has now contributed to the growth of informal settlements, or favelas, which have been established over time. Through self-organized processes, the favela has been built out of socio-economic and political need. These low-scale, high density, urban forms are interwoven with Brazil’s art, culture, and urban behavior. In many ways, the favela, while not romanticized,

is a spatial expression of the cultural hybridity and innovation found in Brazil’s complex post-colonial history. Candidly, the students did not aim to “fix” the dilemmas that spawn favela neighborhoods. Instead, they sought to implement spatial opportunities for self-organizing systems that could populate and blend numerous scales of public space and architectural forms while attempting to provide additional options for urban living.

The combination of limited land for new development, declining economic environments and the explosion of informal neighborhoods presents the city with significant challenges: how and where to grow and how to integrate affordable housing within larger development patterns that are typically dominated by high end, luxury apartments. For the students, housing came to represent development generally—in this sense, the term housing encompassed forms of architectural and urban typologies that carried various economic elements: mixed-income housing, spaces for work and play, infrastructure such as cultural facilities, and new forms of public space in which water played central roles. Architectural typologies drawn from Brazilian Modernism exploited piloti while the garden city visions of midcentury modernism became multi-programmed infrastructural landforms.

In this sense, the cultural legacies of Brazilian Modernism—with their deep connection to notions of national identity and a utopian promise— influenced the students (both North American and Brazilian) in unexpected but understandable ways.

• Transportation: Transportation became the lens through which to view threads of movement that could weave together the proposed diverse

built and ecological networks in Barra da Tijuca with those that currently exist. The students did not limit transportation to roadways; both roadways and hydrological systems were viewed as regional networks that could combine the movement of both people, animal life and water. The two systems were viewed as tandem elements linking the coast to the hillsides, concentrations of development to agrarian productivity, and housing and development with natural and recreational spaces. For example, using this design strategy, students performed careful studies of “informal” agricultural spaces found in Rio often within easements, left-over open spaces, or other forms of space lacking clear ownership boundaries. This search provided clues and contextual relationships, patterns of form, and opportunities for the integration of open space, programmatic use and much needed utilities. A wide range of outcomes from this search included: existing canal networks that produced formal agricultural activity; informal (and illegal) agricultural fields integrated into power utility right of ways; and small-town networks of urban form all characterize this area. The diversity of productive and performative landscapes makes this region of the city fertile ground for potentially innovative agriculturally-based industries. These speculative forms of engagement promoted landscape as a productive tool for generating patterns and behaviors of urbanization that both addressed economic needs (agriculture and employment) and programmed spaces that could potentially incorporate water in productive ways. Rather than importing idealized notions of community gardens or vertical farming, for example, the agricultural operations found across Rio

and Zona Oeste served as a catalyst for integrative networked systems involving transportation, water, open space, and more environmentally sensitive hybrid urban forms.

By diagnosing and documenting hydrological, housing and transportation networks, frameworks for future ecologically-driven interventions could be explored. Using these thematic lenses to research Barra da Tijuca’s landscape in concert with a carefully developed set of urban DNA samples, students then speculated upon potential interventions. Their quest became one to reconcile the contrasts between the utopian visions of Brazilian Modernism and built reality of gated vertical suburbs or the contrasts between sensitive landscape networks and destructive development practices. Purposefully, students explored strategies and design frameworks rooted in combinatory, ecological and cultural modes of urbanization.xi REFLECTIONS While Centro Metropolitano has an historic legacy tied to icons of Brazilian Modernism, its relatively recent development (limited to the site’s southern edges) represents common denominator commercial construction. In the years between Costa’s proposal for Barra da Tijuca and the 1990s real estate boom—fueled by mega-event driven infrastructure improvements—little growth took place in or around this site (a noteworthy exception is both informal and formal low-income housing development). However, much of the site was undeveloped. As a result of the favela removal and relocation

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continue as an urban center until the year 2050.x Understanding hydrological systems, therefore, meant mapping the presence of water, planning for flooded areas, and proposing an expanded network of canals, open spaces and floodable areas that could sponsor new forms of public space and architectural typologies.

The geographic, economic and cultural conditions of Barra da Tijuca and Centro Metropolitano contribute to the poly-nucleated urban fabric of Zona Oeste overall. In fact, Barra da Tijuca represents a large ex-urban zone still isolated by geography and only loosely connected to the city by weak transportation networks. These disparate urban conditions can be found in microcosm in the favelas, artificial grounds, and hydrological features that are distributed across a landscape that includes lagoas, protected habitats, and concentrated pockets of urbanization. The combination of topography, hydrology, regional networks, and unpredictable market forces all contribute to a fragmented landscape that has resulted in pockets of highly privatized and isolated nodes. This failure to produce contiguous urban space and an apparent lack of hydrological management became a starting point for many student conversations regarding

the city’s future. By pairing the consequences of urban fragmentation with connective ecological and infrastructural strategies, the students sought a model of productive fragmentation. Highly concentrated developments, such as Centro Metropolitano, were imagined as concentrations of resilient development link through open space strategies involving regional hydrological networks, canals and floodable open spaces aimed at mitigating the initial stages of rising sea levels.

One danger of this approach was that it may inadvertently resist the questions raised by environmental change and contemporary patterns of failed urban infrastructure; in other words, by seeking to perpetuate development (albeit in differing ways), student proposals were unable to fundamentally fend against a warming climate. But, and most importantly, questions of urban consequences of growth in places like Barra da Tijuca remain valuable. Therefore, and despite their limitations, the student proposals did help illuminate challenges to conventional urban development and enable a wider range of meanings to enter into conversations of environment and urbanization.

Various techniques emerged over the three years that helped students gain a foothold in order to act and focus attention on the hybrid, and often varied, characteristics of local places that broaden understandings of authenticity and urbanity as well. For example, the high modern practice of placing buildings on pilotis, which can be found in both Europe and Latin America, presented evidence of two interpretations: a post-colonial translation of European Modernism (an authentic local interpretation), and an outcome

that produced vernacular variations informed by architectural forms and socio-spatial zones of influence. In this sense, hybridity is an authentic expression and it can be found in both physical and social space. Studies into local neighborhood DNA samples provided our students with a point of entry into a broader discussion. Students found themselves focused upon design strategies that could be sensitive to place but open-ended enough to allow transformation through future adaptive practices.

The DNA studies went beyond conventional precedent analysis and maintained a focus upon socio-spatial conditions. By documenting, analyzing, and cataloging samples taken throughout the city of Rio de Janeiro, students created a spatial vocabulary inherently about microurban conditions found in a range of unique local physical settings.

These DNA, then, represented a set of codes that illustrated social and spatial interactions in site-specific areas of the city. In the process, simple understandings of mixed use development, for example, were quickly challenged; social spaces in Rio (as they do throughout Latin America) represent a range of “mixed-up uses” that go beyond the simple organization of spatial programs that can be found in most conventional North American urban planning. Additionally, informality in both social and physical form presented new ways of understanding the inter-dependent relationships between people and places. These typologies represent varying degrees of socio-spatial behaviors—of people, of place-based occupation and transformation; and of physical form, hybrid structures and informal

patterns. The work of the students illustrates states of possibility, or rather speculations, of how Zona Oeste “could be”, not how it “will be”.

As a result of the complex urban networks and the equally complex challenges presented by Barra da Tijuca’s ecological contexts, design strategies emerged that enabled students to build upon local fabric. Students borrowed strategies from one theoretical camp to augment those found in another: pedestrian scaled increments were layered over mega-scaled urban blocks and then infused with ecologically driven forms of infrastructure. The simultaneous scales allowed for new public spaces, distributed resources through regional networks, and provided concentrations of dynamic housing typologies. Following general transit oriented development models in the west, the most intensely programmed districts were often located in areas near transportation hubs while large areas of each site were often dedicated to new forms of low-density but high performance spatial uses (innovative agricultural industries, landforms aimed to provide both recreational and ecological management spaces). Other strategies involved the use of complex landscape and ecological systems aimed at stitching together each of the three case study sites through regionally scaled three-dimensional land and water-form frameworks. Still other strategies emerged that attempted to address historic legacies through the use of transformed typologies that were rooted in cultural traditions, which aimed to root themselves in a sense of local identity while also extending those identities to include future transformations.

In a sense, the students took a combinatory approach to urban design

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policies of the previous military regime in the northern edges of Centro Metropolitano, public housing districts were established in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, the infamous Cidade de Dios borders the north-western edges of the Centro Metropolitano site.

This contrast between formalized relocation of previously informal settlements and the grand visions of Lucio Costa for a high density commercial and governmental district provided a spark for design considerations. The apparent complexity of these design movements held the promise of potential resolutions to the challenges of radically dense environments and expanded scales of development in each of their case study sites.

While the work was developed within a series of three-year urban design workshops/studios, it parallels what Dana Cuff has called a “fourth phase” of urban design curricular models marking a “major shift in the conception of cities, but with a relatively coherent architectural aesthetic and a professional agenda rooted in design practice’s larger political economy.”xiii This essay illustrates design research in Rio de Janeiro focused on integrating systems of ecology and landscape through design processes focused upon urbanization in the face of climate change. Driven by typological and morphological investigations, the work offers responses to specific topographic and climatic contexts that demonstrate new forms of urbanism. Illustrated through speculative programs ranging from the establishment of research facilities, affordable housing, and cultural centers, to agriculture, eco-tourism, and protected habitats—the pedagogical research integrates opportunities for the use of water systems and management as an urban design agenda.

Rather than defending against storm surge, landslides, and rising sea levels, we sought speculative models rooted in the DNA of Rio de Janeiro and embrace strategies for resilient coastal regions across the globe.

Endnotes: i.

This essay appears in The Plan Journal: Themed Issue (peer-reviewed)—Resilient Edges, Volume 2, Issue 2 (2018).

ii.

Hogarth, Peter. “Preliminary Analysis of Acceleration of Sea Level Rise the Through 20th Century using Extended Tide Gauge Data Sets.” In Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 119 (August 2014) 7645-7659.

iii.

Lara, Fernando. “One Katrina Every Year: The Challenge of Flooding in Tropical Cities.” in 98th ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings: Rebuilding (Washington D.C.: Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2010) 221-226. iv.

Dias ,Gilberto T. M. and Björn Kjerfve. “Barrier and Beach Ridge Systems of the Rio de Janeiro Coast” in Geology and Geomorphology of Holocene Coastal Barriers of Brazil. Edited by Sérgio R. Dillenburg and Patrick A. Hesp.

(Verlag: Springer, 2009) 242. v.

Muehe, Dieter. “Brazilian Coastal Vulnerability to Climate Change”, Pan-American Journal of Aquatic Sciences, 5 (2), 2010, 173-83. vi.

Lerup, Lars. “Stim & Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis.” Assemblage 25 (December 1994) 83-101. vii.

xi.

For example, students were asked to read Thom Mayne’s book Combinatory Urbanism: The Complex Behavior of Collective Form (Los Angeles: Stray Dog Café, 2011); students were also encouraged to examine the work of leading “landscape urbanists” such as Stan Allen and James Corner as well as innovative interdisciplinary design firms such as Susannah C. Drake’s DLANDstudio that integrate (among other things) ecological strategies into their work. xii.

McHarg, Ian L. Design With Nature (Garden City, NY: American Museum of Natural History Press, 1969). xiii.

Cuff, Dana. “Urban Design: The City as Project” in Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America. Edited by Joan Ockman and Rebecca Williamson (Washington D.C.: Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and MIT Press, 2012), 409.

Ibid, 93.

viii.

Costa, Lucio. “Plano-Piloto para a Urbanizacao da Baixada Compreendida Entre a Barra da Tijuca, o Pontal de Sernambetiba e Jacarepagua” in Arquitextos (Rio de Janeiro: Prefeitura da Cidade, 1969). ix.

Gomes dos Santos, Ana Cristina and Vicente del Rio. “A Outra Urbanidade: A Construcao da Cidade Pos-Moderna e o Caso da Barra da Tijuca” in Arcquitectura: Pesquisa y Projecto. Edited by Vicente del Rio (Rio de Janiero: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, 1998) 108. x.

“Facing up to Rising Sea Levels: Retreat? Defend? Attack?”. Building Futures. (The Royal Institute of British Architects, 2009). By borrowing from the RIBA’s studies in the UK, we sought design strategies drawn from and that often combined ideas of defense, attack and retreat.

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in an effort to develop a tool set appropriate to their sites (the local) and their professions (the global).xi The two-fold technique that the sampling represented provided a knowledge of cultural place, ecological and urban conditions with an eye towards an integrative approach to urban design interventions. Students used these DNA samples as a way of understanding and designing microurbanisms that could scale up and combine to address a macro set of metropolitan or ecological conditions. The ever-present wetlands and mangroves in the region could enable a healthier, safer environment. The blending of form along with the incorporation of wildlife, water-based agriculture, and protected wetlands fostered innovative forms of public spaces in the students’ work while remaining rooted in local character of place. Water represented one of the major challenges of the area both now and in the future, which were demonstrated by urban flooding, sinking soils, sensitive ecosystems of lagoons, marshes and tidal waterways in Barra.

However, water was also an opportunity for the students; impending climatic changes forced a renewed emphasis upon ecology and the need to design with nature.xii Water, therefore, became a basic ingredient for productively creating a new set of urban spaces. A vision of a naturally enhanced, porous, and locally fragmented yet regionally connected mode of urbanization operated through an ecological approach, across scales and time. These strategies focused on the impacts of climate change while acknowledging the obvious failures that development has wrought on fragile environmental systems.

Cidade D’agua, Eco-Community for Hydrologic Remedation

Research Spine (Aline De Melo Nascimento, Monica Whitmire, Zhang Xunxun)

Example Strategies: Centro Metropolitano Urban Development Project

As pointed out in the previous section, our students used Facing up to Rising Sea Levels as a precedent study in order to begin to address site conditions in Rio (see: https://www.ice.org. uk/getattachment/news-and-insight/policy/facing-up-to-risingsea-levels/Facing-Up-to-Rising-Sea-Levels-Document-Final.pdf. aspx).

While our work necessarily differed from the work of architects and engineers in the UK, several aspects of their work remained useful our own work. For example, development in Zona Oeste shows no sign of slowing despite the various issues the area currently faces (sinking soils, flooding, ecological protection areas). This led us to take to strategies as starting points for our own work: defend and attack. Our students translated these strategies in Rio to fit different needs. In Rio, "defend" came to mean the development of urban and architectural fabrics that could endure the initial stages of rising sea levels; attach came to mean the development of open public spaces that could strategically flood and ultimately create new forms of public and industrial spaces (spaces for recreation or for water-based agriculture, for example).

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The following pages highlight several different interpretations of these two strategies. Common themes across the three years of workshops included two prominent forms of urban-ecological integration: water became a focus in the form of flooded landscapes and canal systems. Each provided new visions for transportation, recreation and production. While there sites were explored over the course of our three years in Rio, these common themes and strategies proved useful in all cases.

Urban systems diagram and topographic model indicating flood-prone areas and the overall Barra da Tijuca basin ( May Khalife, Nitya Kolli, 2017)

Terra Que Desce: A new use for Costa's grid, Centro Metropolitano; note the elevated urban grid and flooded landscapes in the lower quadrants. (May Khalife, Nitya Kolli, 2017)

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Design process

Site analysis examples and speculative architectural responses to climate change impacts in Barra da Tijuca (May Khalife, Nitya Kolli, 2017)

Cidade D’agua,

(Kendal Baier, May Zhang, Stanford Barnes; 2016)

This would allow for new forms of urban development in which canals could form new circulation systems for both people and agricultural goods. New architectural typologies emerged that focused on canal-front living and commercial spaces as well as recreational infrastructures.

NEGOTIATING INFORMALITIES DNA

NEGOTIATING INFORMALITIES DNA

NEGOTIATING INFORMALITIES DNA

FAVELA PATTERNS, CIVIC SPACE + MANGROVES

DENSE URBAN AREA

LAYERED LANDSCAPES

BUSINESS APARTMENTS Business residential suits for short and long term stay residents.

RESIDENTIAL TOWER Residential tower meets low density civic spaces.

URBAN APARTMENTS Mixed income housing with a variety of unit sizes.

EXISTING FAVELA HOMES Using the existing favelas as inspiration for future growth while also allowing favelas to continue expanding on their own.

BARRA GOVERNMENT BUILDING The water being held by the meeting of levies and sloped landscape allows for overflow and preservation of existing mangroves.

FAVELA PLAZA

CULTURAL CIVIC BUILDING

Central gathering space located in the middle of the favela neighborhood.

BARRA PUBLIC LIBRARY Boardwalk park space connected to greenway which flows throughout the site.

Civic building wrapped in the surrounding landscape. Protected landscape within.

ROOFTOP TERRACE

Large civic space for classroom activities, gatherings, and community events within the favela neighborhood.

NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOL Small local school for favela children.

PRESERVED LANDSCAPE Preservation of natural marsh and cat tail landscape next to new building growth.

PRESERVED MANGROVES Preservation of natural green space along water edge and throughout favela neighborhood.

BUSINESS DISTRICT OFFICE BUILDING Business office building with open plaza spaces, and small retail shops within.

SMALL ROOFTOP SPACE Small rooftop space created atop a flooded favela home.

FREE FORM LANDSCAPES Pathways connecting landscape levels offer unique spaces for various activities.

SEA LEVEL WATER GROWTH Cut landscape to help protect favelas from sea levels rising while also acting as recreational space.

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As a short-term (2020-2050) strategy to mitigate the impacts of climate change, students explored ways to revitalize the area’s existing agricultural canal networks.

Speculative DNA Studies: Centro Metropolitano (Kendal Baier, May Zhang, Stanford Barnes; 2016)

NEGOTIATING INFORMALITIES DNA

PRESERVED LANDSCAPE, LEVEE + INFRASTRUCTURE

NEGOTIATING INFORMALITIES DNA

INVADING LANDSCAPES

FOREST PRESERVE Terraced landscape protected by levies helps preserve the existing environment and local species.

MANGROVE OVERFLOW The water being held by the meeting of levies and sloped landscape allows for overflow and preservation of existing mangroves.

RESIDENTIAL FLOATING TOWER The floodable area didn’t stop developers from building within the low grade plane.

Surrounding water offers a unique setting for residents while also providing unique security.

GREENWAY CONNECTION Boardwalk park space connected to greenway which flows throughout the site.

INFRASTRUCTURE CONNECTION Invasive infrastructure offers pedestrian friendly connections to floating buildings offshore while also providing public civic spaces above and within.

TERRACED CIVIC SPACE Outdoor classroom terracing

GARDEN SPACES Garden spaces protecting park space from large boulevards.

ROOFTOP GARDEN Garden rooftop in areas of higher density and less on grade civic space.

TREE LINED STREETS Tree lined streets providing shade and natural beauty along a main boulevard.

FLOODABLE AREA

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Lowest grade area on site protected by levies to allow for flooding.

Speculative DNA Studies: Centro Metropolitano (Kendal Baier, May Zhang, Stanford Barnes; 2016)

The Transect transformed to address rising sea levels in Barra da Tijuca (Ashley Bonawitz, 2015)

Urban Typology Type 2 - Educational Classes - Cultural Activities - Exercising Field - Exhibition

Urban Typology Type 3 - Exercising Field - Natural Stage - Theatre and Institutional

Recreational Landscape - Community Open Space - Sports Fields - Neighborhood Park - Farmers Market

Drainage Landscape - Research Landscape - Educational Landscape - About Drainage and Water Purification

Waterway Discharge Area - Final Filtration Zone - Recreation Fishing Area - Research Area - About Water Purification and Testing

Speculative DNA and Typology Studies: Centro Metropolitano (Kendal Baier, May Zhang, Stanford Barnes; 2016)

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Urban Typology Type 1 - Urban Farming - Affordable Housing - Community Activities

Public Space and Circulation Paths Diagram

Public Space and Circulation Paths Diagram

Outdoor Stage / Activities Platform

Elevated Park Community Gardens Retail Kiosks

Existing OOce Buildings

BRT Connector Entrance and egress to BRT station at lower level

Shops in the Park

Lightwell Space is cut out of the raised platform to provide Light and air for lower levels.

Park Extension Connection to the nature Preserve to the east as a Continual green park space.

BRT Connection Dedicated Bus Lanes to BRT Station OOce Building

Food Truck and Kiosk Plaza

Restaurants

Major Highway

BRT Station

Outdoor Stage /

Activities Platform A mixture of ooce, residential, and commercial space.

Smaller aaordable apartment units are included.

Elevated Park

Elevated Ramp Park

Community Gardens Retail Kiosks

Raised Park and Pedestrian Connector A series of parks and plazas which connect The Centro Metroplitano to the north with Existing business parks and greenways to the South

Parkway Bridge DNA

Existing OOce Buildings

Multi-Modal Mixed Use DNA

Speculative DNA Studies: Centro Metropolitano (Eric Zaverl; 2016) BRT Connection Dedicated Bus Lanes to BRT Station

Food Truck and Kiosk Plaza

Multi-Modal Station A mixture of ooce, residential, and commercial space.

Smaller aaordable apartment units are included.

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Multi-Modal Station

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Level 1 Intervention Opportunities

| I nte r ve nt i o n O ppo r t u ni t i e s Favela and Group Housing areas are by far the most densely populated areas within Vargem Pequena. Majority of these density clus-ters lie on or near canals are most commonly without access to modern utility infrastructure. The result of this relationship has rendered an un-productive and polluted water network.

In many instances informal communities sit adjacent to private, gated suburban developments. The stark socio-economic contrast is evident in the exclusionary infrastructural design; and serves as a reminder of the social stratification of Rio de Janeiro.

ADJACENT DENSITY OVERLAP 1 HIGHER DENSITY 2 MEDIUM DENSITY 3 LIGHTER DENSITY

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4 NO OVERLAP

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Level 2 Intervention Opportunities

UNDEVELOPED LAND

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ADJACENT Land available for development is scattered most concentrated residential clusters revealDENSITY OVERLAP 1 HIGHER amongst existing residential blocks. Areas undeveloped locations, most accessible toDENSITY MEDIUM DENSITY 2 with the highest concentrations of people the greatest number of people. were selected as the basis for interventions.

3 LIGHTER DENSITY The resulting diagram defines the interven4 NO OVERLAP With undeveloped land overlayed, 400 me- tion opportunities within the design frameter and 800 meter buffers placed around the work.

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Level 3 Intervention Opportunities

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Cidade Verde: Speculative models for agricultural urbanism in Vargem Pequena (Huck Broyles, Bria Prioleau, Jess Yester; 2017)

Cidade Verde: Speculative models for agricultural urbanism in Vargem Pequena (Huack Broyles, Bria Prioleau, Jess Yester; 2017)

83 Da Construcao a Ruinas: Speculative proposals for agricultural and new forms of development focused on the mid-to-medium term (2050) after which sea level rise will overtake the site (Aline Nacimento, Monica Whitmire, Xunxun, Zhang; 2016).

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Journey Into the Hills of Rio de Janeiro Javier Escudero, Ph.D.

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III

A Conversation with Felipe Correa

A Conversation with Felipe Correa

within the context of the rapidly changing geographies of South America.

Felipe Correa was invited to lead a workshop with UNC Charlotte’s Master of Urban Design students upon their return from a four-week collaboration with students in the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio’s Department of Architecture and Urbanism. Using sites and research themes established in the program’s first two summers in Rio (2015 and 2016), students in the summer of 2017 sought to add depth to previous design studies through focused investigations, interpretations, and re-visions of the Rio de Janeiro’s unique urban DNA. Our goal was to provide our students with an opportunity to work with noted expert in Latin American urbanism while also utilizing the insights gained through the workshop to help guide the final documentation of three years of studio investigations in Brazil. This section captures highlights of that workshop and our conversation with Professor Correa.

Professor Correa is the former director of Harvard’s graduate Urban Design degree program and he is currently the Chair of the Department of Architecture and the Vincent and Eleanor Shea Professor in the University of Virginia School of Architecture. He has expertise in Latin American urbanism and he is the co-founder and director of the Trans-continental Research Network South America Project (SAP), which promotes the role of design

July 28, 2017: UNC Charlotte Center City Campus, Master of Urban Design Studios

For example, the issue of technology is extremely important in the way that areas get organized and can range in scale and impact. If we think of New Orleans, Louisiana, the invention of pumping technologies enabled the construction of levees along the lakes and rivers that, then, allowed the area to become urbanized. The invention of the screw pump, which could pump out rain and help prevent flooding, allowed for land to be subdivided, sold and developed. What happened with Hurricane Katrina was that the levees, of course, failed and the pumps did not have the capacity to pump the amount of water that storm produced. So, over time, a lack of investment in infrastructure and an over-reliance on a particular technology contributed to the severity of Katrina’s impacts on the city. So, the issue of technology is very important.

There is an incredible book that came out a few years ago called the

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Felipe Correa: Part of our job as urban designers is to understand cities across a variety of scales and it is also important to understand the relationship between the scale at which you are analyzing or researching and the scale of potential interventions. These two don’t necessarily have to match. The scale of intervention might be, in many cases, smaller; it might be much more architectural in nature. But that might get informed by many other different scales in terms of a broader set of analyses and understandings. So, that would be the first distinction that I would make— that between the scale of research and analysis and of design intervention.

Felipe Correa: You’re basically right. It is an invention of 1920s and 1930s, but it proliferated in India in the 1950s and 1960s as a device to allow farmers to easily access water and to not rely on the state.

Basically, if you have a tube-well, then you just tap a hole, access water and every individual can have a farm. Of course, the moment that access to a tube-well was provided, agriculture and irrigation become completely decentralized and no agency could control how much of water was coming out of the ground. One interesting result was this set of urban-rural hybrid landscapes in which everything is both a village and an agricultural landscape. So, you would say well what does this have to do with urbanization? The tube-well basically is what has defined land use in large portions of Uttar Pradesh in northern India. The tube-well has contributed to the depletion of aquifers and to changes in the course of the Ganges River. Uttar Pradesh is a province that has the approximate dimension of England and the population of Brazil; it is the most densely populated agrarian region in the world. So, in that sense, I think the relationship between technology and models of urbanization becomes very important.

The reason why I am bringing up New Orleans and Uttar Pradesh here is because the tube-well is very popular in Latin America as well and issues of agricultural management in the periphery of Rio are likely driven by this technology as well since water is so easily accessible. If you have to go 100-150 meters below the surface to reach the water table, then it’s much more expensive; but if you only have to tap 5 meters down and you have water, then you easily irrigate. So, it will be interesting you emerging urban designers to understand what the technologies are that, over time, have allowed for agriculture to happen and how that has helped reshaped the territory in which you are working.

Jeffrey Nesbit: One interesting aspect about what you just brought up is the overlap of infrastructural and technological lines over one another. For example, canals in England, and in various places in Europe, were carved to increase the connectivity of goods and commerce; that infrastructural technology enabled goods to travel. Later, as new technologies came in, like railroads, they also followed those same lines of canal ways and water ways and these systems became layered. We can see this today often as utility lines cutting through the middle of a city in which we see two things happening simultaneously: in one instance we might see farmland being occupied by utility easement while the opposite is true where urban development is following agricultural lines.

Felipe Correa: But, that agriculture underneath the utility lines most likely illegal. That is a fascinating circumstance. The history behind those lines is that Brazil, as a country, never had much oil until now. Now they discovered

tons of oil. During the 1940s 1950s, not much oil, so where does a country that doesn’t have oil look at for a constant source of energy in the wake of industrialization? Hydro-electric power. Brazil in 1940s, 50s and 60s, made huge investments in hydro-electric energy. That hydro-electric energy had to be delivered to cities in a very steady manner to be able to guarantee investment for manufacturing. So, the two cities that actually received significant amounts of investment in terms of hydro-electrical power were Rio and Sao Paulo. So, for many years, those right of ways were not actually managed by the city. The right of way for electricity was managed by the military because it was basically a question of defense and of economic sustainability. In that sense, we should be analyzing are between many constituencies at very different scales ranging from the local to the federal.

It’s important not only to understand what and who these constituencies are but also what scales are represented and but who you (urban designers) are working for. Is this project for the local community? Is this project, because of its scale, an amenity at the metropolitan region that serves the entire city? Who’s the audience?

That doesn’t mean that you have to choose one. The project can address the local community and also be a metropolitan amenity simultaneously but those things have to be designed. In a project like yours in Barra da Tijuca, the stronger argument will be one that says “yes, the local community would benefit from this in this way.” I am working on a housing project for my professional practice in Brazil.

This client of mine, who is a developer, teamed up with someone to

buy a former military ammunition warehouse. This is a very large plot of land because the military could not house gun powder in just one warehouse.

Due to Brazil’s strict environmental laws, he can only develop 10% of the site; so, 10% is becoming affordable housing, which is the project we are doing, but the next project will be a large park for the overall region. This will be an amenity that the area currently doesn’t have. Interestingly, the park has to be revenue generating in some form in order to pay for maintenance and upkeep. An important thing is about these projects is that they do not end when they are built. These are projects of scale that require strategies for management over time. So, what is public, what is private, what actually gets given out to the private sectors as concessions to be able to generate revenue, what is the tax that they pay and how does that tax get reinvested in the site—these are the kinds of questions that allow you to define form in the context of your project.

Huck Boyle (student): The division of public and private uses and ownership patterns begin to inform the form?

Jose’ Gamez: The idea is that you have private concessions within a public field and this division between the public and private fosters a mutually beneficial relationship in a setting (Brazil) that has limited financial resources.

This could be thought of as a form of public private partnership. But, I want to circle back to the New Orleans conversation for a minute; development along the river resulted in a set of lines that organized things in one direction and differing uses flowed in another direction. These lines would essentially be constituent elements of a framework, having different roles to play, in

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“Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River,” which is an environmental history of Ganges River but a large percentage of the book is dedicated to the “tube well”—to a particular small scale technology that impacted a very large region.

Jess Yester (student): My understanding of a tube-well is that it is well that reaches down to the water table.

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Felipe Correa: Yes, in terms of the instrumentality they (lines) actually have in the city, if we go back to the New Orleans diagram, they were a series of lines with precise definitions. Some of them become canals and canals drain water. Some of them become avenues and create a very clear hierarchy between avenues and streets. If it was a line that divided two plantations, it actually became a major avenue; if they were new lines that inscribed a grid, then they became streets. In each case, there is a difference in scale and dimension between an avenue and a street—between differing lines. So, in that sense, lines begin to shape a particular sectional cut in space. My advice would be to construct the section of the lines that brings together many things--things brought together to make something greater than the sum of its parts. This would be a new approach towards infrastructure. If we look at the way that infrastructure is being conceived today, it's much more about a composite cell that resolves many things simultaneously: mobility, open space, hydrology, and property ownership. I think, if you can bring all of these together into a series of composite sections you have the right building block to begin to build an argument for new linear elements that are providing something to the city.

Ginny Young (student): I think we need to be able to present a type of framework that does not end up being sort of master planning and

imposed on the site.

Felipe Correa: Why are we so against the master plan? I think we are confusing a few concepts. A master plan is a legal document. When you deliver a master plan, you're delivering a legal document in which a series of constituencies have agreed on a plan of action. If you are proposing something that is going to be implemented and taken into action through different constituencies primarily, public and private, the private sector and municipality, it will have to happen in the form of a master plan. So, as a legal document, the master plan can take many different forms. I don't disagree with you—you are against fixed forms of banal masses and uses and I agree with that. But, I think rather than bash the term, it is better to redefine it and to update it. The word "urban designer" has also received a lot of bashing but if we actually update what we do as a discipline, then we can move forward.

Jeffrey Nesbit: So how do you respond to that?

Felipe Correa: I think it has to do with providing formal frameworks, in my opinion, that define specific morphologies without defining the specificities of the architecture.

May Kalife (student): Isn't it what New Urbanists' argue?

Felipe Correa: No, that's the opposite. Let me give you an example with two projects that I think are very useful. The form-based code was not invented

by New Urbanism but it has been revived by the New Urbanism. By the way,

New Urbanism is something that is heavily criticized as a uniform thing but there is a lot of diversity within the movement. We might agree or disagree with what some New Urbanists do but, with all due respect, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater Zybreck know what they are talking about. Not many people know the history of the American city as well as they do. In 100 years, they are going to be much more prominent in history books than many other figures. That does not mean that everything that they are doing is in my opinion correct.

For me, New Urbanism is one of the many different approaches to city design available to us but I think there is an important distinction to be made there. For example, if you look at Seaside, which is one of the most canonical New Urbanist projects, you can decode it by reading the code in the built the image of the project. It is virtually one to one. However, If you take a project like Borneo Sporenburg done by West 8 in the Amsterdam Docklands in the late 90s and early 2000s, you will see that it also has a code—it has a set of rules.

There is a set of rules for each block but that defines the general morphology but it does not define the specific architecture. Different architects can give it different identities and can interpret those rules in different ways. So, you might have three blocks that share the same parameters but the actual form is different. And in that way, you construct a larger language of diversity within the city. There is a difference between a set of rules that give you morphologies that can then accommodate a multiplicity of architectural identities versus the kind of New Urbanist code that only gives you one image.

Brai Prioleau (student): What is one example of those morphologies?

Felipe Correa: A project needs to have a FAR of 6, it needs to have an open space ratio of 30 percent and it needs to cover at least 50 percent of block coverage. These are a set of rules but these are not form-based. I can give each of you a block, and with these same set of rules, we will end up with three blocks that share the same morphology but have three very different outcomes. In one case, you might do a full perimeter block; one could also do two courtyards or a perimeter block with contours in the interior. The architectural interpretation is open; block A, block B, and block C, all have a FAR of 6, they all have at least 30% open space, and they all at least cover 50% of the ground. This is an urban design technique that can become much more inventive when we do not specify what the architecture is. As an architect, I care about architectural form but not in terms of the urban plan; I don’t care about defining the architecture at that scale. I care about defining the morphology of this in relationship to that. How high is this, what happens here, is this mixed-use, what is the level of fenestration in these buildings, what is the level of engagement between building and street.

Jose’ Gamez: The point you are making about morphology and about rules and the diversity that morphology can have made me want to know how architecture occupies the block? In other words, the massive blocks of Barra da Tijuca need to be subdued. There’s a scale and density of occupation at the urban scale that you’re touching on that form the relationships that set up how buildings sit in that urban fabric.

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this case, it's a different spatial organization as well. Those early lines were essentially a form of agricultural urbanism.

Felipe Correa: Issues of safety and issues of access are among those specific things. We see this conflict of scales in Lucio Costa’s work in Barra and in Brasilia. The moment everything was placed upon piloti, a clear ground plane was created that became extremely ambiguous. Who owns the ground? If you don’t know who owns it, you don't know who maintains it. This goes back to the idea of a long term management strategies. In Brasilia, it (the open ground plane) worked because that is a city built to house administrative bureaucracies. If we all belong to the same bureaucratic class, then it’s much easier to agree on how those grounds are going to be administered; but, if you’re bringing in many different socioeconomic classes, different social groups into a much more diverse city, then it is much more difficult to agree on what those grounds are going to be.

An interesting project, for example, would be to say: okay, on the one hand, Lucio Costa’s universal clearing of the ground didn't work; on the other hand, the repetition of gated communities we see today, also doesn't work because it creates what Lucio Costa was trying to prevent, which was the privatization of the waterfront and the privatization of open space. How can we begin to think of

a new block typology that can mediate those two things? That, for me, is a fascinating project.

Jeffery Nesbit: So, it’s about bringing about a block typology that might be conducive to other alternative uses that have additional economic viability to them.

Felipe Correa: Yes. What I’m saying is that we are searching for a block in which access and direction is completely open. You could argue, well that didn't work but what happens if we have two towers for the sake of discussion here—I mean the building should also have a different shape, but we create a diagonal here and this might have a sectional difference. This might be a little bit higher. This might be a private garden that’s part of that building. This on the ground, on the piloti, might be public but might have a glass casing and here I might have restaurants and activities. Therefore, this street becomes much more commercial, this one back here becomes much more residential and then here maybe instead of replicating the same thing I actually do a residential vs residential, so this street is purely residential but it has a very conventional street edge. This one is more commercial and it has these kind of open spaces. This begins to, in many ways, create hotspots.

Peter Wong (Graduate Program Director, School of Architecture, UNC Charlotte): Coming back to the space underneath the piloti, the democratic space, that was already an interpretation of the Corbusian model. Corbusier’s idea was that it was supposed to be for transportation, it was supposed to be for services, and that public life would happen above on some other

platform. I think that proves your example; in a sense, you’re asking students (urban designers) to know more about urban history as they make decisions to update a model that might have been in place but needed to adjust. I think Costa did that; I think that his vision was a radical interpretation of the Ville Radieuse.

Felipe Correa: It is an interpretation of Ville Radieuse and of the Plan Voisin. Le Corbusier was always ambiguous as to what should happen on the ground floor.

Jose’ Gamez: PUC’s Leme Building, where the architecture department is located, is exactly this kind of reinterpreted typology.

It is a building on piloti with a range of social densities, of degrees of publicness within a privatized space. It has hotspots of commercial programming—coffee shops, and places where you can be in public in group but essentially behave privately because of the terracing and built-in benches. David Walters and I would argue that in Latin America, piloti have worked while they didn't in Europe. In a sense, the success of PUC’s Leme building is in what Teddy Cruz would describe as the amount of social exchange that can happen in any one place.

Jeffrey Nesbit: Or having predetermined programmatic initiatives.

Maybe Corbusier knew he was being ambiguous for undefined socialization at that level, or as Peter was suggesting, that those places happened somewhere else so it’s no longer on that ground.

Felipe Correa: But, you see, it depends on the project. In Ville Radieuse, there are clear places for infrastructure. Urban life happens on top and the base is primarily for motorized mobility. But if you look at Plan Voisin carefully, Corbusier’s city for one million in Paris, the ground floor is intentionally blurred with trees. So there is no plan; the only plan is the one drawn by Colin Rowe, which suggests that if Le Corbusier would have actually drawn a figure ground of his own project, then he would have never proposed it. If you look at the structure of the Plan Voisin, you sill see that the relationship to nature is very different between the center, which is the business district, and the residential buildings along the edge. As always with Le Corbusier, depending on which drawing you look at you could make any possible argument you want.

Jeffrey Nesbit: This begins to get in to the poetic rhetoric about “lungs of the city”.

Felipe Correa: Also, I don’t think that the Plan Voisin was supposed to be built. Obviously, he knew it wasn't going to be built because it was a provocative project; it was not necessarily meant to be built in the way it was projected—like his proposal for Rio, the project was speculative not practical or descriptive. There is also an incredible history of the way Rio has been drawn. There are very few cities that are as iconographic as Rio. And, there is an incredible history of architects, including Le Corbusier, that have passed through the city, that have drawn it both in terms of plan, perspective, views, and impressions of the city. I think it would be interesting for the studio

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Jeffery Nesbit: I would look for an urbanization that can have influence on the parameters of morphology. In that regard, you can maintain a conversation about space, orientation, uses, and the range of densities as you move into these other more specific things.

and for student projects to look into this history a bit more and to consider Rio both in the abstract and in its past. What I mean by the abstract is that there are certain reductions that have happened through the history of cartography. Rio has been drawn repeatedly since the 1600s and 1700s up until today through may different hands and with many different intentions. Maps are never neutral. I think it would be useful to go through that history of drawings because maps have a certain level of reducibility that allows for certain things to be highlighted. I think that a lot of the urban form of the city can be revealed through those drawings. I'm saying these things for the next time you have to look at a city. Understanding the city in person is great but understanding how other people have already drawn it for you is very useful.

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Jeffrey Nesbit: Well, this conversation has gone better than we could have expected but we are running out of time. We would like to thank Professor Correa and our guests for joining us today. We look forward to seeing how your comments and insights inform the next phase of our students’ work.

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Editor Biographies

Jose L. S. Gamez is the Associate Director of the School of Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a founding member of the School’s Master of Urban Design program. His research explores cultural dimensions of architecture and urbanism and it has appeared in Places: A Forum of Environmental Design, The Journal of Urbanism, The Journal of Applied Geography as well as the books Vertical Urbanism, Writing Urbanism, Expanding Architecture, Charlotte, NC: The Global Rise of a New South City, and Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning, Policy and Redevelopment.

Zhongjie Lin is an Associate Professor of Architecture and

Urbanism and the Director of the Master of Urban Design Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is also a co-founder of Futurepolis, an award-winning international design practice. He is the author of Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement and co-editor of Vertical Urbanism among several other books. He has received several prestigious awards for his research projects including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, an Abe Fellowship, and two Graham Foundation grants.

Graduate School of Design and researcher in the Office for Urbanization. His research focuses upon the evolution of postindustrial landscapes through the lens of historical technology, political uncertainty, and environmental unpredictability. He is also the founding director of Haecceitas Studio, and Director of Seoul Studio, a design research program in South Korea. He has taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Texas Tech University, along with leading a number of design studios in China, Korea, and Spain.

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Jeffrey S. Nesbit is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s