touring the bush (11) : caracas, intro/outro

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touring the bush (10) : brasilia vs curtiba, now

the sun is out, sheep are trimming the lawns, as usual. they are watched by gardeners-turned-shepherds. instead of the constant jerky grumble and oily stink of mechanical mowers, you get the occasional bleat and the considerably gentler whiff of ruminant droppings. yes, mother nature’s little croppers are also excellent providers of fertilizer. when the time is right, the sheep are shorn to make blankets for the poor.

this is not a chapter in a precious moments my first good christian going green guide. this is brazil. yes, the same country you saw in all those movies with kids being shot in the head for stealing a candy or sold for organ adoption. but that’s rio, or sao paulo, this is curitiba.



ok, it sounds a little off. it probably is. yes, it is a little christian, this whole garden-as-a-little-piece-of-paradise-on-earth thing. yes, it is a tad populist, this spoonful-of-sugar planning. but somehow it’s working. 98% of the people who live here say they wouldn’t prefer living anywhere else.

besides, it’s not just sheep and lawns. there is a highly participative city-wide recycling program, and people who live up in hard-to-get-to favelas and bring down their trash to be collected get food or bus tokens for their contribution and effort through a “green exchange” program. social-service themed buses tour the city teaching clean water conservation or offering p.e. to poor kids. there is fifty square meters of green area per inhabitant, compared to the recommended twelve of international standards.



institutional innovations include the “lighthouses of knowledge” learning spots, a decentralized and easy-access network of city service branches known as “citizenship streets” and the open university for the environment. city-funded day care, tree-planting initiatives, conscious industrial regulations, recreational activities, auto-construction assistance, infrastructure conversion…all this is part of curitiba’s successful city-building.



brasília, on the other hand, despite its unesco world-heritage status and all its poured concrete greatness, remains an uncomfortable testimony to the contradictions of city planning solely in the service of (state) power. lonely planet sums it up like this: "though it probably looked good on paper and still looks good in photos, in the flesh it's another story." the city center is soulless, a precious collection of government buildings. the city's alternative to a pedestrian scale is walking long, dry and hot distances. it isn't rare when someone is run-over trying to cross a superhighway. an expensive metro system still remains unfinished. poor residents are located in faraway "satellite" towns, championing in higher-than-average sprawl-induced depression. infrastructural maintenance is poor and costly. people with moyens spend their weekends in sao paulo or rio.



the city is detached and limited. like a hollow idea. or as someone else puts it, "a photogenic myth".



next stop: caracas (it's gonna be bueno)

touring the bush (8) : brasilia vs curtiba, intro (utopia)

brasília is a project-turned city. in the early nineteenth century brazil started playing with the idea of an inland capital, in order to stretch development and political networks away from the coast (urban growth and economic activities were typically concentrated along the coastline, both the earlier capitals, salvador (1549-1759) and rio de janeiro (1760-1960), were city-ports). aside from these more or less practical justifications, moving the capital to the near-empty heart of the country followed a strong, abstract (nationalistic) reasoning. the shift would be symbolic: away from the colonial patterns of coastal urbanism (and european/colonial trade dependency) to a proto-nationalist imperial centrality. just like the rest of mid(XXth)-century latinoamerican modernisms, the actual quest begun earlier, within rotting ancien régime “transitional” structures of the late 1800s. old-school aristocratic values, “civic” control-of-the-masses, depictions of nation, and other ancien régime conceptions outlasted the social chaos at the turn of the century, and pervaded the “new” order of tropical modernisms, particularly different orbits of social-aestheticism (architecture and planning included).



stale utopian types where mixed with rationalist optimism, radical urban planning, social and economic upheavals, and a
dash of caudillismo (charismatic authoritarianism). in the case of brasilia, even though the project had been thought up sometime in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the site for the city was set by a 1922 “groundbreaking”, nothing really happened until the fifties, with brazil riding the continental post-ww2 boom, and the rise of kubitschek, "president bossa nova," the man of the "50 years in 5" growth scheme, the frantic and populist developmentalism that latinoamérica eventually got used to and later resented (with collosal debts and national bankruptcies falling across the region in the seventies and eighties).



juscelino kubitschek was elected president in l955, and one of his main campaign offerings was transfering the capital, "build brasília to rebuild brazil." the ordeal was nothing short of astounding. the project (i.e. city) design team was more than just a bunch of home-grown corb' groupies. costa, niemeyer and burle marx took the master's sudamericana musings and stuffed them with new meanings and understandings and stylings until they had come up with something truly original. corbusier's 1929 south american tour not only brought out this unexpected lightness and sensuality in his own work, but actually managed to breath the tropical modernists to life, full-blown. his "earthscrapers" and "seascrapers", his jots and wavy scribbles and sketches, the fascination with the landscape, and plain faith and enthusiasm in a bright architectural and urban future proved to theoretic and stylistic references, as well as points of departure.



lúcio costa landed in rio from europe in 1919, and noticed that "at first, there was only a landscape. a strangely beautiful landscape..." his own 1957 plan for brasília was a proposal for a another strangely beautiful landscape, the concrete, intentionally balanced landscape of brazilian modernism. brazil in the 50's was all newness: bossa nova, cinema novo, neoconcretismo... now it was on its way to a new architecture and a new city...



it took 50 thousand candangos (workers) and 41 months to finish and "inaugurate" the city on april 20, 1960. brasília was to be efficient and pleasant, but above all, a showcase for the novo estado novo (the old "new state" had been the authoritarian fascitoid rule of getúlio vargas, and a certain rationalist and controlled planning resonance from the vargas regime stuck on kubrischek's projects despite their progressive character). yes, everything was new, but everything was also old. the setbacks and contradictions of utopia would soon start to show, not due to perversion, but because there was a negative germ in the system from the beginning, because brasília was, after all, an inherited utopia, a piece in the game of state power and presumption.



1922 was also the year of the century exhibition, a world's fair showcase in rio de janeiro that coincided with brazil's 100 years of independence. the architecture of the fair celebrated and embodied ideals of beauty, order, public health, civic morals, productivity, and above all state nationalism and guidance. it was in the end, a celebration of power and the future promise of power extension. brasília, with all its conscience and idealism, somehow fell on the same weaknesses the discarded utopias of the past did, despite itself, on a gargantuan scale. like its rise, the fall of the city would be all too fast and resonant.



next : failed utopia, future utopia. the exceptions of curitiba.

touring the bush (7) : buenos aires, projects 3

5. mellow modernists : i don't get this latinoamerican fixation on old-school modernism. sometimes i think it might be a sort of rejection to the tropical modernisms of the 50s-60s authoritarian developmentalism (desarrollismo). the thing is, instead of rejecting the modernist part, contemporary architects are rejecting the tropical. houses outside of santiago, in guadalajara, in rio are leaving behind the ondulating, sinous curves or the bright pink walls for more standard, straight-lined, minimalist, boxy building types. even when this usually dissapoints, some of these recent projects aren't half bad, and some even try to work their way out of boring bourgeois. more than ennui, in a city that easily tends to barroque, contemporary modernist architecture in buenos aires acts as a pleasing sedative (click pics for details)









next stop : brasilia vs. curitiba, failed and future utopias

freaks

dolly, barnaby bradford

modernists are like
two-headed dogs biting their tails