for a while I have been thinking about doing some work with children in Brazil to talk about architecture, the environment, urbanism and etecetera.
in a way I do believe that in order to change something in the world we live we have to teach the children about it and wait 20 years for the transformation to materialize.
but in response to those anxieties and other obsessions (such as the fact that we still do not build in the rainy tropics in a way that prevent leaks and infiltrations) I decided to put forward this project and I inaugurated a series of workshops with underprivileged children here in Brazil. The methodology could not be simpler: I take pictures of the street where the school is located, turn it into a line drawing and ask them to color it. The idea is to talk about the current landscape of concrete, asphalt and walls; asking them to imagine a street with vegetation, grass, flowers and etc...
as much as I was excited, I never imagined such fantastic results. The children, short of everything from material goods to a stable family, are not at all short of ideas. They demonstrated a very good knowledge about rain, flooding, ecology and even global warming. They embraced the idea of imagining how beautiful the city could be and produced the most amazing drawings as the one that illustrates this post.
and for myself, accustomed to the cold and often cynical analysis of graduate seminars, the workshop provided the radiant understanding that even under the most harsh present conditions lies the hope for a better future.
in a way I do believe that in order to change something in the world we live we have to teach the children about it and wait 20 years for the transformation to materialize.
but in response to those anxieties and other obsessions (such as the fact that we still do not build in the rainy tropics in a way that prevent leaks and infiltrations) I decided to put forward this project and I inaugurated a series of workshops with underprivileged children here in Brazil. The methodology could not be simpler: I take pictures of the street where the school is located, turn it into a line drawing and ask them to color it. The idea is to talk about the current landscape of concrete, asphalt and walls; asking them to imagine a street with vegetation, grass, flowers and etc...
as much as I was excited, I never imagined such fantastic results. The children, short of everything from material goods to a stable family, are not at all short of ideas. They demonstrated a very good knowledge about rain, flooding, ecology and even global warming. They embraced the idea of imagining how beautiful the city could be and produced the most amazing drawings as the one that illustrates this post.
and for myself, accustomed to the cold and often cynical analysis of graduate seminars, the workshop provided the radiant understanding that even under the most harsh present conditions lies the hope for a better future.
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