Quarto de empregada II

When we revisit the two most celebrated multi-family buildings of the 1940s: Pedregulho and Guinle, it is sad to realize that while the working class solutions of Pedregulho were gradually abandoned, the more conservative features of the Guinle apartments were embraced by a middle class that also gradually abandoned the transformative intentions of modernism. The contemporary housing scenario is not only mediocre, it reinforces in spatial arrangements many of the inequalities that seemed natural 70 years ago but should have been long tackled.

The quarto de empregada have become since them a sad trademark of the Brazilian inequality imbedded into architecture. The idea that a woman will live the majority or a large part of her life in a 2x2m room inside some other family’s house sounds shocking but is considered normal by a large part of the Brazilian elite. Lately with labor becoming gradually (but slowly) more expansive, other solutions have substituted the quarto de empregada. Since the 1980s, middle class 3 bedroom apartments (the most common type) have been built with the so-called terceiro reversível. What it means is that the third bedroom in the apartment have two doors, one opening to the social quarters and another opening to the service/laundry area, allowing the families to use it as a bedroom, a home office or a servant room.

In any case, the more socially advanced proposal of Reidy’s Pedregulho have been long abandoned as a typology in itself. Instead, the working poor are left to build their own housing, be it in the illegal favelas or in the extensive peripheries of the cities where conditions are often worse than in the slums despite legal ownership of the land. Since redemocratization in the mid 80s, local governments have struggled to provide those same services of day care, schools and health clinics but they always come many years after an area is occupied, making them costly due to scarcity of space and not so efficient due to a process of exclusion already in place.

Meanwhile, the middle class got used to paying very little for house services and the same forces that take teenage boys and girls out of middle school to help support their families condemn then to low paid jobs for life.

The elevador de serviço, however, has not changed much physically but yet symbolically. Once viewed as a natural separation between patrons and servants it has been contested in the last two decades since re-democratization as a striking symbol of racial and class boundary. There have been innumerable cased in which a guest has been directed to the service elevator based on his/her skin color or overall appearance. The most famous case involved the mother of soccer world star Ronaldo who sued his condominium for being pointed to the “other” elevator.

However, strong habits die hard and most middle class apartments are still built with two doors to the very same elevator hallway: one finished in shiny wood opening to the living room and another painted in dull gray or beige opening to the kitchen. When challenged about why they need two doors side by side people give all kinds of excuses but refuse to acknowledge that they are signs of persisting prejudices.

Quarto de empregada I

As a typology that was born out of the early 20thy century avant-garde, the apartment has a lot to say about how Modern Architecture envisioned the future. For if the Bauhaus was trying to optimize the kitchen in order to minimize the burden of housework on their wives, the soviets were trying to abolish housework all together with communal kitchens and day-care centers in each apartment block. Another example worth mentioning is the fact that when organizing the first exhibition of Modern Architecture in the US (MoMA, 1932), Phillip Johnson and Alfred Barr explicitly left out buildings which advanced communal living for they would not be well regarded by the “American families”.

In Brazil it was not so different. Lucio Costa designed workers housing in 1929 (Gamboa complex) with minimal space (and minimal cost) as a priority but with few exceptions the buildings for the lower classes were too few for the looming housing crisis.

One of the notable exceptions is the Pedregulho Complex designed by Affonso Eduardo Reidy for the city of Rio de Janeiro in 1946. When completed in the late 50s, Pedregulho won many awards and was published in all major architectural magazines of the world. The spatial solution was a long slab of apartments meandering around a curvy hill, 4 stories above and 2 other stories below an open piloti on street level. The complex also included an elementary school, gymnasium, swimming pool, daycare and a health center. The apartments organized along a long corridor were based on the idea of maximum integration and flexibility the spaces open and connected as much as possible. The floor area was between 60 and 120 sqm and the apartments had 1 or two bedrooms, a small kitchen and one bathroom. This typology became the norm for affordable minimal units such as the JK building in Belo Horizonte or the Copam building in Sao Paulo (although without the support service spaces of a daycare of a health center)..

Meanwhile, another typology was being developed and Lucio Costa seems to be again the pioneer behind it. In the late 40s he designed a group of 6 buildings in the Guinle estate in Rio, from which 3 were constructed.

The Guinle Apartments were not targeted for the working class market but rather for a new urban upper-middle class. In each floor there would be 4 apartments only (two single-stories, two duplexes) and the floor area varied between 170 to 220 sqm. Avoiding the long access corridor gave each apartment the possibility of having two external facades or two varandas as Costa himself proudly pointed out in reference to the traditional Brazilian house. What is interesting for us at this point is precisely the persistence of such traditional ways of living into the new apartment typology. The two varandas immediately became differentiated: one used as a social space and connected to the living rooms, the other as service space connected to the kitchen and service quarters.

Yes, what started as a luxury in the 1940s: bedrooms for servants in every unit (the Guinle apartments had two of them) have survived to the present day. A small room of about 1.7 x 2 m, barely able to fit a single bed and with a window opening to another room, usually the laundry.

Also present in the Guinle Apartments is the back-to-back set of elevators, one facing the social hallway and the other facing a “service” corridor. Under the idea that one would be used by patrons and guests and the other by services of any kind, the elevador de serviço has also survived the last 6 decades to the present day.

Architecture is most visible when it fails

As much as we like to believe that architecture is an important component of our culture or a mirror of our condition as a society, most of the time, our built environment fades into the background and becomes just an envelope for our activities. All it takes is a disruption of the energy flow that results in a blackout, a terrorist attack that brings down buildings or a category five hurricane that leaves thousands homeless and suddenly, we are confronted with architecture. It appears at its most visible when it is most threatened. Time is decompressed compelling us to confront the full weight and materiality of the built environment.
Last week I had a chance to drive around some of the most damaged areas of New Orleans with my good friend Rochelle Martin who is the co-author of the previous paragraph, part of a paper we presented at the Symposium for 21st Century Architecture at Louisiana State. What we saw was devastating. Eighteen month after the levees broke, the city is half empty and in some area FEMA trailers are a sign of hope, an indicator of people coming back. Other areas there are not even trailers, just abandoned houses with bushes growing on roofs and debris piled up on from yards. When the built environment failed in New Orleans it exposed an ugly side of contemporary society. I should be accoustumed with urban violence in my native Brazil but nothing could prepare me to the real violence of a destroyed neighborhood. "If you enter I will shoot" was written on a garage door, crying out for the riped social fabric.

When architecture does become visible because an entire neighborhood was flooded by a failing levee or filled with debris from a suicide terrorist attack, what does it say? We need to ask what is the image articulated by architecture once it is made visible in the aftermath of those tragic events?

At this point our reflections become rather grim. Architects spend time complaining that globalization, consumerism, and suburbanization have made architecture invisible if not irrelevant, what do we have to show when all eyes, for a moment, turn to us as architects? Presently, we do not have any articulated response on how to build better for the 21^st century. We have only questions. What should constitute the city of the 21^st century? How are social issues such as diversity and integration to be addressed? How can architects respond to global migration?

It seems to me it is not only a problem of finding a good solution that balances all the different priorities that guide the questions above. But rather, that we have lost faith that such solution can ever exist. We have lost faith in solving the problem of properly housing our 6.5 billion companions.
For a moment, I wish we could set aside our competitiveness and our emphasis on productivity and ask ourselves if all human beings do not deserve to be feed, cared and most importantly for us, sheltered.