space where and for whom?

continuing the series of posts comparing apartments from Brazil and South Korea , I write today about the areas found in our sample of 20 apartments from each country. As already suggested by the questionnaires and is now confirmed by the areas measurements, Brazilians are investing more space in the privative areas in detriment of the conviviality (see graph above).

the fact that service spaces (kitchen, laundry etc) are proportionally larger in Brazil is explained by the fact that a significant part of the housework - clean, wash, cook and to iron - are made in the apartment by a servant.

the fact that circulations are proportionally larger in Korea is a reflection of the space structure that generally places two bedrooms on one side, living space in the middle and the master bedroom on the other side, doubling the area of the hallways.

but the fact that bedrooms are proportionally larger in Brazil was quite a surprise, as well as the result from the questionnaires that Brazilians are spending more time in their bedrooms then the Koreans.

in August we will be tabulating the data from Bombay and in September the ones from Moscow and I can’t wait to see the comparative results.

the other side of the Atlantic

I often find myself complaining that Europeans and North Americans know nothing about Brazilian architecture.

but how many African architects we know?

it is worth reading what Sean Jacobs wrote about David Adjaye.

Brazil is spelled with an A

This blog today leaves architecture on hold to talk about other important things like football.
I agree that Dunga is not a genius of futebol-arte (artsy soccer) but neither were Scolari, Zagalo and Parreira, nor even Vicente Feola who, in 1958, only launched Pela after much insistence of other players.
I also agree that Brazil in 82 was fantastic, as well as Holland in 74 and the Hungary in 54. They should have won, but did not.

But today I write to acknowledge a team that arrived in Venezuela without many stars that claimed they needed to “rest”, started with a loss to Mexico and ended up massacring the ever-favorite Argentina in the end.

As the Argentinean La Nacion wrote today, “Brazil might be spelled with a B, but is never a B team. Two consecutive Copa America finals should be enough to certify that”.

So be it, independent of Dunga, forever.

flooded by children's energy

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.

fort greene

In the early 60s, Jane Jacobs induced a revolution in urban theory celebrating the diversity and vitality of Greenwich Village in Manhattan where she lived. Born almost one decade after the publication of her classic book and having lived 25 years in Brazil, I could have never seen the Village that Jacobs described. Instead, what I see now is a nice neighborhood but extremely gentrified, its diversity gone a long time ago and now reduced to variation on fashion statements.
However, the process of renewal and consequent gentrification is doing well, thanks. To live for 5 days in Fort Greene, Brooklyn was quite a learning experience. The area where only 7 years ago taxi drivers refused passengers and some streets were off-limits even for residents, is now under accelerated change. New restaurants and wine-bars are opened each month, coexisting with small Korean markets Puerto Rican pizzas. In the streets, young professional with small children searching for an alternative more spacious and cheaper that Manhattan shares the sidewalks with a working class folks living there for half a century. But with every remodeled brownstone a few more working class family moves out and a few more young professionals move in. For the time being the result is what we call city living: a multi-use, mixed income, multi generational, international neighborhood. Very much the same urbanity that we architects learned to love after Jane Jacobs opened our eyes in 1962 with Life and Death of the Great American Cities. It is a pity that likewise SoHo, Village and Park Slope it will eventually become so unaffordable as to exclude diversity.

We will miss the Fort Greene of 2007.

90% good intentions, 10% results

an exhibition at the Copper-Hewitt Design Museum attracted me by its title: Design for the Other 90%.
What should be a celebration of interesting ideas to be used for the 90% of the world population that normally does not consume "design", ended up showing a accumulation of objects that do not make sense together, in some cases not even individually. Like a ceramic filter to solve the problem of the water contamination in the third world.... dãaaa, nobody told them it is available in any grocery store in Brazil. Or worse, a shelter for "day laborers" whom already gather in shaded semi-public spaces such as a gas station and, unprotected by an archaic legislation often need to move their "point" every week. So what is the contribution of a shelter? But nor everything was non-sense in the exhibition, two objects make it worth the ticket, coincidentally both dealing with water. One is a portable filter, a kind of straw that filters as you drink. The other is my favourite, a 15 gallon plastic that can be pulled or rolled (see photo above), alleviating millions of necks that carries water on top of their heads everyday in our unequal 21st century.
In summary, an exhibition to make New Yorkers to feel better imagining that design can save the world.