sharing walls

the last post

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:31:00 +0000

this blog has been consolidated

please find new posts (in english and portuguese)

at parede de meia

and update your bookmarks

many thanks,

Joaquim Guedes, 1932-2008

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 14:58:00 +0000

This blog is mourning the death of Brazilian architect Joaquim Guedes last Sunday in Sao Paulo.

Joaquim Guedes’ work is fundamental for understanding Brazilian architecture in the second half of the XXth century. Departing from the rationalism or brutalism of the so called Escola Paulista (São Paulo´s school) in the 1950s, Guedes developed a unique response to the challenges of Brazilian modern architecture, one that is much closer to the local demands and tectonic responses. Guedes understands “architectural design as the art of building”.
Born in 1932, the first of 15 siblings, Guedes graduated in 1954 from the University of São Paulo where he was influenced by Corbusier’s methods (but not its formal solutions) and Aalto’s materiality. Aalto would continue to be a strong reference in his works as well as other professors and pioneers of the Escola Paulista: Vilanova Artigas, Oswaldo Bratke and Eduardo Knesse de Mello. With them Guedes shares the belief in the tectonics as a base for a coherent architecture.

Having the opportunity to work on all scales, from objects to renovations to hospitals to entire cities, Guedes strikes us for his objectivity and rationality. Against anything superfluous, Guedes has always criticized Brazilian Modern Architecture of the 50s and 60s for its exaggerated formalism. For him, the most important is the submission to social programs, technology, economy and human activities, which come before expressionism and personal creation.
His work is also outstanding for the rigorous detailing (not a stronghold of Brazilian Modernism) , which pushes Guedes’ work to a higher level. Rigour and detailing has been a trademark of Guedes as a professor also. Teaching since 1958 at the School of Architecture of the University of São Paulo, Guedes has been a strong reference throughout the last 30 years. He also taught in Strasbourg (France) between 1970-1973. His incisive rational process can be summarized in his own words: “the more I doubt, inquire and criticize, the more I feel closer to knowledge and truth”.

Working with his wife Liliana from 1954 to 1978, Guedes architectural talent was manifested very early. He was only 24 years old when in 1956 and his entry for the Brasilia’s plan competition broke up with the Charter of Athens. Still debated and studied today, his proposal for Brasilia presents a city based on quotidian experiences able to grow and expand with the pace of Brazilian modernization and consequent urbanization.
In 1957 he designed the J. Guedes house (his father) in a difficult site (30 x 150 ft) for a large family. In this house the principles of his later work: rationality and tectonics, are already laid out in an incipient manner. Shortly after (1958) he designed the Cunha Lima house which made him famous with the prize at the VII São Paulo Bienal. At the Cunha Lima house the exposed reinforced concrete structure that was the trademark of the Paulista School is reinterpreted with emphasis on economy of means and maximization of spaces for social life. For Guedes, architecture has always been an rational and economic way to materialize spaces for the needs of society. In the Cunha Lima house, as would be common in all his buildings, the structural solution is very important and the economy of columns increase the flexibility of interior spaces.

The same would occur in his own house (Liliana and Joaquim Guedes house) where the fantastic slabs continue outside the plan and work as shading device. In this house the outstanding detailing is fully harmonized with the overall plan and the exposed reinforced concrete slabs are humanized by the wooden fenestration subordinated to the structure.

In the 1970s Guedes had the opportunity to design and build entire cities in the Brazilian backlands and the Amazon Jungle. The city of Carajás (1973) , Marabá (1973) and Barcarena (1980) in the amazonian state of Pará where designed as part of a major mining project in which Guedes worked from the beginning, influencing even the path of the 400 miles railway that connects it to the port. Distant …. From the major cities of Belém and … from Brasília, the design of those city plans included a complex logistics of transportation and labor, a task up to Guedes’ rationality.
In the design and construction of the city of Caraíba (1976) in Bahia’s backland, Guedes faced a completely different task. Caraíba is located in a very dry region of the Brazilian sertão (dry savana) where the challenge was to shade and protect from the hot winds. Guedes solved this problem with little shaded spaces instead of large plazas and a high respect to the traditional local way of building guided him towards very simple facades whose elegance adds a delicate touch to the hard life of the sertanejos.
Guedes focus on economy instead of aesthetic expressionism guided him to think of the Brazilian slums, for instance, not as a problem but a solution since it reveals the amazing capacity that people have to build and overcome daily problems.
Structure, economy, rationality and emphasis on quotidian life might be the major forces behind Guedes architecture but are not enough to explain the strength of his major works. To all those we need to add an extremely developed sensibility of a humanist.

We will miss Joaquim Guedes

inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:46:00 +0000

Ingrid Froelich collects stories about what inspires people and I was honored to be interviewed thanks to our project 365 special days but ended up talking about Studio Toró because it has been more active in me

mine and other interviews are here:

www.icecreamisnicecream.com

who would profit?

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 21:34:00 +0000

two weeks ago I presented the studio toró work at the Michigan Council for Social Sciences, and after going through all the problems created by urban flooding in south America and our non-profit work towards dissemination information to mitigate the problem, one teacher in the audience asked me a very important question :

which industry do you think would profit from a more sustainable built environment, in this case in particular, from a higher permeability that would create less flooding?

I immediately thought about the insurance industry which has been sponsoring many studies of the impact of global warming on climate change, but almost nobody in Brazil has home insurance.
in other words, how can we break the cycle of more problems means more construction which brings more problems and therefore more construction becomes necessary?

in about two weeks the mayor of Belo Horizonte will be visiting us in Ann Arbor and I hope to ask him directly about that.

where is the north-american architecture?

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 22:43:00 +0000

thanks to Letícia’s work at the UN, I had the chance to come to NYC a couple of times in the last few months.

and walking around Manhattan and Brooklyn, I was lining up a series of recent buildings that I thought I must see: The New Museum by Kasuo Sejima; Jean Nouvel at Soho, Herzog & de Meuron at 40 Bond St; NYTimes tower and Morgan library by Renzo Piano; the diamond tower by Foster; and Gehry’s building at 18th St. at the Hudson River.

so goes the label of this post. With Gehry being the exception that proves the rule (born in Canada, living in LA for 40 years), all the others are foreigners.

after the boom of the 70s and 80s with Eisenman, Meyer, Graves and etc, there is no young generation of north-american architects capable of substituting the "whites" and "grays".

perhaps Phillip Johnson is veeery much missed,

or perhaps the answer is in an article that Michael Speaks wrote 10 years ago in which he presented a clamorous difference between the US avant-guard with its elaborated manipulation of the form and geometries; and the European avant-guard more concerned with buildings performance and the transformations in the design process brought by new technologies

I tend to think that after 20 years of the so-called critical-discourse the north-american architecture suffers from a certain disorientation

much like a dog that fell out of a moving truck, it knows that there is no coming back to the old house of blobs and geometric manipulations based on drawing; nor it knows how to reach the new house built out of a neo-pragmatism with modernist roots and sustainable veneer.

niemeyer 100th birthday

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 23:01:00 +0000

this blog pay homage to a little man who changed the way Brazil looks at its own society and designed so many of the very images which defines the country today,

born on December 15th, 1907, Oscar Niemeyer celebrated his hundredth birthday today,

and still designing….

happy centennial Oscar

on rankings

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:29:00 +0000

I have to say that I am not a big fan of rankings, they tend to be quite reductionist, but following the tip of a collegue at Tulane I checked the new ranking of the Chronicle of Higher Education and there it was:

U of Michigan # 1 in Architecture and Urban Planning doctoral programs.

they put together architecture and planning and I still haven't figured out why they post us twice, but in any case, if feels really good to learn that we have been very productive collectivelly and that our hard work has payed off.

congratulation to us all here

drawing as language

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:58:00 +0000

last Wednesday my studio in Michigan received the visit of 6 students from Chung-Ang University in Korea. Later in December I will show the result of the studio, the very first undergrad, that this year as final project (6 weeks) are designing the headquarters for a urban water conservation NGO

any similarity with studio toró is not mere coincidence

but the subject of today’s post is the concept of drawing as language. It fascinates me to think that between 2 to 3 million individuals spread around the planet have the share a certain language: architectural drawings.

developed over the last 400 years in Europe and systematized by Durand and others at the Ecole Polytechnique about 200 years ago, the conventions of space representation that we usually call architectural drawing have spread all over the world, unifying graphic representation of spaces to be built and bringing with it a spatial system very akin to modernity.

so when we research the homogenization of architectural typologies(see Global Apartments Research Group) it becomes fundamental to understand the drawings as vectors of such contamination.
but what if anything this has to do with the visit of the Korean students?

faced with language barriers, drawings become immediately more central. When we lack words, the traces on the paper speak much louder and take over the conversation. Required to come up with ideas for the building envelope that should engage precipitation, students relied much more on their drawings in order to make their concepts understood by the others.

it is the drawing language bringing together architects from opposing corners of the world.

left without directions

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:50:00 +0000

If anybody had doubts about Hugo Chavez’s project of remaining in power forever, it evaporated yesterday with Venezuela’s congress approving an extension of the current term and the possibility of endless re-elections for the bolivarist leader. Added to this the closing of oppositional newspapers and TV stations and the circus is ready for a lefty pseudo-democracy.

At the same time, in the north things are not going much better either. As much as I wish the democrats win the White House next year, the sequence Bush-Clinton-Clinton-Bush-Bush-Clinton? bothers me a lot . If this does not seem like a democracy but a sophisticated kind of aristocracy, what else can it be?

But back to Chavez, it is very sad to see that a significant part of the left in Latin America prefers to ignore the attacks on democratic rule and the dismantling of the Venezuelan institutions, cheering each bragging of the colonel. In this way, the chavistas left and the North American religious right are on the same boat: bragging might win elections (unfortunately) but does not improve anybody’s life.

Has anybody has seen Venezuela’s social indicators improving? Illiteracy, child mortality, sanitation? And what about the indicators in the US following a trajectory of inequality for many years?

Meanwhile we, the people, seem lost and absolutely orphans of proposals that can diminish inequality and at the same time to reward personal efforts.

I have recently finished reading “what the left should propose” from Harvard’s Mangabeira Unger and will write about it soon. The title of this post already gives a hint on how I see the book, but it is nevertheless worth reading.

leonard temko on research

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:46:00 +0000

Leonard Temko wrote such a great comment in response to my last post that with his permission I turned into a post-post.

LT: "I think there is a movement within many professional domains towards recognition of the value and importance of applied and original design research. This is tied to the expanding importance of 'design thinking' in just about every major knowledge-based field.

Unfortunately, traditional designers of the built environment, professional or academic, are no longer at the forefront of this fast expanding movement. And that is a FACT that should worry EVERY educator and employer within our discipline.

The trend towards professional isolationism, which almost seems a genetic predisposition, and is evidenced in the profession's ongoing inability (or refusal) to bind researchers and "designers" together (at gunpoint if necessary) at the academy is a root cause of the decline in influence and relevance of the profession of architecture.

In essence, we are becoming less of a profession in the 21st Century sense of the word and instead are clinging to an ancient, tired, and ultimately self-defeating identity.

How can we change this? We can start by refusing to allow, from this point forward, any suggestion that 'design' is limited to formal expression and must be couched in much broader terms. We can start by burying the ancient dogma that separates telos and techne and replace it with an holistic and integrated view of design, designers, and designing.

We need to reach outward...not inward.

Just a thought...."

check out his blog here

on research

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:50:00 +0000

it is great to see Brazilian bio-agricultural governmental agency Embrapa making headlines in the New York Times due to their research on tropical crops and the savana (cerrado) soils.

but wouldn't it be great to have the same succesful combination of research, profits and the common good in the built environment also?

i am absolutely convinced that we have the expertise and the demand, but somehow our research efforts all end up collecting dust on shelves and drawers.

how could we change that?

futebol, fusball, calcio, football

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 15:18:00 +0000

it might have been a surprise to the ESPN commentators and soccer fans in general but not for football fans worldwide. The women’s world cup will be decided by two of the most traditional teams: Brazil and Germany.

italian and argentinian girls, we miss you here, when are you coming for real?

if history can ever repeat itself this is so much similar to the trajectory of the man’s world cup. US and Scandinavian teams do really well in the infancy of the competition (US in 1950, Sweden in 1958, 1962) and then cannot hold its lead due to the absence of a strong professional league. The early days are perfect for the amazing college-based talent pool of the US.

but then comes football professional and international tradition and the talent pool is not college kids anymore but poor boys and girls from the outskirts of Rio and first generation Germans whose parents immigrated from eastern Europe.

for some reason the formula used for gymnasts, swimmers and runners does not apply to football, and that is probably one of the reasons why it is the most popular sport on the planet.

and by the way: the Brazilians girls don’t have a league of their own and could barely pay their bills only a few years ago. Imagine what they can do with the right infrastructure.

and by the way #2: why does ESPN insists the US was unbeaten for 51 games? At the panamerican games in Rio last July they lost the gold medal in a 0x5 match. That kind of spin might sell politics but does not sell football.

brazil-korea-india

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:15:00 +0000

We have been slowly but steadily enlarging our pool of apartments/cities being analyzed and this Fall, with the Global Apartments Research Group resuming its biweekly meetings, I should be able to write more about it.

The exciting news is that Romil Sheth did a fantastic data collection in his hometown of Bombay (or Mumbai) this summer. The questionnaires have already been tabulated and most of the apartments have already undergone preliminary analysis.
The chart above shows the comparison of area devoted to each function, in average, for each pool of apartments in our database.

It is worth noting the Korean emphasis (almost an obsession) with the varanda and the amount of area devoted to circulation, required to make the tri-partite private-public-private spatial arrangement feasible.

About the Brazilian apartments I have written before but it doesn’t hurt to remind the fact that the amount of social space (25.85%) is the same amount devoted to service spaces (25.70%). We shall explore that further.

And in the case of Mumbai, it seems like a very streamlined spatial partition, with a reasonable amount of social areas (the highest among the 3) and private areas (again the highest). But are the small service spaces (17% only) correlated with the fact that in 20 questionnaires, not a single male was reported spending any time in the kitchen?

More to follow

david byrne on johnson’s glass house

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 02:49:00 +0000

excellent tip from barriga de um arquitecto:

David Byrne´s description of his visit to the Phillip Johnson´s Glass House in his blog (remember that Byrne studied architecture),

the head of the talking heads comes up with many interesting points. One in particular I want to highlight: that to live in that house without the added pavilions is only possible to a monk!

I often find that the best of modernism was precisely about that: a simpler life with fewer drawers and closets, larger windows to see and be seen.

It is very worth reading the entire post here.

flowers in the asphalt

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 02:36:00 +0000

I am back in Ann Arbor after two month in Brazil. Meanwhile, we had a great session on Architecture and Latin American Identity at the LASA (Latin American Studies Association) in Montreal,

but reflecting on this time in Brazil, I guess the biggest success had been workshops centered around the issue of urban waters. I went to 3 different schools and day-care centers and worked with children. In addition, I developed a the campaign to be delivered in the bags used to carry bread(to see post below) that it will arrive in the bakeries in few weeks.

on the workshops, the drawing above made by a child with hearing disability at the Francisco Sales School, illustrates well what it the process of urban environmental education means: it is as if we were planting flowers in asphalt.

despite the difficulties, the harvest is already in the horizon. Back in Michigan I will try to obtain funding to extend the actions next year. The goal is to train a group of architects so that we can act in multiple schools with some financial support.

the first of these workshops will still happen this year in the Equator (I hope), then Guatemala and next year in Brazil again.

the energy that emanates from the children helps us continue seeding the asphalt.

soon in a bakery near you

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 21:35:00 +0000

when I arrived in Brazil last month I was struck by a great idea, developed by Rita Miranda at Casa Sol. She used the paper bags available at every bakery (thousands are served by casa sol alone) to disseminate ecological messages.

on complimenting her for such a noble and smart initiative, she invited me to write one about urban water issues, what I did. The result (seen above) will reach thousands of bread-hungry households by late September.

I couldn’t be more happy. Studio Toro fulfilled its mission for the summer.

space where and for whom?

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 18:24:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 00:16:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 03:27:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:28:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:33:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 02:46:00 +0000

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.

are we private or public oriented people?

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:54:00 +0000

We Brazilians love to think of ourselves as very outgoing social-oriented people and everyone of us who spends some time abroad complain about how much we miss our social activities. But here is the trick, when we asked people in Brazil and in Korea to tell us how much time they spend in the social areas of their apartments (living room, dining room, varandas) versus private areas (bedrooms), the Koreans are spending 76% more time in the social quarters (3hs21min for the Koreans, 2hs31min for the Brazilians). One can say yes Brazilians are more social outside of home but how to explain the fact that Brazilians spend more time in their bedrooms (9hs21min) than the Koreans (9hs05min). Or do the private life in the apartments do not provide an accurate account of our contemporary life-style? Any thoughts?

50 minutes of family life

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:24:00 +0000

50 min is the average time that a Korean family interacts in the same space. This data is not statistically representative but is only the preliminary result of some 60 questionnaires sent to families in Brazil, Korea and the Russia last year whose responses are being analyzed right now. (thank you so much to everyone who participated!)
the questionnaire basically asked people to register in which room (bedroom, living, kitchen, etc.) each member of the family normally is, in intervals of 15 minutes throughout the day. Actually, the questionnaire does not ask if the family is really interacting (they can all be in the same room immersed in individual activities) but assumes that in order to interact people need to be in the same space. Or should we not assume that?
In any case, it is frightful to perceive that we are becoming more and more isolated from one another, a trend that is evident when see each member of the family with his/her own bedroom, own bathroom, own car and own TV. By the way in our questionnaire watching TV counts as interaction if people are at the same space.
More results to follow soon,
More information about the research is available at the Global Apartments Research Group

comparing brazilian and korean apartments

noreply@blogger.com (Fernando Luiz Lara) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:46:00 +0000

The first difference between Brazilian and Korean apartments appeared when we looked at the spatial arrangement vis-à-vis private versus social areas. While Brazilian apartments show a striking differentiation between private areas and social/service areas, usually separated by a small corridor that positions two doors between the living room and the bedrooms, the Koreans present a large social area as a middle ground with private areas split between two regular bedrooms in one side and one master bedroom in the opposite side. Such articulation creates a striking opposition Public-Private in the Brazilian units and a tri-partite articulation Private-Public-Private in the Koreans. One interesting issue that arises from this observation is the lack of flexibility in the Brazilian case when compared to the Korean plans. The tri-partite solution allows for different family arrangements such as a grand-parent living at home or teenage children having more privacy. That possibility is nevertheless contradicted by the demographic data that show the number of multi-generation family arrangements decreasing in Korea, from 23% in 1970 to 10% in 2000. Meanwhile in Brazil multi-generation families are growing as a consequence of housing deficit and changes in the labor market, forcing young couples to share an apartment with their in-laws or bringing frail grandparents to live with their children and teenage grandchildren.

When we discussed that tri-partite arrangement with Korean scholars (quote names) they were quick to point out what they perceive as the permanence of the traditional space of the “maru”. The maru in traditional Korean housing is the heated space of the kitchen/dining that for practical purposes was places in the middle of two more private rooms (or the contemporary equivalent of bedrooms) so that the warmth of the maru would heat both sleeping quarters. If that tradition have survived the modernization process in the sense that the dining space is still the most important in the Korean apartments, it is therefore logical that such space would occupy a central position. Our space syntax analysis of integration corroborate such idea for the most integrated spaces almost always overlap with the dining room in the Korean apartments.

However, when we look at the strict separation of private versus social areas in the Brazilian apartments, it is reasonable to as why is there not more flexibility in the apartments being built there nowadays. Or would the flexibility be a post-occupancy added feature? With independent concrete structure and masonry walls the Brazilian apartments can be re-arranged to different spatial arrangements easier than the Korean counterparts with many of its walls being poured concrete serving structural functions. Although we would love to be able to enter and document a significant number of Brazilian apartments, our data set cannot adequately answer that question at this point for an interesting follow-up to this research would be to investigate to what degree Brazilian families change the spatial organization of their apartments to the point of changing the internal walls.
Instead, we can discuss the permanence of certain traditions in the Brazilian apartments the same way that the maru have been carried out in the Korean units. In the case of Brazil two features come to our attention regarding the persistence of traditions in the spatial arrangements of contemporary apartments. The kitchen is never open to the dining room and the bedrooms are located in sharp opposition to the social areas.

The articulation of kitchen and dining is almost always the same no matter how large or small is the apartment in Brazil, with a wall and a door separating the cooking from the eating area. That striking separation (unknown in most other small apartments anywhere) has roots in the early urban housing typology in the 19th century and the infamous inequality of Brazilian society. The result of that was and still very much is present in the fact that the one who cooks (maids) are not sharing the dining experience (patrons). Although contemporary labor costs prevents the Brazilian middle-class from having a full-time maid at home, it is still very common to have somebody over a few times a week to clean, do the laundry and cook. In the case that the wife (often) or another member of the household (seldom) are cooking, the center of attention and interaction than moves to the kitchen where many fast meals are served, or in the case of a more traditional dinner everything needed would be brought to the table and the kitchen is somehow disconnected from the act of eating together.