Proposal Graduation Project

Sao Paulo grow during the twentieth century into one of the larges metropolises of the world. High-rise buildings shoot up like mushrooms, Sao Paulo became an ‘urban jungle’. However, beside this intensive urban city emerged also an expansive periphery more poorly developed. This periphery mainly came into being through a process of autoconstruction (autoconstrução), the working classes build their own houses because they were not able to participate the formal market. Nowadays almost all the house have sewage system, electricity and water, a significant part of the roads are asphalted. Interesting is that the architect in this process only operates somewhere in the margins.

Exceptional is the building system CEU (Centros Educacionais Unificados), in this project design is deployed in a very strategic and pragmatic way in order to add public services to the periphery. More than forty of these centre’s have been build, all with the same repeating building objects. The centre’s contain among other things: different schools, a cultural centre, a theater, sporting facilities and swimming pools municipal services. The strength of this project is that it within a short period of time, and for a large amount of people, offered access to services that where lacking before. What interests me professionally is that fact that architecture can play a role on the metropolitan scale. An elementary architectonic intervention – sometimes called ‘urban acupuncture’ – can till a certain extent improve the daily life of many people. Standardization makes it possible to create a generic type of architecture; quick to build, cheap and accessible for many. In my graduation project I want to investigate this topic further. So my research questions is as follows:

                Is it possible to develop a typological public space, that is less uniform as the CEU’s and more                 is integrated in the context, without giving up its repetitive and adaptable characteristics.

In relation to this research question I want to examine the following topics:

1. Theoretical Framework: Public space in a city characterized by segregation and fear.
The Brazilian anthropologist Teresa Caldeira writes about Sao Paulo as a ‘City of Walls’; a city where the public space is ‘imploded’. Many inhabitants of Sao Paulo feel imprisoned because of strong fear for violent crime, resulting in an increasing ‘fortification’ of the public space. This causes on the one side of the spectrum the rise of the so called ‘gated community’ or ‘fortified enclave’, while the poor live in favela’s, a contemporary version of the ghetto. However, we have to realize that these two are the extremes, the majority of the people live in between these conditions. I want to examine want the possiblities of public space are in these urban conditions. Is public space – by Hannah Arendt defined as ‘a space of appearance’ – still a realistic in a segregated society? Or do we need to change our strategies as designers?

2. Historical Inspiration: The potentials of the Roman system for the contemporary informal city.
The architecture of the Roman city had a strong typological character. In every city there were comparable public buildings, build with an ‘urban toolbox’. Roman architecture balanced between specific and generic. The different urban components repeated themselves in various places: the enclosed square, the theater, (public space), triumphal arc (monumentality), the arcade (binding element), the basilica (commercial space), the temple (religious space), bathhouses (hygiene and leisure). In many cases these different – more or less standardized - functions where brought together around the forum and resulted in a multifunctional public space. I want if it is possible to design a contemporary toolbox; one that is adaptable to the specific context, but remains generic.

The Fallacy of Physical Determinism - Herbert J. Gans

In the essay Urban Vitality and the Fallacy of Physical Determinism (1968) Hebert J. Gans critizes urban planners, saying that the overestimate their capacity of influencing the life of people through urban planning. This essay in particular criticizes Jane Jacobs famous book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), arguing that see falls in the same trap of as the modernist city planner; her opponents. Gans, who is a sociologist, say that it is not so much the physical form of the city that determines behavior. He argues that rather the cultural codes of a social group determine behavior. The way people use the urban spaces depend on with social or ethnic group they belong to.  The reason why people in a certain neighborhood have a intensive street life and others not, could have been caused by the fact that the house is reserved for the family, and therefore the social life has to take place on the street.[1] So the determiner of the use of space is in itself not physical but sociological. The modernist planners of the city, but also their criticizers like Jane Jacobs are losing themselves in ‘the fallacy of physical determinism,’ which mean that they put too much weight at the physical appearance of space when it comes to sociological phenomena.
Gans writes about the American middle-class who prefers to live in the suburbs and don’t want to live in diverse neighborhoods, the retreat from the working class parts of the city is a very conscious decision, that is not in the first part determined by physical space but by the status they want to represent among their equals. They don’t want to travel by public transport, they want to travel by car, as every middle-class family does. They don’t want to go to the small merchant, they prefer the supermarket where they have more choice and it is much easier to park your car.
I will write more about this interesting sociologist, because I think that the nuances he makes are very still very valid today; especially to prevent to lose ourselves for the trap of the ‘technical fix’, the attitude that social problems are easily solvable by technology.

[1] Herbert J. Gans, Urban Vitality and the Fallacy of Physical Determinism, in: People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions (1968, 1972) Cox & Wyman Inc., London, p. 34,35.