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.

Farewell to Old Amsterdam!

Very beautiful images from Amsterdam shortly after the second world war.

Kenneth Frampton: Tectonic Form and Public Appearance

What follows is a summary of a lecture by Kenneth Frampton that he held 28 May 2009 at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. This lecture was titled Tectonic Form and Public Appearance.
Frampton begins his lecture by critizing contemporary architects like Herzog de Meuron. According to Frampton these architects put to much emphasize on the skin, and not so much on the tectonic form and the spatial aspects of the building. What is missing is the ‘space of appearance’, a term derived from Hannah Arendt’s influential work The Human Condition (1958). An example of the space of appearance is the acropolis in ancient Athens. However, we have to realize that architecture is not a preexistence for this space of appearance to come into being. This doesn’t mean that architecture is a powerless instrument in society. Frampton formulates it like this:

‘Architecture can still intervene (…) in the urban fabric in a limited way, as an intervention. And this intervention should guarantee this of public appearance.’

The question is now what the characteristics are of this spaces of appearance and Frampton tries to find examples of them in the architectural history. The first one is intercolumniation as in the we see in the temple at Thebes. The hypostyle is announcing the sacral space. This concept of intercolumniation is omnipresent in historical architecture, Frampton also gives the examples of Schinkel’s Altes Museum where the columns announce the central public space. 
The freestanding column can also be seen as a analogue for the human body in the public space.
The second example is the Greek theater where the body politic could gather and transcendent there everyday life. (The life of necessity or labour as Arendt would call it.) Not only provides the Greek theater a place to make this possible, it also expresses it in its tectonic form, this form is an representation of the absent collective body.

The third example is the stair – in its tectonic form it already represents the motion of the human body. I would say that the stair, and the theater are counter-moulds of the public.
Later Frampton comes to speak about the role of architecture. He thinks that it role is twofold: Presentation and Representation. Presentation is about what is provided, the programmatic elements for the realization of the project. Representation is the constructional elements itself that represent the public, think about the examples of the stair, column. In the absence of public you see the representation of the public.
Frampton pays in this lecture a lot of attention to the architecture of Paulo Mendes da Rocha and shows several of his buildings. This because there is – according to Frampton – a relation between the human body and the constructional elements. (He also shows the faculty building of architecture in São Paulo by Vilanova Artigas.)

The limits of Architecture
Answering the questions of the audience Frampton comes to speak about the MUBE, the museum of Brazilian sculpture in São Paulo by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. (See images bottom of the post.) This building defines a beautiful public space, however, after the construction the site is completely fenced. This ruins the building and especially the public character of the project. Frampton reacts on this particular situation in São Paulo:

‘ (…) at some point architecture has its limits. There is a certain dimension where architecture cannot really come into being. I think because society is so stressed by poverty and by the accompanying violence that come along with the poverty [that] architecture come beside to point in a way. The heroic gesture can still be made but they may not be consummated because society is under to much stress. (…) When we get to such a level of paranoia [this] paranoia makes architecture in a society impossible. I mean, if you think about designing embassies today, you need to have two embassies: you need one that is the kind of representational thing where you don’t mind that somebody puts a bomb in it, and you need another embassy which is a bunker. (…) That kind of paranoia is a killer. It is the opposite of a society of risk.’

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 8. VIOLENCE, THE UNBOUNDED BODY, AND THE DISREGARD OF RIGHTS IN BRAZILIAN DEMOCRACY

The increase of violence during the process of democratization is by Caldeira seen as, what see calls “disjunctive”. Brazil is a political democracy, ‘the civil aspects of citizenship are continuously violated,’ as she expresses in the last chapter of the book. This chapter focuses on “the body,’ as Caldeira approaches this theme from the disrespect for human rights and the campaign for the introduction of death penalty.
The disrespect for human rights comes clear when we look at how the discussion about the rights of prisoners. A very common attitude is than to say that human rights is the same as giving rights to bandits, something that is really not done according to a lot of people. To give an impression of the way the media speaks about human rights, I give the example of the daily radio program of Afanasio Jazadji who is a popular radio star in São Paulo. In April 1984 , the day the National Congress decided to deny the population right to vote the president he said:

‘Some should take all those irredeemable prisoners, put them against the wall and fry them with a blow torch. Or instead throw a bomb in the middle of them: boom!, end of the problem. They have no family, they don’t have anything, they don’t have anything to worry about, they only think about doing evil, and why should we worry about them? …

Those bastards, they consume everything, millions and millions a month. Let us get this money and transform it into hospitals, nurseries, orphanages, asylums, and provide a respectable life for those who really deserve to have this dignity. Now, for those type of people … people? To treat them as people! We’re offending humankind!’

Comparable reactions are made regarding death penalty, and some of the ones Caldeira gives are rather shocking. However, we have to be careful not to judge Brazil as a whole on these populist statements, and we have to keep in mind the violence most people experienced themselves or on their relatives.
When it comes to punishment a lot of people think of ‘punishment as inflicting suffering of the body,’ as a form of ‘physical revenge,’ as Caldeira calls it. ‘The dominant discourse is that of private revenge, as system that uses pain and interventions on the body as a means of creating order.’ [So the problem with public space stands not on its own; it goes much broader in a much wider incline of the border between public and private. JvB]
Something very important Caldeira makes clear deals about child beating: ‘Unable to understand language, children nevertheless are clearly believed to understand pain. Since fear of pain generates obedience, provoking such fear is considered good pedagogy. The marking of the body by pain is perceived as a more forceful statement that mere words can make, and it should be used especially when language and rational arguments would not be understood. In general, the people I interviewed think that children, adolescents, and women are not totally rational (or not always rational), in same way that the poor and obviously, criminals are not. Towards such people the use of violence is necessary; it is a language anyone can understand, which has the power to enforce moral principles and correct social behavior. Pain is understood as a path to knowledge (especially moral knowledge) and reform. Violence is considered to be a language closer to truth.’

Body and rights
‘Clearly, the body is conceived of as the locus of punishment, justice, and example in Brazil. It is conseived by most as a proper site for authority to be asserted through the infliction of pain.’
Caldeira starts to speak about “the unbounded body,” which mean that it ‘has no clear barriers of separation or avoidance; it is a permeable body, open to intervention, on which manipulations by others are not considered problematic. On the other hand, the unbounded body is unprotected by individual rights.’ The main reason for the appearance of the unbounded body is the openly discredited judicial system.
Caldeira gives also different examples of unbounded body that are outside realm of violence. In the fist place the high percentages of cesarean births and sterilizations of women in Brazil. This is seen as a alternative way of birth control, and especially the poor use it. Another medical intervention is the plastic surgery that is very common among Brazilian women in order to become the stereotype Brazilian women. Nonmedical thing Caldeira mentions is the carnival, the ‘occasion for displaying the body and playing with transformations of the body. (…) During Carnival performances people expect to touch and be touched: it is considered in bad taste to repel such interventions because one is out there to play, and the mingling of bodies is the essence of the play. Not only is Carnival a realm for the merging of bodies, their manipulation, and display, but it is also one where the threat of violence and actual violence are always present.’
Having this said, Caldeira derives from Michel Foucault’s theories the standpoint the emerge of a liberal-democracy moves away from bodily punishment to the punishment of the mind. But the progressive abandonment come always simultaneously with a process of democratization. What appears is a “disjunctive democracy” where, as in Brazil’s case, we have very highly developed social rights [think for example about the social movements] but civil rights that are not protected. Important is the relation between the body and civic rights. ‘In Brazilian society, what dominates is the unbounded notion of the body and the individual.’
Caldeira ends the book with a few questions, one of them, maybe even the most important one, about the future of public space. ‘Is there a model that protects people’s bodies and enforces individual rights while maintaining the indeterminacy [Dutch: onbepaaldheid, JvB] of borders that constitutes the democratic public space.’ The task no is, according to Caldeira, to ‘find new ways to democratize public space, renegotiate borders, and respect civil rights.’ Very interesting in my opinion is that Caldeira looks for more flexible borders, because she thinks that flexible borders combined with great inequality, ‘works only in one direction, from dominant to dominated, without any institutional restraints or boundaries. Caldeira gives a hint here in what direction see does think: ‘I advocate more rather than less boundedness for the body, especially when it involves relationships between unequals.’

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 8. THE IMPLOSION OF MODERN PUBLIC LIFE

Caldeira rings in this chapter the alarm bell when it comes to public space: ‘People feel restricted in their movements, afraid, and controlled; they go out less at night, walk less on the street, and avoid the “forbidden zones” that loom larger and larger in every resident’s mental map of the city, especially among the elite. Encounters in the public space become increasingly tense, even violent, because discrimination, and suspicion are the new hallmarks of public life.’ The most important question in this chapter is: ‘how to conceive of the relationships between urban form, politics, and everyday life. These relationships are very complex and usually disjunctive: simultaneous processes with opposite meaning may take place in the same public sphere. São Paulo offers a compelling example of disjunction: its walling process has coincided with the organization of urban social movements, the expansion of citizenship rights for the working classes, and political democratization. (…) Nonetheless, the build environment is not a neutral stage for the unfolding of social relations. The quality of the build environment inevitably influences the quality of the social interaction that take place there. It does not determine them completely; there is always room for diverse and sometimes dubversive appropriations of space and for the organization of siacila actions that counter those shaoed by spatial practices. However, the material space that constitute the stage for public life influence the types of social relations possible on it. (…) Usually it takes organized political action to resist walls or to dismantle patterns of segregation.’

The modern ideal of public space and the city life
[Caldeira takes a few social theorist and philosophers to explain her idea of public space. What strikes me is the fact that Caldeira uses only very western European or north American scholars. In this part of the chapter there are no south American scholars. What does this mean for the conception of public space in the Latin American city? JvB]
About Jane Jacobs: ‘When public life is absent, the alternative to sharing too much may be sharing nothing, and suspicion and fear of neighbor are the expected outcomes.’
About Iris Marion Young: she ‘defines city life as “the being together of strangers,” whose ideal is “an openness to unassimilated otherness.” Young tries to sketch an ideal image of the city containing in four main virtues: ‘(1) social differentiation without exclusion; (2) multi-use differentiation of social space; (3) eroticism, understood broadly as “an attraction to the other, the pleasure and excitement of being drawn out of one’s secure routine to encounter the novel, strange, and surprising”; and (4) publicity, which refers to public space as being by definition a place open and accessible to anyone and where one always risks encountering those who are different.’ [Interesting writer… JvB]
Caldeira distinguishes two types of social movement: the fist that emphasizes the sameness of the discriminated group (blacks, gay, women) and second, the fact that “universalism” is often the basis for exclusion and that we should focus on, what Young calls, “difference without exclusion.” This second notion is also comparable with the writings of theorist like Claude Leford, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Étienne Balibar. The modern city forces confrontation among strangers. ‘Such spaces [public spaces, JvB] promote interactions among people who are forced to confront each other’s anonymity on the basis of citizenship and therefore to acknowledge and respect each other’s rights.’

Garden city and modernism: the lineage of the fortified enclave
According to Caldeira the rise of the condominium in Brazil and United States has its origin in Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model. This because it had the same idea of living in a green area and it has the principle separated functions. The condominium can also be seen as a variation on Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, that he himself once described as a “vertical garden city”. The condominium follows naturally from modernistic planning, except the walling of the space. [It think this is not true. JvB] What Caldeira is arguing is that in São Paulo the city is build by the bad aspect of modernism, and the good aspects are left aside. This results in a public space that ‘expresses the new intolerance. (…) In the ideal modern city life, “borders are open and undecidable,” suggest Young. Fixed boundaries create nonmodern spaces, an undemocratic space.’ [I do not agree on this. JvB]
The strange relation between democratization and the walls in the city Caldeira reacts as follows: ‘While the political system opened up, the streets were closed, and fear of crime became the talk of the city.’

Street life: Incivility and aggression
Both the rich and the poor neighborhoods are not accessible: Morumbi is a neighborhood for a car, the pavement is bad; the favela has only a few entrances and is not surveyable. Other people privatized their streets by closing them of with gates or other objects.
The systems of security are not only for safety reason but also to ‘discipline’ and to ‘discriminate’. ‘The image of the suspect is made up of stereotypes, and therefore systems of screening discriminate especially against the poor and black people. The entrance guards do not bother people with the right class signs, but they give a hard time to everyone else. (…) In a city in which systems of identification and strategies of security are spreading everywhere, the experience of urban life becomes one of social differences, separations, exclusions, and reminders of the limitations of one’s possibilities in the public space. It is, in reality, a city of walls, the opposite of the boundless public space of the modern ideal city. The rich and the middle classes, more and more try to avoid the street and start to do their shopping in enclosed shopping centers and hypermarkets. The street is also very dangerous because of the traffic. Nobody obeys the traffic regulation.

Experiencing the public
Another interesting disjunction in the process of democratization is has to do with the occupation of former elite space (for example the movie theater) by the poor. ‘With fewer obvious signs of differentiation at hand and with more difficulty in asserting their privileges and codes of behavior in the public space, the upper classes turn instead to systems of indentification. Thus, spaces of controlled circulation (such as shopping centers) come to assure that distinction and separation are still possible in public. Signs of social distance are replaced with material walls.’
In this chapter Caldeira names only two public space that are, in her opinion, exceptional in terms that they have a plural public space. The first one is Ibirapuera Park and Praça da Sé.

Praça da Sé
This central square is extensively discussed because it is a very important public space in São Paulo. It contains tree important landmarks, namely the cathedral, the central subway and the “zero mark” of the city, indicated by a stone on top of a compass engraved on the ground. Teresa Caldeira thinks that the space has become more and more a place for the poor people, because of the homeless people, beggars, street vendors, ect. However, still today we see a lot of business man in suits, but also preachers of different kind of Christian movements, musicians and policeman. According to Caldeira the rich start to avoid Praça da Sé, because of its dominance by the poor. 

But Praça da Sé has also a very political component. During the military dictatorship this was the only place were demonstrations were held, such as on 25 January 1984 when three hundred thousand congregated in Praça da Sé to demand free elections. ‘Demonstrations were moved to Vale do Anhangabaú on only two occasions, when the square was too small for the expected crowd of one million: the last rally for direct elections in April 1984, and the demonstration for the impeachment of President Collor in September 1992. (…) On the one hand, Praça da Sé symbolizes the political reappropriation of public space by the citizens in the transition to democracy. On the other hand, it represents the detoriation of public space, danger, crime, anxieties about downward mobility, and impoverishment of the workers who continue to commuting, working in the informal market, and consuming its cheap products. It symbolizes both the strength and the deterioration of public space and, therefore, the disjunctive character of Brazilian democracy. [Caldeira refers here to a text she wrote together with James Holston called ‘Democracy, Law, and Violence: Disjunctions of Brazilian Citizenship’, published in “Fault Lines of Democracy in Post-transition Latin America”. Zie literatuurlijst voor beschikbaarheid. JvB]


Contradictory public space
Something very interesting in my opinion is the argument Charles Jencks uses. He thinks that we simply should deal with the process of walling the city, architects should find an aesthetic solution for it, referring to Frank O. Gehry. The fences are good because they prevent conflict. A totally different approach towards this problem has Mike Davis, who sees the fencing as a “destruction of public space,” and also as a consequence of postliberal politics (Reagan – Bush). However, Caldeira is more carefull making the link between politics and the ‘implosion of modern public live’, referring to the process of democratization.
Caldeira sees certain similarities between São Paulo and Los Angeles, such as ‘the garden city model, modernist design and city planning, (…) the fortified enclaves and theme parks (…) the intense fear of crime and the production of stereotypes of dangerous others (...) high rates of crime.’
The last part of this chapter is very strong so I quote is completely: 

‘The new urban morphologies of fear give new forms to inequality, keeps groups apart, and inscribe a new sociablity that runs against the ideals of the modern public and democratic freedoms. When some people are denied access to certain areas and when different groups do not interact in public space, then reference to ideals of openness, equality, and freedom as organizing principles for social life are no longer possible, even as fiction. The consequence of the new separateness and restriction of public life are serious: contrary to what Jencks (1993) thinks, defensible architecture and planning may promote confict instead of preventing it, by making explicit the social inequalities and the lack of common ground. In fact, we may argue that the Los Angeles uprising was caused by social segregation rather than by the lack of separation and defenses. If the experiences of separateness expressed in the urban environment become dominant in their societies, people will distance themselves from democracy.’

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p. 297-355.

Centros Educacionais Unificados – CEU

Critique:
[1] Relation to the street or the city fabric is poor
[2] The definition of the public space is a missed opportunity.
[3] No possibility of “appropriation of space”.
[4] To standardized
[5] It does not relate to commercial space.