Ode to the Void
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Architecture and Nature Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOde to the Void Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCritical Readings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRisky Space Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLelé: Dialogues with Neutra and Prouvé Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
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Ode to the Void - Carlos M. Teixeira
LATIN AMERICA: THOUGHTS
Romano Guerra Editora
Nhamerica Platform
MANAGEMENT COORDINATION
Abilio Guerra, Fernando Luiz Lara e Silvana Romano Santos
ODE TO THE VOID
Carlos M. Teixeira
Brasil 02
EDITORS
Abilio Guerra, Fernando Luiz Lara e Silvana Romano Santos
EDITORIAL STAFF
Silvana Romano Santos, Fernando Luiz Lara, Abilio Guerra,
Fernanda Critelli e Caio Sens
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Maria Claudia Levy e Ana Luiza David (Goma Oficina)
FORMATTING
Caio Sens e Fernanda Critelli
EBOOK FORMATTING
Natalli Tami
TRANSLATION
Anthony Doyle, Carlos M. Teixeira, John Norman,
L’Architecture D’Aujourd’hui
TRANSLATION REVIEW
Carlos M. Teixeira and Fernando Luiz Lara
foreword
the true nature of brasília
wild grass
freedom, it’s a void
palafittes manifest
topographical amnesias
palafittes
history of the corridor
alphaville and ‘alphaville’
exposed inside out
project jari
fordland
ariaú jungle towers
landscape as conflict
foreword
Written between 1999 and 2015, the texts in this book were previously published in the Vitruvius online journal, which has been establishing itself as the largest channel for architecture debates since the 2000s. This republication, however, is not a simple collection, but a compilation of essays that seeks to provide synergy to texts once isolated and that here define a more coherent and articulated narrative.
The more incisive of them is The true Nature of Brasília
, a praise to the cerrado (a Brazilian savannah) and a dreamlike reverse way of seeing the city: Brasília did not conquer the cerrado — on the contrary, the cerrado has conquered the city (or it is about to conquer it). Despite the Pilot Plan’s superquadras begging for more architectural substance, what actually happens is that the voids are much more eloquent than the solids: it is a sparse city amid of a sea of grass that should be reconsidered by the potential of these ignored weeds, which are the insidious and real protagonists of that landscape.
These same weeds are taken to the context of unplanned cities in Wild grass
, an essay on a false encyclopedia tone that denounces the lack of green areas and public spaces, extols vacant lots and expands the concept of what may be regarded as landscaping. Wild grass
is a negotiation with the disorder and the unforeseen and, above all, an exalted way to accept the imperfections of the city.
Freedom, it is a void
is part of the book Under construction: History of the void in Belo Horizonte (Teixeira, 1999) that endorses an adversative stance against the technicist planning. An ode to the city which is at once efficient and inefficient, complete and incomplete, the essay proposes a radical solution to the waywardness of modern urbanism. Here, the voids are less an operative tool and more of a volatile and changing resource that we need to detect, and which should be "as exciting and enigmatic as a perfect crime is to the traditional controllers of the city. Correspondingly,
Topographical Amnesias" describes a series of ephemeral actions that use Under construction’s resources as a guide for urban interventions.
The idea of the potentiality of voids is also present in History of the corridor
, an essay in which this avoided space usually acting as a distributor of movements is seen as an enabler of delirious uses.
In a twist to a factual criticism of here and now, Alphaville and ‘Alphaville’
attacks the social segregation and spatial fragmentation caused by gated communities and urban enclaves — mistakes of the laissez-faire urban planning practiced in Brazil and other countries where we notice an absence of the state as a regulator of the city development. The same grim tone appears in Exposed inside-out
, a photo essay showing how the car-centric urbanism still plagues the country's big cities.
The latter texts take up the subject related to the relationship between nature and the city. Jari Project
and Fordland
constitute fables about the onslaughts of capitalism over the Amazonian forest and criticize the view of nature as an infinite resource. Both were catastrophic endeavors that lend themselves not only as anti-models of economic developments, but also as a demonstration of the forest resilience against the attempts of using its resources in a predatory way.
This same resilience of nature is the subject of Landscape as conflict
, a manifesto that looks to architecture as the provocateur of a landscaping which is conflictive par excellence, reveling in destruction and reconstruction, never in simple conservation
.
Ariaú Jungle Towers
presents an unprecedented example of green architecture lost in River Ariaú, a tributary of the River Negro not far away from Manaus. A hotel whose amazing cylindrical towers are imbued with becoming, the passage of time and the cycle of construction-use-destruction, not different from the organic cycle of birth-work-death. Those were also the ambitions of Metabolism, a Japanese avant-garde movement that impressed the world in the 1960s: theirs were mutant buildings, adaptable, capable of reacting and causing changes, and in a continuous process of construction