PRACA CULTURAL SERGIO PORTO Another important project carried out in the favela is Praca Cultural Sergio Porto: the refurbishment and enlargement of the Espaço Cultural Municipal (ECM) Sergio Porto made by Azevedo Agência de Arquitetura (AAA) in cooperation with Associação Moradores Bairro Humaita (AMAHU) and Projeto_ ENTRE. Rogrigo Azvedo – founder of the AAA - is an architect and urban designer with more than fifteen years of experience in large and medium scale urban and architectural projects in Brazil. His experience in design includes mixed-use buildings, urban regenerations, refurbishment of historic buildings, cultural programming, and master planning of commercial centers and waterfronts. The project involves an existing theatre. Architecturally speaking the existing structure - which is an important venue for the dance and theatre scene of Rio – has structural problems and it is terribly degraded (for example it rains inside the building). Instead of destroying this theatre, AAA decided to recover it because it is the only public theatre venue with a flexible structure inside that can be used freely. Moreover, although there is a great demand for the usage of the theatre, only the 5% of the demand is actually hosted by this building due to space problems. The main aim of this project is then to bring the neighborhood inside the building, which is conceived as an architecture for the people, not merely as an infrastructure. The project is like a above-ground plaza – a kind of architecture simply unheard of in Brazil. Since in the context where this building is designed people can find places of permanence like restaurants, a library, bookshops but not an open-air space where people can meet without consuming. The idea from which was developed was then to build a public space where at the moment a Gas station is situated. Thanks to the “AMAHU” it was possible to discover who was the owner of the station and how to take over this space. Due to security issues – which are becoming more and more relevant as the years go by - there is a very definite and clear division between the private spaces of residential buildings and the public spaces of the city. As a consequence of such a division houses, buildings and projects have no dialogue with the city. The city is seen as an infrastructure and all of the interventions are thought as such: infrastructures created to answer a specific demand that has arisen within the city.
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From this perspective, the theater is only seen as a place where there is a stage where people just come to see a performance, ignoring all of the other questions inherent their lives in the city. This project, instead, wants to establish a dialogue between the city and its inhabitants. It based on a coauthorship design where the future users are involved in the design process. Something totally unique in Brazil. So they say: “What we are doing here with this project is an act of desperation because at the moment in Brazil there is no idea of urban planning, but only a preoccupation with the building of the single lot/piece of land. The creation of the city at the moment is the creation of private space and everything else is ignored. So here this project is like an opposition to that in a desperate attempt to do something for the neighbourhood and in this particular instance the last player to be informed in this process is the government”. Another important issue the architects had to deal with is the project’s coexistence with a school nearby. The project has then been thought as a new space for the children too. There, they could start performing, play and even invite their parents to share this new opportunity. The new public space had also to be flexible. It can be a place where people spend their spare time, a parterre for the viewers of a play or it can even be a stage. It is a sort of second theater where architecture and scenography can become one thing. The project also proposed changes in the road layout so as to create better and bigger calçådas and bike lanes. This project is a pure result of the city’s creation process. Using Aldo Rossi’s words, it is an urban artifact. The architects’ role in the definition of this project was to understand the demand of all the actors in the design process: the theatre, the community, the neighbourhood, the city.
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