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LISARB
LEARNING FROM RIO Guilherme Lassance
Major sporting events scheduled to take place in Rio de Janeiro are producing several radical urban transformations that have been attracting the attention of renowned architects of the international circuit. All this is happening in a city where relevant architectural references have not been produced for a long while because of the prolonged economic crisis of
operate as design references. In schools they assist the effort
the past. Despite these conditions, we were able to detect
of confronting the precariousness of most of the daily spatial
“invisible” design lessons to be learned in this city. The book
experience of our students with richer and more meaningful
Metropolitan Rio: guide for an architecture deals with the
architectural examples, hardly helping them to overcome the
development of a strategy for re-presenting design references
“absence” of concrete, built and actual demonstrations of
that are locally rooted and accessible for direct embodied
recent production to be studied.
experience. By referring to some well known manifestos as the Learning Indeed, it is relevant to note that despite the current abundant
from Las Vegas by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour (1972),
information about the architecture produced worldwide, most
Koolhaas’ Delirous New York (1978) and the Atelier Bow Wow’s
part of it is still concentrated in areas with privileged political
Made in Tokyo (1999), we wanted to transcend the external
and economic conditions. Unable to have direct contact
appearance or superficial image, which is often precarious or
with such production, students from other parts of the world
“out of date,” to access a more structural and diagrammatic
become inevitable hostages of a superficial consumption
level of analyzing space. The transaction contained in this
of design references accessed only through images when
simple strategy of re-presentation is very powerful and
working on their academic projects. Besides being consumed
totally in tune with the intention of promoting change in the
in a superficial manner, international references always
way people design and understand design. Indeed, if we
carry the difficulty of linking to local context, both in terms of
think retrospectively, we can note that the use of alternative
the physical immediacy and, in the wider cultural sense, of
representational resources is typical of moments of crisis
peoples’ modes of living and using the city. These references
of paradigms, in which the formal prescription propagated
are rarely compatible with the local cultural, social, economic
by a certain existing code system is to be criticized and re-
and technological realities, thus contributing to the traditional
discussed through new values. Devoid of visual compositional
and endemic separation between academia and the
codes that could be legitimated or rejected, architects use
professional practice. Therefore, while outside the academic
schematic representations as a means to escape or delay
environment these imported architectures do not
decisions regarding the visual appearance of the building, submitting them to the programmatic imperatives less prone to the momentary instability of the aesthetic debate. Such strategy of representation also reflects the spirit of the