18 thoughts on “Week 3 Reading discussion”

  1. 1. Modernism Made Vernacular, The Brazilian Case
    In the beginning of the article, where Lara mentions the development of modernity and its entrance into different countries/regions, I thought of Colin Rowe’s text, “Introduction to Five Architects,” where he briefly discusses the dissemination of modern architecture in a much broader sense. He says the proliferation of modern architecture, especially into America cheapened its original ideological value and became diluted into nothing more than a decorative style for the wealthy – the very thing it was trying to go against. Reading about its development or reinterpretation in Brazil, especially regarding the modernist roots of the favelas, modernism feels reclaimed for the common people. It also speaks about the “commoner’s” understanding of modernism, where these workers probably have had more exposure through the construction of these buildings than the owners. They’ve broken it down into a fundamental understanding and into their own tastes – as seen in the line drawing produced by the author. I think after reading this article, it is critical to see modernism, or any other “style,” as not only attributed to corporate buildings or high end residentials or a certain class of people, but as a style that truly permeates throughout a region via people and exposure.

    2. A New Industrial Frontier, Ciudad Guayana
    Ciudad Guayana was a Latin American example of a city being created out of a competitive industry creating a city. With Venezuela’s newfound economic power and wealth, they needed a matching city to be able to be compared with the rest of the developing world. As a result, it seems like Guayana was created in the likeness of a business, with “four key agents with interests in the area: the iron and steel syndicate, the government’s iron and steel institute, the research commission for the electrification of Guayana, and the president’s commission for the advancement of Guayana.” Even with regards to its urban planning techniques, particularly in regards to their naive thinking “solid technical thinking, it would be solid thinking socially” it superficially seems like the livelihood of the inhabitants of the city were neglected. Guayana was designed with the intention of setting a standard for Venzuela’s up and coming urban development and meant to represent the city of the future, whether or not it is successful however, is up for discussion.

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    1. I really like the idea of modern architecture being appropriated by the wealthy “cheapening” it, while the adoption of regular people and the poor actually adds value. Nice paradox, nice juxtaposition.

      As for Ciudad Guayana, one detail – It wasn’t so much a showcase city for Venezuela (that’s Caracas’ job) as an attempt to create wealth in an underdeveloped part of the country.

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  2. The text, Modernism  Made Vernacular was quite interesting.  The contrast between the way the United States only embraced modernism for a short time of fifteen years, and it was exclusive to the upper class versus Brazil’s implementation of modern architecture among all the classes, with its popularity lasting well past the 1980’s is quite striking.  Modern architecture was always something I considered to be luxury type buildings for the upper-class, and something which went out of style long ago, but to see that there are places where it actually flourished and became the norm, I found to be a bit of a shock.  The premise that the modernist vernacular architecture is actually modernist architecture is highly contested among many scholars, since most if not all the houses built were designed without the use of an architect.  Through the evidence presented by Lara, I would tend to disagree that they are not really modernist houses, but that they in fact are, as it is the style of building and not the person who does the designing that determines what the inherent design quality aspects are. The ubiquity of the implementation of modern houses among the very poor in favelas, the middle-class houses, and working class in loteamentos are what makes them not just modernist, but vernacular modernist houses as they are have not merely incorporated modern aspects to their vernacular homes, but taken the modernist building and made it the vernacular, which greatly contributed to the success of modern architecture in the region.  What is most interesting is that the homeowners themselves desired to have modern houses because of the media and the desire to move forward with the times, whereas here in the US, while our modern technology was embraced, the style of modern housing did not take off despite it being a new concept which would potentially move us foreword.  Could the mindset of Americans towards modern architecture been more favourable if there was more of an incentive by the government, media and/or developers to push modern architecture?  
     
    The second text, Beyond the City, focused more on city planning rather than architecture, but was fascinating nonetheless.  Venezuela went through some extreme changes around the time of WWII, which drastically transformed them from being an agrarian society to an industrial society.  This dramatic shift created a social dichotomy which was caused in part by industrialization and the finding of their most prominent natural resource, oil.  This created a great divide between the classes because unlike in the US where each person owns their own land, the Venezuelan government own all the land and so the general population did not benefit from the find of oil.  To remedy this problem, the government decided to undertake a great project, urbanizing and rebranding the city of Guayana.  The population density was very low and space underutilized due to the land not being fertile, it however proved to be a great site for an industrial city.  The city, after its initial construction had received great criticism from those who had visited, as it is a long road with three main nodes which make up the city.  Depending on how one measures success, I would say that the city is in fact successful despite former criticism.  Since it was built the population greatly increased and is still growing.  I would say that this is perhaps even more successful than some of our cities in the United States.  If an uninhabited or even an inhabited land with the potential of an industrial site was implemented in the same way Guayana was, I think we would be able to fix many of our cities in the us which were once hot spots for industry and now have begun to decay such as Detroit and some areas of Pennsylvania.  I think it is the way the city was [planned and not necessarily the location which gave it such success.  The form of the city is not 100% ideal in all cases, however using the strengths of the site such as wind direction, land area, natural resources and barriers as Guayana uses would produce an efficient, booming city.  The idea of a linear city may have4 a place as well, but I believe it can perhaps be modified to a triangle or something else to better suit the demands of a city.   

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  3. I am not seeing a Week 3 posting section, this is for week 3.

    Modernism Made Vernacular

    The argument is how architecture is perceived. Through outside influence the idea of different movements can become desired in a populated area. In terms of Brazil, the debate is whether the designing/ materiality was done out of impressionistic reasoning or beneficial reasoning. Beneficial reasoning as in understanding the elements that are modern architecture (concrete)is a great use of protection and in hot environments can take a greater deal of time to absorb the heat. Lara feels it is for the beneficial purposes due to the traditional floor plans inside the modern envelope. The envelope itself is due to the outside impressions of government and architects, it also helps to want and desire what the rich have. Leading the want for modern appearances.

    Beyond the City

    “Peattie argued that the actors involved in the design of Ciudad Guayana were envisioning a Platonic city, a symbol of modernization and progress, while the reality on the ground was an Aristotelian city, characterized by local initiatives and idiosyncratic urban forms.” (Ch. 4, P. 101) The mass production of the city had setbacks in the case of design example being, taking major hubs for the city and using non monumental approaches. However developing housing for all incomes in one neighborhood is a movement towards a strong social environment. The debate is even though the mass development has it’s weak points, it developed a city hub that stands larger today, in a rural region that supplied most of the resources needed to construct.

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  4. An Ecological Approach to the Study of Urban Spaces: the Case of a Shantytown in Brasilia
    Gustavo Ribeiro

    I think Ribeiro’s use of ‘unplanned’ to describe a shantytown is perverse. Life is not planned, meaning the act of living is not planned. Neither by its inception (at the molecular level) nor by sustenance. So to say ‘unplanned shantytown’ implies that there is an alternative form of shantytown people could opt for. In urban societies people plan strategies to survive and they plan for experiences because they exist within the means to do so. To say the vernacular fabric evolved as a result of people not planning, to my mind ignores the essence of how people live. I think Ribeiro takes for granted his perspective as an educated individual living in a developed and highly organized urban fabric. Because, I think Ribeiro implies all organization is a result of planning where I argue organization can be an act itself without a postlude, that Ribeiro implies is planning.

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    1. I think “planning” simply refers to a larger scale plan than whatever plans are made by individuals or families or builders. Similarly, medieval European cities are unplanned.

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  5. From a comparison of “modernity” between Latin American examples and those from the United States, it seems to be apparent to me that in many ways the United States did not need “modernity” to carry it into the future in the post-war years. After World War II the most famous urban planning technique in the United States was the typical American suburb – separated from the city with single family homes and yard surrounded by white picket fences. The ideal life in post-World War II America moved the average working American away from their workplace in the city. This is in direct contradiction to the idea of a functionalist city brought at CIAM’s 4th Congress and seems to be the major difference between city planning in the United States and in Latin America. Many South American cities, like Ciudad Guyana and Brasilia, housed a large number of low-income residents. With less financial resources available to them, it was obvious to the modernists that locating the residential zones close to the workplace was a viable solution to increase the standard of living for low-income urban dwellers. While Lara mentions a number of different reasons why modernism might not have taken off in the United States, it seems to be that the lack of disorganization in American cities possibly held the development of modernism from taking root in the United States.

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  6. Beyond the City
    Felipe Correa

    It was interesting to learn that migration, hydrocarbon-fuel, and the oil boom contributed to the drastic shift from agriculture to urban culture in Venezuela, as opposed to factory jobs in other cities. But I question what spurred urbanization in southern Venezuela despite not having initial part in the oil or hydrocarbon-fuel as the north did. Here are a couple points I found interesting but not sure what else to say about them:

    -“if regional policy reflects the existence of geographic and spatial inequities, it also reflects an awareness of the importance of a regional approach to the implementation of national growth objectives”
    -the phenomenon of ‘completely new, architect-designed metropolis’ this concept makes me sick, actually
    -notion of linear city. seems counterintuitive to me, I immediately think of the inevitable parts of town that will become plighted with poverty or crime and a linear city plan would encourage its isolation making it easy to cross over or perhaps it will be the neighborhood at the end that is never visited.

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  7. Beyond The City: Resource Extraction Urbanism in South America

    An industrial base provided the economy and people for which a city was to grow. The consideration of informal settlements in the planning of housing would accommodate the lowest rung of people, while blocks of townhouses and semi-detached homes appeared wildly popular with the managerial class. It is the former integration of informal settlement that would prove most successful and exportable a strategy. Extralegal areas and the possibility of future upgrades seemed to mimic the patterns of informality and its planning gave some structure to an otherwise negatively haphazard outcome.
    The overt segregation of working classes seems a pity and a direct result of the need to plan in controls, as conceived by the CVG’s (Corporacion Venezolana de Guayana) consultants the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard. Also unfortunate were the vacancies of ‘key parcels’ (p.106) that contributed to a sense of emptiness, as noted: “the avenue resembles a service corridor rather than a regal boulevard,” due to the gradual infill of blocks surrounding it.

    Modernism Made Vernacular: The Brazilian Case

    Favelas typically connote dense communities of informal construction. The discovery of their intrinsic tie to the dissemination of modernist style into Brazil comes as a revelation. It seems that “high architecture” became desirable to the middle class populations within Brazilia and accompanying developments. Thanks to a law pertaining to single-family housing, the process of ‘autoconstruction’ enabled individuals (non-professionals) to design their own homes with the only requirement being professional construction supervision. This freedom of owner as designer invited the appropriation of modernist Architectural elements, only preserving traditional interior plans suited to familiar ways of living.
    The builders who executed these owner’s designs often lived in the favelas. Modernist techniques of construction and materiality permeated into their own dwellings, showing how pervasive modernism was throughout the social classes. This observation allows the author to classify the agglomerated style as vernacular which is a curiosity indeed.

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  8. Who said modernism was European?

    When looking at the pictures of Lara’s article “Modernism Made Vernacular”, I felt this refreshing feeling of watching something familiar. Those are the kind of houses you can find in a lot of places back in Colombia. One floor houses -with brisoleils and sleek varandas- are easy to find constructions in Bogotá, the capital city, and in any other town in the middle of nowhere. They all feel very Colombian, but it was until I read Lara’s piece, that I wondered about their origin, let alone if they were a vernacular “architectless” interpretation of a European theory that was word-of-mouth taught.

    I find the Brazilian case eye-opening: How did Favela builders learn the principles of Modern Architecture, which has clearly influenced their construction methods? Of course, calling a slum house an example of Modernism is absolute nonsense, but you can tell the influence. Even more, why would a considerable amount of “self-constructed” houses use the principles of Modernism, instead of a more traditional type of architecture?

    The reason may reside in the fact that, historically, architects have designed only for the 1%. Meanwhile, most population has survived without the help of architects, until the arrival of Modernism. Maybe, it was with Modernism that for the first-time architecture demonstrated a clear intention of solving problems that were crucial for most people. And it worked.

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    How a new city is born:

    Felipe Correa’s text, “A New Industrial Frontier: Ciudad Guayana”, describes in general terms how a political decision led the creation of a “Designed in America” city, in the shores of the Orinoco river; a city in where now days 1 million people live. There was a necessity / situation / goal, then a master plan executed over half century, and finally a result for this experiment. The author describes this process in a chronological and detailed way, so the reader can get a general idea of the whole situation. Nonetheless, I felt that some important points were left undeveloped, including this one:

    “Lisa Redfield Peattie, an anthropologist who was part of the planning team that shaped Ciudad Guayana, emerged as its harshest critic. Peattie argued that the actors involved in the design of Ciudad Guayana were envisioning a Platonic city, a symbol of modernization and progress, while the reality on the ground was an Aristotelian city, characterized by local initiatives and idiosyncratic urban forms.”

    Why she says that? What does she mean by “Aristotelian city”? How the built context reflects this affirmation?

    The article is very rich in describing the reasons that led the creation of Ciudad Guayana, but fails to define in detail the positive and negative outcomes of a city planned in the desks of MIT and Harvard. I was left wondering about important facts such as: Are there informal urbanizations that didn’t follow the proposed zoning rules? Or is Ciudad Guayana a city that exemplifies that planned urbanism can tackle problems that are common in other older Latin American cities.? Furthermore, the author avoids to state that the principal goal, which was creating a new industrial hub aimed to diversify Venezuela’s economy, was not met. Today Venezuela is submerged in a deep social, political and economic crisis, deeply rooted in its dependency on oil.

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    1. I agree, it is very sad that Rómulo Betancourt’s diversification efforts were mostly ignored entirely. Perhaps Correa thought pointing at the current state of Venezuela would be shooting fish in a barrel…

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  9. I enjoyed Lara’s study on vernacular modernism because we spend so much time in survey classes defining these terms independently. It’s a classic case of comparing high Architecture to building: Modernism is the former, and vernacular Brazilian favelas are hardly even buildings. The author presents an excellent narrative of how Modernism transformed into favelas in Rio in ways that actually defy modernism; that they are organically ordered and reveal the hand of its maker. Here, I’m interested in what Lara refers to as “transculturation,” or cultural hybridization. Is a Brazilian mason inspired by the middle-class Modernist homes he’s building appropriating a European high style of architecture when he applies the same tenets to his family’s favela? What about the middle-class homeowner who is also commissioning vernacular modernism? It’s interesting how there are multiple layers of the vernacular in Brazil that present greater and greater contrasting comparisons to Modernism. Who is more guilty of cultural appropriation here? Can we even call it that?

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  10. BEYOND THE CITY

    I found really interesting the way the city of Guayana became a new industrial frontier. Especially, the way how it had to face the accommodation of the fast-paced migration that new productivity in the region would attract and became a new economic centre competing with other cities like Barcelona or Caracas.

    Also, I considered interesting the analysis of the design project for Ciudad Guayana fifty years after its initial conception. Investigating its evolution during these years it helps to know if the urban model have changed along this period and if time has helped to the city build upon its original concepts and adapt them to the necessities.

    Finally, at the end of the reading there is a conclusion that compares two models for urbanisation with which I’m a little confused with the last model system. Maybe due to the technical vocabulary used but I would like to understand in detail the description about the today-landscape:

    ¨Yet it is evident that the plan’s rudimentary implementation provides a model for urbanization that is far more successful than many of the contemporary resource extraction landscapes that we see today-landscapes where the city is rendered a byproduct ofmyopic production metrics, excising the social contract once embedded in the extraction process.¨

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    1. I believe it means that while not entirely successful and probably blinkered in many ways, Ciudad Guayana’s planners at least tried to make a good place to live – for all. Current cities and systems are strictly market driven, and today’s capitalist system no longer believes in any form of a social contract.

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  11. As the urban space changes physically and socially, its relationship with the environment changes. However, because the urban growth was often haphazard and unregulated, it took a while to realize and respond to the environmental changes. Peterson explores one such interaction – the one between urban space and infectious diseases. The paper examines the three in which sanitary reform was brought about – water carriage sewerage, sanitary survey planning and townsite consciousness.

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    Lara’s exploration of modernism’s assimilation into the Brazilian vernacular is a fascinating one. In her actions of cataloging and researching, she reveals how the language of ‘high architecture’ overtime became the local language that everyone speaks. It makes me thinks about how the Indo-Saracenic architecture is not quite seen as foreign in South-East Asia (at least not to the general public). As Lara mentions, in Brazil, this adoption of the modernism was made possible due to the country’s general embrace of modernization (and all the progress it is supposed to entail).

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  12. In the reading of “Beyond the City, Resource Extraction Urbanism In South America”, It talk about how the City of Guayana was been design and constructed, which depends on the natural resource to promote the city developed as a center of economic system in the South America regional. And the result of the economic growth bring the “iron city” population growth and develop the city planning as a modern style, “a linear for to give order by linking a series of existing and proposed centralities that in summation would make up the totality of the city”. I don’t really understanding the reason why the Architect design a linear city. I don’t agree with it in consider of traffic circulation, I think if their is anything happen at the any point of this “linear axial” such as rapid fire. It is dangerous to allow another side of the people to access the opposite.

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  13. The reading is about Richard Neutra’s unknown work in Latin America. In their description I have found 3 engaging ideas that nowadays are discussing and being questioned:

    – Architecture is not what modernism stated as architecture. It is not only a formal language. The architecture needs to be translate in built enviroments in relation with so much more agents such as climate conditions, social context, economic situation, politics meaning… Therefore, what is really interesting is how Neutra could introduce more agents in the elitist discipline and translate the modernism language in a social structure (opening the discipline to social needs instead to not only stylize the power). He advances one challenge that architects did not realize: design the relation between power and resources. Achieving inclusive designs for the daily life rejecting the pre-designed solutions that the modernism language was used to.

    – The second one is the consequence of the previous point, and it came out wondering what is the urbanism and architecture. May be the building as we know nowadays is dead. Therefore, architecture is not only about the built construction. That last fact makes that urbanisms are composed by all kind of occurrences, it switchs the building for the actual situations by themselves. That open-mentality forced to change the scale and analyze architecture globally; not only by isolated buildings. It is announced by Neutra:

    “”“Architecture, when it connotes planning the constructed environment at large, is a social issue of the first order. It is, in Brazil as in North America, an issue of public economics and internal and foreign politics as well. The properly balanced, contemporary reconstruction of the setting for social life in the various countries of the planet will ease strains and stresses everywhere.”””

    – The last concept might summarize the whole reading by the idea of the contamination of the globalization. Richard Neutra himself is the best example. He was born in Austria, he grew up within European academy, he developed his renowned work in US and then finally he was interest by the Latin American urban growth. So, is that issue a problem?

    This last question is discussed in the second reading “Modernism made vernacular” where it is associated juxtaposed concepts: vernacular and the modernism even if they have the same technology system in a favela than a wealthy house. It is here when we understand that architecture and urbanism can´t be still taught as objects in an empty space, but rather as a social agreement that involves a lot of agents in a big scale.

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