the INCREMENTAL house

The front of my home Fearless guard dogs Courtyard space Front Entry Second floor which will eventually become a restaurant I rented a room from a wonderful woman named Benigna. While the public space outside it is pretty dead and very little public/private interaction, it is much more complex and interesting once you get past the exterior walls. As Benigna was showing me around and introducing me to the neighbors (in her own plot), it was clear there was like a mini community there. Beniqna stays next to me with her daughter. Below her stays Casta. And on the bottom floor of the new building is Remejio with well, he couldn’t really tell me. Benigua said 10, as I looked through the crack and saw at least 4 kids peaking through, getting a peak at the gringo. Remejio said they had a squadron, and he never quite knew how many. Building at the back of the lot where my room was My building was on the back of a lot. This is where Beniqna stays next to me...

Pedregulho and Context On the way to the Metro Pedregulho entrance Studio favela edge favela edge favela upgrading While in Rio , I visited Pedregulho housing, designed by Affonso Eduardo Reidy and built around 1950. It has 6 floors and 272 apartments. It is quite a contrast to anything around there, and neatly connects with the terrain as it weaves around the hillside. The third floor offers is open and offers a great experience of moving into the building, and then gains a commanding view of the surrounding neighborhood, which off to one side consists of a very dense fabric of favelas. However, they both seem to relate to each other, with the colors, and texture of lived in buildings. There, I initially saw two options on where to get involved on the housing issues for architects and planners. And that was a tough option. Pedregulho (architect’s disregard for people’s lives) on the left and the favelas (state and society’s disregard for people...

The marked and empty buildings are striking. There are so many of them, but they have still continued to have an active live and connection people even though their formal uses have disappeared. Some buildings just aren’t finished. And while some are just ‘tagged’ others have been taken over by people seeking housing and shelter in good locations. If there are so many empty spaces (40,000 abandoned buildings) and so many people that need housing (15,000 homeless people), why not? And Sao Paulo is a city of extremes. For a couple of years, Sao Paulo had the largest squat in Latin America . I think it would be hard to find a larger one in the world. Stretched over 22 floors (without working elevators) close to 3,000 people occupied this building for almost two years. The Prestes Maia building was occupied by the Movimento Sem Teto (MSTC) ‘roofless’, extending out of Brazil’s strong Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST) ‘landless’ to bring attention to crazy and diffi...

The Unidad Vecinal Portales is a massive housing complex just north of the main bus terminal. I don’t know the exact number of units, but it must approach 1000. It is quite a striking modernist project designed in 1950 by B.V.C.H. (Bresciani, Valdés, Castillo y Huidobro) and was constructed between 1952 and 1956. It has quite a striking variety of buildings, all originally connected through broad walkways and interior streets. In the larger blocks, housing is a variety of one and two story units. In between the blocks are units, designed like rowhouses. Each of these have a front and backyard. These were originally placed under a lot of the walkways, but over the years, these walkways have been closed off and used to create pitched roofs over the homes. It is a very strange experience to be walking along and see the walkway in front of you end in someone’s roof. One of the residents told me that it was because young kids would hang out all night being rowdy and the only wa...

While in Antofogasta, I visited a project called Salar de Carmen. It was designed by Mario Perez de Arce and Jaime Besa in 1959 and encompassed 850 homes. It was very much in the modernist tradition and while originally was a very striking project, has since been transformed into an unrecognizable project, almost blending in with the vernacular of the surrounding neighborhoods. The original design in 1961 1961 and 2008 Additions and Transformations Each of these corners were originally the same design A typical street elevation showing the variety, transformation and progress of the fabric Context today