Rio is not known as the safest city. There are favelas 4 situated on the hillside. Yet there is a lot we can learn from them.
The architectural design of favelas is not planned. For decades, people helped each other with constructing the unit next door (on a whim it seems!), resulting in a complex and intricate patt... See more
I’m not sure how safe Rocinha would have been if I had wandered there on my own. But from the little that I’ve seen, they are rich in culture and hold strong community values.
Living in New York City, the city is also densely packed, yet we exist independently in our own spaces and spend a lifetime not knowing our immediate neighbors. While in Rocin... See more
But I also love the way that buildings are — they’re these huge structures that we have accepted as the places we go in to get what we need, or to sleep, or to work, or whatever. They’re also these huge towering structures. I think of them as if they’re creatures; they’re other kinds of beings. Sometimes we don’t even touch them. I’m interested in ... See more
I’ve talked about architecture for a long time. I feel like it emerged out of questions I used to have — or answers I used to find — in the city. I used to want to write about the city all the time and a lot of my books take place in cities. Then I used to talk about the sentence as a city, as a space to mov... See more
EVERYTHING IS ARCHITECTURE Alles ist Architektur is the title of a manifesto published in magazine Bau by Hans Hollein in 1968. According to Hollein, the traditional definition of architecture is no longer relevant. ‘Our efforts are focused on the en -vironment as a whole and all media that deter mine it. Television as well as the artificial climat... See more
'Architects have to stop thinking in terms of buildings only. Built and physical architecture, freed from the technological limitations of the past, will more intensely work with spatial qualities as well as the psychological ones. The process of erection will get a new meaning, spaces will have more consciously have haptic, optic and acoustic prop... See more