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    Ode to the Void
    Ode to the Void
    Ode to the Void
    Ebook116 pages58 minutes

    Ode to the Void

    By Carlos M. Teixeira

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    About this ebook

    The second book of the collection "Latin America: Thoughts" presents Carlos Teixeira's texts written between 1999 and 2015, previously published in Vitruvius, architecture portal in Brazil. This republication is not a simple collection, but rather a curated selection that defines a coherent and articulate narrative with texts previously isolated, illuminating some simple themes - social segregation, spatial fragmentation, car-oriented urbanism - and some unusual ones- the grass, the void, the reverse, the stilts.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRomano Guerra Editora
    Release dateDec 20, 2016
    ISBN9788588585614
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      Book preview

      Ode to the Void - Carlos M. Teixeira

      LATIN AMERICA: THOUGHTS

      Romano Guerra Editora

      Nhamerica Platform

      MANAGEMENT COORDINATION

      Abilio Guerra, Fernando Luiz Lara e Silvana Romano Santos

      ODE TO THE VOID

      Carlos M. Teixeira

      Brasil 02

      EDITORS

      Abilio Guerra, Fernando Luiz Lara e Silvana Romano Santos

      EDITORIAL STAFF

      Silvana Romano Santos, Fernando Luiz Lara, Abilio Guerra,

      Fernanda Critelli e Caio Sens

      GRAPHIC DESIGN

      Maria Claudia Levy e Ana Luiza David (Goma Oficina)

      FORMATTING

      Caio Sens e Fernanda Critelli

      EBOOK FORMATTING

      Natalli Tami

      TRANSLATION

      Anthony Doyle, Carlos M. Teixeira, John Norman,

      L’Architecture D’Aujourd’hui

      TRANSLATION REVIEW

      Carlos M. Teixeira and Fernando Luiz Lara

      foreword

      the true nature of brasília

      wild grass

      freedom, it’s a void

      palafittes manifest

      topographical amnesias

      palafittes

      history of the corridor

      alphaville and ‘alphaville’

      exposed inside out

      project jari

      fordland

      ariaú jungle towers

      landscape as conflict

      foreword

      Written between 1999 and 2015, the texts in this book were previously published in the Vitruvius online journal, which has been establishing itself as the largest channel for architecture debates since the 2000s. This republication, however, is not a simple collection, but a compilation of essays that seeks to provide synergy to texts once isolated and that here define a more coherent and articulated narrative.

      The more incisive of them is The true Nature of Brasília, a praise to the cerrado (a Brazilian savannah) and a dreamlike reverse way of seeing the city: Brasília did not conquer the cerrado — on the contrary, the cerrado has conquered the city (or it is about to conquer it). Despite the Pilot Plan’s superquadras begging for more architectural substance, what actually happens is that the voids are much more eloquent than the solids: it is a sparse city amid of a sea of grass that should be reconsidered by the potential of these ignored weeds, which are the insidious and real protagonists of that landscape.

      These same weeds are taken to the context of unplanned cities in Wild grass, an essay on a false encyclopedia tone that denounces the lack of green areas and public spaces, extols vacant lots and expands the concept of what may be regarded as landscaping. Wild grass is a negotiation with the disorder and the unforeseen and, above all, an exalted way to accept the imperfections of the city.

      Freedom, it is a void is part of the book Under construction: History of the void in Belo Horizonte (Teixeira, 1999) that endorses an adversative stance against the technicist planning. An ode to the city which is at once efficient and inefficient, complete and incomplete, the essay proposes a radical solution to the waywardness of modern urbanism. Here, the voids are less an operative tool and more of a volatile and changing resource that we need to detect, and which should be "as exciting and enigmatic as a perfect crime is to the traditional controllers of the city. Correspondingly, Topographical Amnesias" describes a series of ephemeral actions that use Under construction’s resources as a guide for urban interventions.

      The idea of the potentiality of voids is also present in History of the corridor, an essay in which this avoided space usually acting as a distributor of movements is seen as an enabler of delirious uses.

      In a twist to a factual criticism of here and now, Alphaville and ‘Alphaville’ attacks the social segregation and spatial fragmentation caused by gated communities and urban enclaves — mistakes of the laissez-faire urban planning practiced in Brazil and other countries where we notice an absence of the state as a regulator of the city development. The same grim tone appears in Exposed inside-out, a photo essay showing how the car-centric urbanism still plagues the country's big cities.

      The latter texts take up the subject related to the relationship between nature and the city. Jari Project and Fordland constitute fables about the onslaughts of capitalism over the Amazonian forest and criticize the view of nature as an infinite resource. Both were catastrophic endeavors that lend themselves not only as anti-models of economic developments, but also as a demonstration of the forest resilience against the attempts of using its resources in a predatory way.

      This same resilience of nature is the subject of Landscape as conflict, a manifesto that looks to architecture as the provocateur of a landscaping which is conflictive par excellence, reveling in destruction and reconstruction, never in simple conservation.

      Ariaú Jungle Towers presents an unprecedented example of green architecture lost in River Ariaú, a tributary of the River Negro not far away from Manaus. A hotel whose amazing cylindrical towers are imbued with becoming, the passage of time and the cycle of construction-use-destruction, not different from the organic cycle of birth-work-death. Those were also the ambitions of Metabolism, a Japanese avant-garde movement that impressed the world in the 1960s: theirs were mutant buildings, adaptable, capable of reacting and causing changes, and in a continuous process of construction

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