The Architecture of Redemption: A House on the Periphery of the Discipline

 

“Intellectuals are the ones who like misery, poor people actually like luxury!” Forged in the sociology of everyday life and sensitive to the aesthetics of the media and the masses, this quote from the famous samba artist Joãozinho Trinta sheds light on the contradictions of a Brazilian intelligentsia fond of the aestheticization of poverty. The Casa da Vila Matilde seems to belong to the category of objects produced, both materially and narratively, to serve as justification for this type of populist progressivism. Far beyond the classic debate between popular and pop, the work we are going to analyze is a sui generis case of lack of exceptionality.

The production of the house in the year of 2015 is commonplace: Dona Dalva, a client with few resources who lives in an unhealthy and precarious house, decides to remodel it. Seeing that this would not be possible, she decides, together with the architects, to demolish the existing house and build a new one. The whole process takes one year. The lot has the traditional dimensions of the city’s peripheral subdivisions: five by twenty-five meters. Long and narrow, it imposes the challenge of guaranteeing good lighting and ventilation to all rooms. To do this, the architects create a central patio that separates the social area from the private area, the two being connected by a functional corridor that shelters a sequence of service spaces: bathroom, kitchen, and laundry. The elegant distribution of the plan allows cross-ventilation in the front portion of the house and insolation in the master bedroom. The intelligent placement of permanent ventilation windows on top of the bathrooms, facing the stairway topped by a zenithal opening, optimizes the air exchange and illumination of these environments. In addition, the upper floor has a terrace that, added to the vertical garden on the first floor, responds to the pleasure that Dona Dalva finds in gardening.

In a country where nine out of ten buildings are built without the involvement of an ar- chitect, we must highlight the architectural quality of the project.¹ A simple but efficient design, comprising a built area just under one hundred square meters, the house won the Building of the Year by popular vote on the ArchDaily website in 2016, as well as the Azkonobel Award from the Tomie Ohtake Institute, having represented Brazil at international events such as the Venice Architecture Biennale. Furthermore, what can be considered a rare phenome- non in Brazilian architecture occurred: the house appeared in several nonspecialized media outlets, ranging from weekly magazines to television shows and YouTube channels. After being ignored for a period of almost five years, the project was once again in the spotlight when the Argentinean newspaper La Nación recently praised it saying, that it stood out for its “innovation and high architectural quality.”² 

To understand if the work lives up to the praise, and also to understand the reason for all this visibility, the project will be broken down to its two central aspects: its form (construction, lan- guage, typology) and the discourse generated from its construction (disciplinary narratives, the reception policies for such works).

What we will see throughout the formal analysis of the house is that a kind of “typological overlapping” occurs. In other words, we can notice at all times a concurrence of formal solu- tions, between the vernacular of self-construction, typical of the Brazilian suburbs, and the erudite project of the architects. This overlapping, however, is not even remotely an aesthetic negotiation nor a linguistic or constructive strategy. It is, rather, an opportune coincidence. Two constructive universes that are strangers to each other are simultaneously unified and repelled, generating a fiction that suggests conciliation, but which, as we will see, is rather a negation.

In spite of the restricted budget, and even considering the demolition that was carried out, the amount of 150,000 reais (38,000 US dollars) spent on construction of the house is completely in line with the expected cost for this kind of building. As the authors of the project remind us, the house was not cheap: it cost what it should cost. The main issue was where to invest the money. In this sense, there are two fallacies: the first says that the cement block was the most rational and economical option for the project; the second says that the choice of unfinished surfaces was financial.

The authors inform us that they chose the concrete block, among other reasons, due to previous experiences with the material, notably in an earlier project, known as the Casa Maracanã (2009)3 , authored by one of the associates. In fact, if we compare the two houses they are materially identical. However, we cannot say that the two used concrete blocks for the same budgetary reasons. What is not clearly stated by the architects is that this choice is mainly aesthetic, having deep roots in erudite traditions that flourished locally. The office is part of the third generation of architects inspired by the brutalist modern architecture of the 1950s to the 1970s in São Paulo. The use of exposed concrete, as well as the search for structural and technical virtuosity, constitutes the primary features of their architectural language. In these houses, instead of concrete cast on-site, they used concrete blocks—also a standard material in the works of, but used less by, local brutalist architects—synthesizing a different tectonic from many of the works that inspired them, such as the FAUUSP building by Vilanova Artigas and Carlos Cascaldi (1969). The block is thus a kind of promise, albeit an old one, that technique itself can be an instrument in our social emancipation. Sufficiently industrial in its production and artisanal in its assembly, this element synthesizes the contradictions of a contemporary Brazilian practice.

But the question still remains whether the block could, in fact, be an interesting structural solution. After all, it is more standardized and robust than the traditional ceramic block (which it denies and alludes to at the same time), allowing a more rationalized construction site. But it is no mere coincidence that Brazilian favelas and periphery houses are red. The ceramic block, both as a seal and as a structural element, costs 30 percent less than the concrete block and is 40 percent lighter, which facilitates its transportation within the construction site. In addition, the ceramic block offers better thermal insulation than its concrete counterpart. In contrast to the traditional column-beam system that we see in those self-constructed houses, the architects used a system that was alien to the project’s context; that is, the structuring of the floor slabs on perimeter walls. What we see, therefore, is an exogenous technique—distinct, implanted without the traditional know-how.

Which brings us to another issue. Imbued with a shrewdness typically seen in São Paulo’s brutalist movement, the “unfinished” part of the house is, according to the authors, intended as a free space for the owner to personalize and customize. If this were the main motivation for the choice of materials, one would expect the house to be ready to receive such finishes, and this is not the case. Ideally, the burnt cement floor would need to have a subfloor to receive any finished floor, from ceramic tile to wood parquet. The same can be said for the electrical and lighting system. The conduit fixed on the concrete block does not allow a proper finishing with putty and paint, because, unlike the traditional socket, it has no depth adjustment. The whole system, metallic cases and visible tubes, would have to be uninstalled and then reinstalled on the newly plastered wall. The house was not designed to receive the client’s “customization”; that claim is a complete fabrication. It is finished. It was designed and executed with materials that work well as they are, but not so well when other layers are applied.

Finishes usually account for about one-third of the total value of a house. Since they can be done later, it is actually a good strategy to initially invest more of one’s money in the structural elements of the space. However, in this specific case, the gain is quite relative. Besides the reasons presented above, both the concrete block and the precast slab need to be coated with a proper resin for maintenance, the price of which is close to that of economical finishing solutions, such as painting directly on the structure. The burnt cement floor usually costs a little more than leaving the slab exposed, and if it is not done to perfection, it will develop several cracks throughout its useful life. The client herself said in interviews that what bothers her most is the absence of a ceramic floor, which will be her first addition to the house.⁴ 

With the relocation of the budget to doors and windows, custom-made and according to a very elegant design, the architects made a choice that is, again, more aesthetic than economical. The doors are made entirely of wood, floor-to-ceiling, pivoted on an asymmetrical axis, and topped by wooden lintels. All the windows are also floor-to-ceiling—tripartite, with the middle module made to be opened—in black aluminum. In other words, the modernist language is starkly contradicted, since the only element that is actually designed is exactly the one that depends on a bespoke system of craft for its production. The promise of industrialization/massification of the modern project is limited to prototypes multiplied ad nauseam, not in any kind of interpretation or negotiation of the architect in the productive cycle of the construction industry. In this sense, a perfect counterpoint to the Casa da Vila Matilde is the Casa do Caseiro, built four years previously by the firm 24 7 Arquitetura. Also a simple house for residents on a low income, it has a built area of only seventy square meters and cost 50,000 reais (23,000 US dollars). Unlike the Casa da Vila Matilde, however, it has finishing in every room and uses mass-market doors and windows. It is, in many ways, a house more in tune with the social and cultural reality of its clients, and it represents an entirely different set of values regarding what does or does not matter in a low-budget house.
In the end, what distinguishes the two houses is that the Terra e Tuma house seeks distinction: a house made by architects needs to look like it was made by architects. And here we are talking about a distinction very typical of the intellectuality Joãozinho Trinta described. A progressive São Paulo elite that has in austerity—or, if you like, in the “minimalist style”—a strong element of social differentiation. As individuals who carry the bourgeois guilt of pos- sessing resources in a country of astounding social inequality, they opt for a construction devoid of ornament, color, excess, or individuality.

Marcos Napolitano, in analyzing the work of sociologist Marcelo Ridenti,⁵ reminds us of the oversizing of the category “people” in the 1960s within this Brazilian intellectuality. That same late romanticism can be seen, in this case, in the reiteration of the use of apparent materials in architecture. What in the 1960s was narratively constituted as “material honesty,” capable of bringing class consciousness to poor people, today remains a desire, albeit a decadent one, for the enlightenment of the poor. That is, the materiality of the Casa da Vila Matilde can be read as a will to teach the poor how to build. The question is: what is the point of trying to teach the poor about what they already experience intimately every day? In this sense, there echoes a notion that the architect knows how to build better than the bricklayer, and that they need to teach the latter how to do their job correctly. It is like saying: “Concrete blocks are better than ceramic blocks, haven’t you got it yet?”

The same can be said of the upper floor slab designed by the architects. This slab does not have a guardrail on the front, only one at the side overlooking the space that leads to the patio. This decision responds to the architects’ desire to not interfere with the facade—a wall at half height, or even the use of the same metal railing as at the back, would impair the sense of continuity between the perimeter wall and the facade in front of the house—resulting in a solution for the residents’ safety that is incomplete, to say the least. Furthermore, this slab is not open, free to adapt to any use, but determined, because a box filled with expanded clay, a garden of sorts, was built on top for thermal insulation—which was necessary, after all. In this sense it overwrites the famous “waiting slab” of the slums and peripheral houses, at once the ceiling and the promise of another floor in the never-ending process of house growth. Of course, we can say that this element can very easily be demolished when a new room is built, but it still expresses that the slab is not a space of free use, or constructive power, but rather a sculptural element of completion. Were it not so, the room below would not depend on this clay for adequate thermal insulation rather than the traditional system of concrete beams with ceramic block enclosure that, having a better thermal insulation, would better solve this issue.

The analyzed elements—such as the concrete block and the burnt cement floor, the lack of finishing and the use of types such as the waiting slab—displaced from their original meaning, generate the effect that may be called “typological overlapping,” as they were not able to constitute a field of adherence or opposition to the current building system of the Brazilian peripheries. The unfinished state of the house is showcased as something new, a solution to be followed. The house thus becomes, purely and simply, a strangely familiar body—one which never generates recognition, only strangeness, for the client and the surrounding population. The house has consequently become the symbol of a professional struggle for expansion of the profession’s struggle to co-opt the informal self-construction practices used in Brazilian cities.

In 2016 the representative body of the CAU (the Council of Architecture and Urbanism) launched a nationwide campaign called “Architecture transforming lives,” with the Casa da Vila Matilde as their poster child for good, accessible architecture. The website reads: “Before starting a construction, there are always two sides: one of the architect, where there is econ- omy, order, functionality and especially the future. And another where empiricism, reaction and improvisation prevail.”⁶ In spite of the authoritarian positivism of classifying architecture as something that brings order and functionality to one’s life—and that this would be the means to achieve a better life—what draws attention is the demeaning of the construction done by the bricklayer. The text goes on to state that “buildings made with the help of architects and urban planners end up costing less than buildings made with bricklayers alone.” What we see, therefore, is a class that reproduces the same institutional arrogance that for so long was responsible for its exclusion from any political and social decisions in our country.  The house functions, thus, not as a prototype or a project of urbanity—like Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s Gerassi House, or Le Corbusier’s Ville Savoye—and much less as a sign of the struggle for the right to housing, but as an advertisement saying: “you can hire an architect”! It is not intended as a new industrial paradigm to help build the city, but as a one-by-one ser- vice. Any ideal of “housing for all,” an inalienable right provided for in Brazil’s Constitution, is replaced by a timid promise of the “house for all”—as long as everyone pays for it, of course.  

Both the project itself and the disciplinary narrative built around it point to what sociol- ogist Rosana Pinheiro-Machado has called “inclusion through consumption.”⁷ This concept aims to explain the social ascension that occurred during the Lula era (2002–2011). Through various social funding programs such as ProUni (which allowed access to private education for the poorer section of the population) or the elimination of taxes on home appliances, the government sought to improve the quality of life of a population that finally escaped from poverty. The problem is that this ascent produced citizens who understood themselves as citizens not by fighting and attaining rights, but by consumption.

The PT (Workers Party), founded in 1980 by trade unionists, local church communities, and leftist intellectuals, is one of the largest labor parties in the world, and in 2002 elected the first president of working-class origin in Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. For more than ten years, and through four mandates (the last one unfinished), the party structured a project for the country: one full of contradictions, it’s true, but rooted in values such as national sov- ereignty, investment in education and technology, and South–South diplomacy. From this period emerged strengthened globalist and regional initiatives such as Mercosur and BRICS (an acronym for the five largest emerging economies of the world at the time: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).

In the early 2010s Brazil saw the PT project derail. In a contradictory way, the June Journeys protests that occurred in the country in 2013, with an anti-party and anti-systemic bias, represented at the same time an organic mass movement that strengthened the sense of democracy in the country but also the risk of a diffused populism. According to political scientists Levitsky and Ziblatt,⁸ from 2010 to 2015 the world was experiencing the heyday of liberal democracy. From the Arab Spring of 2011 to the Black Umbrella movements in Hong Kong in 2014, struggles for a more horizontal and participatory system of representation mul- tiplied around the world. Against this democratizing aspiration, which walked side by side with feminist, black, LGBTQIA+, and other identity struggles, we have seen an aggressive backlash. The same movements that in Brazil fought for a high-quality public transportation system were co-opted by the populist right that, years later, would come to impeach the elected president Dilma Rousseff.

The architect as a professional category, bewildered like everyone else at the time, seemed brimming with the will to ascribe social meaning to a practice that had been gradually detaching itself from any cultural relevance it had ever had in the country, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. With the end of the democratic developmentalism from 1930 to 1960, and of the dictatorial developmentalism from 1960 to 1980, we were sinking into a neoliberalism that only aggravated the social inequalities afflicting our communities. The Lula era brought, in this sense, the promise of rescue through a project that would finally distribute the wealth of what was one of the six primary economies in the world.

It would not be absurd, therefore, to associate the yearning of Brazilian architects to participate in the construction of more inclusive cities with this social effervescence. From this perspective we could also understand the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, whose theme Reporting from the Front sought to “foster discussion and reflection around the role of architects in the everyday battle to improve living conditions in a wide variety of political, geographical, social, and economic contexts.”⁹ Unlike the previous iteration, organized by Rem Koolhaas, a European architect discussing the constitutive elements of architecture, this edition was curated by Latin American Alejandro Aravena, who sought to locate the limits and boundaries of the profession. When he received the Pritzker Prize that same year, Aravena was noted as a socially engaged architect.¹⁰

In any case, what we see is an exaggerated optimism, based more on voluntarism than on real political engagement. Whether in the Casa da Vila Matilde, the Biennale, or even ELEMENTAL’s “half-houses” (which are directly inspired by the 1966 Peruvian PREVI housing projects), despite their differences, one will not find any direct inspiration in the prefigurative, horizontal, and anti-systemic struggle of the popular movements of the early twenty-first cen- tury. In none of these cases resides the revolutionary tone of the previous century, but rather the aftermath of a faltering progressivism that appeals to the market dimension of its practice. The democratic regression we would see in the following years, especially Trumpism in the United States and Bolsonarism in Brazil, points to the climax of a now-declining movement: the last gasps of a professional category of architecture that optimistically, but also too naively, bets on a social reform without political ruptures.

The hypertrophy of a situation as ordinary as the construction of a popular house may be an echo of this same optimism, moments before the political collapse that would follow. To again quote Napolitano: “In these terms—a mixture of voluntarist activism and the monolithic and idealized vision of the popular classes —the relationship of the Brazilian left with the masses, the collective actors of the revolution, should be analyzed.”¹¹ In other words, the house is only justified as a cultural artifact because it is presupposed that someone was helped, aided, and led to the path of dignity through architecture. Only an idealized vision of common people as needing to be saved by leftist intellectuals (a vision contrary to the most generous sense of emancipation) could explain the euphoria surrounding the project.

By stating that “architecture does not find in people, in society, an adequate way to work,”¹² the author of the house reveals the only truly exceptional aspect of the project: its client. She was the only unusual element in the whole project cycle. She was the one who, unlike all the poorer people, hired an architect instead of a bricklayer. And yet, she always starred in the official narrative of the work as the great beneficiary, the one blessed by the blessings of architecture.

From the raison d’être of the thing, it became discourse. Interestingly, in an interview, the client says that the first thing she felt when entering the house was safety.¹³ Of course, what led her to build the house in the first place was, primarily, the risk to life that the old house represented (a piece of the roof fell on her bed). Somehow the service provided by the architects did not transcend necessity, for it did not render a home in which Dona Dalva could recognize herself. Therefore, it would not be an exaggeration to assert that, even if it is a competent project, the house does not present anything exceptional in architectural terms. There is no aesthetic re- newal in the project. There is no critical reflection on the building site or the issue of peripheric self-construction. There is no destabilization of the concepts of lot and private land ownership. There is nothing really new. The house is, thus, conservative in an inverted sense, because it conserves, deep down, an order of the past, not one for the future—like those who, after years of battle, are more concerned with strengthening their garrisons than creating new fronts for struggle. Suddenly, the progressive camp found itself surrounded by a hollowed-out aesthetic project on one side and the vertiginous growth of an antidemocratic reaction on the other. There is only one guarantee: the old formulas, even if revisited, will not build a new world. They will, at best, build the image of a world that was meant to be built.

In the end, the work’s great merit is to be common. Its trump card is to sell itself as something at hand, accessible to everyone. A popular product, not because it responds to the people’s desire for luxury or because it reexamines the necessity of yearning for it, but because it is what it can be. An architecture that can redeem us from our idiosyncrasies and finally be accessible to all. Something good, safe, something that “won’t fall down.” Something that, if you save your meager resources for thirty years, you can one day afford. And, with luck, you will be able to put in the tile floor you’ve always wanted.