101 años despues

Well it´s not quite the same voyage, but it is 101 years later.


I have learned an interesting piece of my family history while visiting an uncle in Santiago that I would like to share. Walterio Meyer Rusca left Switzerland in 1907 (at age 25) for Chile to work an 8 month contract as a railway survey engineer. He boarded a steamboat in Genova and arrived 3 weeks later in Buenos Aires. From there he went by train to Mendoza, and by small gauge train up into the Andes. He crossed the mountains by horse carriage and continued to the pacific ocean by train. A boat from the port of Valparaiso took him to the north where he worked. The following year Walterio returned to Chile again to work in the South and this time decided to stay.

Cruzando Paso de Juncal

Cuesta de los Buitres

Los ayudantes

Walterio wrote a diary of his travels and work and took many photographs which he would send home to his parents. His Diario de vida 1907-1909 Chile will be published next year in Spanish and German and will include letters and over 100 photos.

The ideal city?

Brasilia for me has been a wonderfully relaxing change of pace and lifestyle. I stayed with very good family friends with whom I toured the city (mostly from the passenger seat of a car).



Brasilia was built from scratch in the late 50´s and the masterplan was designed by Lucio Costa. It became the capital of Brazil in 1960. Monumentality, segregation and speed are the first impressions of the city. The private automobile rules here and there are separate sectors for apartments, hotels, houses, mansions, and offices.

View of the eje monumental.

Cathedral of Brasilia, Oscar Niemeyer, 1970

Brasilia´s monumental architecture left me feeling rather empty. One quickly gets over the initial shock of the expressive shapes, curves and scale of Niemeyer´s buildings and realizes that their formalism makes them feel like sculptures with little relation to the city or Brasilia´s climate. There is a very Brazilian contradiction evident here. Buildings constructed to imitate a machine aesthetic were built using low-tech construction methods by poor migrant workers from the North-East. Unfortunately, the promise of an equal city for all who built it never came true and despite Brasilia´s wealth a large amount of the population lives in poor settlements in the `satellite cities'.

I am now in Chile, having arrived in a somewhat removed state of mind - having gone directly from the discoteca to the airport for an early morning flight.

Urban Age South America

The conference was located in the beautiful Estacao Julio Prestes in downtown Sao Paulo and was a big deal for a whole bunch of local politicians. All these mayors and officials are great speakers but their statements and promises are often dubious. However, there was also a great representation of well known local and international urbanists, architects, activists and policy makers.

Some of the major themes that were discussed were...

Fragmented urban governance - ie. the boundaries of a city don´t correspond with the extent of the built up area. This leads to poor coordination between city government and other regions regarding important issues like public transport, roads, land use planning, water infrastructure and environmental regulations.

Global economic crisis - what will it mean for cities? Probably further increase in informal sectors but also potential opportunities for urban reform.

Segregation - Sao Paulo has evolved into something much more complex than the wealthy centre vs poor periphery duality. Major business centres moved out of the decaying downtown and informal settlements have continued to grow.

Small-scale interventions - Many interesting projects were presented by architects and designers that are improving life in cities such as Medellin (Colombia), Santiago de Chile, Rio de Janeiro and Mumbai.

There is much more to write of course but to finish I must add that never have I been treated so well. Paid for in full by the Alfred Herrhausen Society, we were given countless lunches, dinners, drinks and social events. It was all a bit surreal for me.

Sao Paulo

Valle Anhangabau, Centro

Edificio Copan, Oscar Niemeyer, 1953
Avenida Paulista is visible in background. According to urban age this building has the largest residential floor area in the world.

Praca Patriarca, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, 2002

SESC Pompeia, Lina Bo Bardi, 1977
Cultural and recreation centre built at the site of an abandoned factory.

FAU (Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism) Universidade da Sao Paulo
Vilanova Artigas, 1969
This building is completely open on the ground floor (as is it has no doors)

Memorial da America Latina, Oscar Niemeyer, 1987

Urban Age

There is a very interesting conference happening right now in São Paulo. I will let you know how it goes in a few days. In the meantime I highly recommend a newspaper they have published on South American cities. Check it out at http://www.urban-age.net/ then under news on the right side.

Eu falo um pouquinho portugues

Fortunately, I have escaped the firm grip of Rio de Janeiro. The city is as diverse as one could imagine and in an incredible setting (although the weather sucked). The city offered many neighbourhoods to wander, busy streets packed with vendors, beaches, architectural highlights and stark juxtapositions between wealth and poverty. A few more connections meant that I had a chance to meet some very kind architects and recent grads and proceed to mostly nod my head and pretend I understood as they rattled off their opinions on Brazilian architecture.

Rio Critical Mass: Ultima sexta-feira, 18 horas, praia de Botafogo. It was rather solitary - it seems as though (in a very Brazilian way) nothing works out as was originally planned. I do not know if I had the wrong spot or if nobody showed up.

The nightlife has been something like: day 1 sleep, day 2 jorge ben jor live at the fair, day 3 live samba club in a 19th century mansion, day 4 Arcos de Lapa street party.


Stacked Urbanism: a few notes on favelas in Rio:

This is Favela Rocinha, the largest favela in Brazil with approx. 130 000 inhabitants.
It is located in the Zona Sul, very close to Gavea and Leblon, the wealthiest neighbourhoods in the city. Rocinha is a well established favela and has benifited from government infrastructure programs. It has water, sewers, electricity, shops, retaurants, nail salons, public buses yet only a couple of streets.

The much smaller Favela Villa Canoas. The informal urbanism in this favela transforms the notion of what is a street. The alleys of this favela become the corridors of an endless informal building, and each house/room becomes a form of apartment. Integrated in the most visible manner are all types of infrastructures such as tangles of wires, open storm sewers and even shops and bars.

These two favelas may be poor, but you do not see misery nor the hundreds of homeless living on the streets of downtown. However, not all favelas are the same. Only some of Rio s estimated 750 favelas are well established and have some types of infrastructures. The favelas in the Zona Norte (where the vast majority of the population lives) are much worse off due to their distance from existing infrastructure and lack of access to jobs.


The past week has been somewhat of a cultural marathon. There are countless museums and cultural centres in both Rio and Sao Paulo. Some have very good collections housed in boring buildings, others have terrible expositions in fascinating buildings.

Alex Flemming: Sistema Uniplanetario In Memoriam Galileu Galilel, MAM RJ


28th Sao Paulo Bienal, 2nd Floor: Open Plan


On a more solemn note, in the past couple weeks Brazil has has experienced extremely bad flooding in the state of Santa Catarina and several other states. Thousands are homeless and unfortunately many people have died. No flooding has happened in Rio or Sao Paulo.