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.