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Design Omnibus: Rebel Architect

By Peggy Roalf   Thursday December 1, 2016

In the favela of Rocinha, in Rio de Janeiro, there is a man who has spent 25 years building over 100 apartments, several stores and even some churches. Nicknamed the ‘Engineer of Rua 2’, Ricardo de Olivera has no formal training in architecture and design. He says that he never needs to draw anything because he can build from his mind’s eye.

Using the simplest of hand tools, and helped by a couple of neighbors, he is passionate about improving conditions in his favela – and keeping at bay the very real threat of gentrification as poverty tourism expands in Rio.

Watching a video about the construction of his new family home, it becomes evident that the opposite of design is not so much the random proliferation of stuff as it is the agglomeration of matter.

 

Known as the pedreiro, or brick-layer, Ricardo says that there are no more empty plots in Rocinha, so the expansion continues skyward. On any mild weekend afternoon you can pick out half a dozen builders preparing new stairways up to their rooftops. Here, he says, “whenever you are building a ceiling, you are also building a floor.”

The plot of land he inherited from his grandfather, one of the first settlers of the favela who arrived to occupy the mountain-side almost a century ago, has morphed from housing a wooden shack, to a small house to the six-storey apartment block now under construction, which will be topped with a dark-room observatory for his telescope.

Luis Carlos Toledo, an urban planner who has made Rocinha his labor of love for the past decade, says “Urbanism can dramatically change people’s lives. If it weren’t for the narrow alleys in the favela, drug criminals wouldn’t be able to play their game of cat and mouse. Design is one way to change how these places work.”

Two sides of the coin persist in Rocinha, largely due to the city’s policy of funding tourism rather than dealing with their slums. Toledo concluded, “The way people build in Rocinha is a clue to the future of the favela. People are not just trying to fit more people in the same space they are trying to copy the middle class while living in the favelas…they are building pools and gardens. People are now proud of their homes. This is the transition between squatter and citizen. The citizen will begin to ask, 'Where is the infrastructure to my city?' and then come the [larger] changes.” Information courtesy Al Jazeera

Watch a video by May Abdalla of Ricardo de Olivera building in Rocinha here.
Watch a video by Maluco Nacho of poverty tourism in Rocinha here.


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