Category Archives: Ensaios

The Architecture of Openness (or Benign Tumor II)

Carlos Teixeira
An incomplete structure is an open, free, undetermined space and subject to any events and activities. Maybe that is why all the buildings are beautiful when under construction: because at this stage there is still hope they will result in some architecture, there is still room to imagine the product of that construction as [...]

Message to Oscar

Fernando Lara, former teacher at the  Taubman College (MI) and professor at the Texas University, tell us about a conversation he heard some days ago…
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Message to Oscar
Fernando L Lara
The phone ringed in the middle of the night and he got it quickly, jumping out of the bed as if a century had no weigh. On [...]

Vazio S/A – The Developer (theory)

Originally published on the online journal  Vitruvius, this text advocates the participation of architects in property development and describes an experiment developed in discipline Estudio V at Unileste-MG, taught by Wellington Cançado and Carlos Teixeira. It was a good opportunity to contrast the limitations and greed in civil construction with  the freedom of academic speculation.

Incorporations
Carlos [...]

Architectural Grafts (or Prosthesis Garden) II

The project Architectural Grafts (see ‘projects’ on Vazio S/A website) goes on with new green-magenta investigations. The photo below is a mango tree pierced by six threaded bars. Architectural Grafts I was awarded in the international contest Private Plots & Public Spots (Austria), and explores “resistances and resignations, frictions and attractions”  between nature and city.  

Architectural [...]

Koolhaas X Mies

Invited by the architect and friend Fernando Lara (Assistant Professor of the Taubman College of Architecture – University of Michigan), I’ve been to Ann Arbor as guest lecturer of his studio. Then I took the chance to visit the new architecture of Chicago, where the stir of the new Frank Gherys dims the best in [...]

My grandchildren, what is worth best: the void or the full?

Void for Dummies: writer and educator Rubem Alves has written a text about the void to his grandchildren. It is sensational!
The void
Rubem Alves
My grandchildren, today I want you to tell me, what is worth best: the void or the full? Ah! What a stupid question! Everybody knows that what is full is worth best than [...]

Give the park back to the city

Architect Roberto Andrés is a collaborator of Hoje em Dia newspaper. Published in March 2009, the text below comments the absurd history of Parque Municipal, the main park of Belo Horizonte, whose area was reduced to less than a third of its original 15,21 hectares.
Devolver o Parque à cidade
Roberto R. Andrés
The Parque Municipal [...]

“Investment” in the slums

The newest policy of intervention in the slums of Rio de Janeiro: the building of a three metre high wall to “avoid their expansion”. Wellington Cançado, architect and co-organizer of the book  Collateral Spaces (see post Collateral Spaces – bilingual website above), comments on the piece of news.
The Wall
Wellington Cançado

“Rio begins the construction of a [...]

TERRITORY: TIME – Marta Bogéa

We present below the text “Território: Tempo” [Territoty: Time], by architect Marta Bogéa where the architectonic intervention is understood as an overlap of spaces and times. “Território: Tempo” was launched in the Architecture Forum of the Universidad San Francisco, in Quito.
TERRITORY: TIME
Marta Bogéa

IN TIME OF SPACE
The materiality of architecture lies in space. But [...]

Arte Cidade Urban Fabric

Schie 2.0/ Urban Fabric
Carlos Teixeira
This text was commissioned by the philosopher-curator Nelson Brissac to the still unpublished “Arte Cidade Zona Leste”. With projects spread through Pari, Brás and Zona Cerealista districts (in the east of downtown São Paulo), this one, which was the last Arte Cidade (a biennial of urban interventions conceived by artistis and [...]

Category Archives: Ensaios

textos e ensaios