Born in Brazil – Wallpaper May 2010

06/03/2010 02:05 am

The latest edition of Wallpaper magazine, “Born in Brazil | Nascida no Brasil,” features a panel (aka incredibly  hyper-colorized) from recent projects, including our project 285 Montevideo.

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Swarming Futures, London Festival of Architecture

05/29/2010 01:32 am

Supported by the Embassy of Brazil in London, ‘Swarming Futures’, an exhibition of four practices that includes Vazio S/A and its project The Ultimate Skyscraper (pictured), explores the way innovation in design can be generated by large patchworks of inclusive collaboration and creative exchange. Swarming Futures is part of the London Festival of Architecture, and will be on show from June 25 to July 11 at Gallery 32, Embassy of Brazil, London W1K 7AT.

 
Designers, politicians, communities, businesses, participants and visitors are all agents and stakeholders in a massive swarm of interests and possibilities that will ultimately shape the cities and lives in Brazil’s near future.

Curated by London-based architect Ricardo de Ostos, the exhibition explores how unique associations between mainstream and underground forces can open new fields for innovative buildings and city planning. The exhibition itself is an assemblage of diverse urban elements, including already built and yet to be built projects, from individual buildings to larger city scale projects. Aiming for fresh ideas, it displays projects that explore trans-disciplinary and spontaneous networks between the social, economic and cultural. Maverick cooperation and urban experiments in and for the city are uncertain, and at times unpredictable, but fundamental to encourage social progress.

‘Swarming Futures’ brings together a cross-section of current, cutting-edge Brazilian architectural proposals. Selected projects include large infrastructural interventions, such as the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Park, designed by BCMF, as well as local and sensitive proposals by São Paulo practice MMBB.The inventive Brazilian-French architects Triptyque display their well-known ecological projects alongside new and exciting experiments. Strengthening the speculative vein of the exhibition theme, Vazio S/A present their hyper-critical project ‘The Ultimate Skyscraper’ which discusses the impact of large scale commercial developments, while additional features investigate innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration in the contemporary scene of Brazilian architecture.

Spiral Booths video, V&A Museum

05/22/2010 09:33 am

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Produced by Culture Shock Media, the Victoria & Albert Museum has just published on its website a two-minute video of our project Spiral Booths (see post below, April 10). An extended version of the video will be on display at the museum by occasion of the exhibition “Architects Build Small Spaces”, to be open  June 15. 


BCMF Architects at Columbia University

05/18/2010 04:00 pm

Architect Bruno Campos – from BCMF Architects – lectured about the architecture and planning of the Olympic Games – Rio 2016. The text of the presentation can be read on electronic magazine e-Oculus. Below, the video of Young Practice in Brazil, which was presented by him at Columbia University GSAPP, New York.

The Serendipitous Model

05/08/2010 02:02 pm

The model of project Architectural Grafts was done in November 2009 for the 8th Sao Paulo Biennial (see post “Vazio S/A at Sao Paulo Biennial” below, and ‘projects’ section at the website www.vazio.com.br). The trunks of the model were made from the remains of the pruning of a hierba mala (Euphorbia cotinifolia L.), a bush which, when cut, releases a rich white sap. After the Biennial, the model stayed a couple of months at IAB-SP (the Brazilian Institute of Architects) until last month, when I finally brought it to Belo Horizonte.

It seems that these months at IAB worked as an incubator of decomposers: perhaps because they are so rich in sap that the stems of mala hierba have favoured the emergence of so many and so bizarre forms of fungi. As the original plant of Architectural Grafts – a pau-brasil (or Brazil wood) that, little by little, has been swallowing the washers and the screw that pierces it -, the model has also been changing, but from a dead plant. It is curious because Architectural Grafts is a project that uses plants not only alive, but dead plants as a ground for landscaping, such as dry brushes found in the garden that were painted  magenta (the complementary colour of green). Hence this musty model is a representation of the object and the process of the project, which does not cease to be a serendipitous analogy.

Topographical Amnesias website – 2002

05/04/2010 03:44 pm

Made in Flash when this language was still a novelty on the Internet, the website of Topographical Amnesias (see section ‘projects’ at www.vazio.com.br) was coordinated by Alexandre Campos and was off-line since 2002, when it was designed. I think it aged well after these eight years!

Rio 2016: BCMF Architects’ Lecture at NYU

04/17/2010 12:41 pm

Supported by the Consulate of Brazil and sponsored by the American Institute  of Architects, the office BCMF Architects will give the talk “Rio +2016:  Planning and Architecture for the Olympics ” at New York University on April 23. The  conceptual studies of almost all buildings submitted for the candidature of Rio de Janeiro at the 2016 Olympics were made by BCMF (architecture) and Vazio S/A (landscape urbanism). In the lecture, Bruno Campos, a member of BCMF, will be assisted by Carlos Teixeira (Vazio S/A).

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RIO2016:PlanningandArchitectureoftheOlympics

When: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM TUESDAY, APRIL 20

Where: New York University Kimmel Center, 4th Floor (pending) 60 Washington Square South New York NY

PART 1: URBAN PLANNING
The excitement ignited by the selection of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the first Olympic Games in South America will be brought to New York by the Brazilian public officials, planners and architects who designed the four clusters linked by a transportation ring. Nautilus’ President, Bonnie Harken, who grew up in Brazil and worked in Rio, organized this event and will be moderating this panel covering urban issues. A second panel focusing on architectural designs will be held on Friday, April 23. Both events are coordinated with Columbia University’s “Brazil Week.”

Speakers: Wanderley Mariz is Sub-Secretary of International Relations for the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro. Mr. Mariz has formerly served as Rio’s Special Assessor, Secretary of Labor and Employment, and as an Alderman.

Washington Fajardo is the Sub-Secretary of Cultural Heritage, Urban Intervention, Architecture and Design for the Municipality of Rio. In collaboration with the Rio 2016 team, Mr. Fajardo helped define required elements of the urban program for the 2016 Rio Olympics within strategies set up by the Brazilian Olympic Committee.

Bruno Campos is one of the three partners at BCMF Arquitetos, a multi-disciplinary team which led the planning and design of the 2016 Olympic proposal in Rio de Janeiro for the Brazilian Olympic Committee. He will be assisted by Carlos Teixeira of Vazio S/A, who collaborated with BCMF on the landscape design for the Olympics.

Moderator: Bonnie A. Harken, APA/AIA Co-chair Waterfront Committee, American Planning Association, NY Metro Chapter & President, Nautilus International Development Consulting, Inc

Sponsored by: General Consulate of Brazil, New York; TURNER International LLC; AECOM; Nautilus International Development Consulting, Inc.
Organized by: APA Metro New York Chapter, Waterfront Committee;  Bonnie Harken, President, Nautilus International Development Consulting, Inc. and Global Dialogues Committee, AIA NY; Warren Antonio James, Principal, Warren A. James Architects + Planners.
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Event website: http://www.nyplanning.org

The Fun Theory

04/15/2010 06:13 pm

Is there a way to change the way we deal with the city day-by-day?
Yes there is.

See more here:
http://www.thefuntheory.com/

Victoria & Albert Museum

04/10/2010 01:00 pm

Comissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Vazio S/A designed Spiral Booths, a “space for fiction and performance” that will be built for the  V&A 2010 Architecture Exhibition.  Other six installations will compose the exhibition, all of them chosen out of 18 proposals presented by selected practices of cutting-edge architects.

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Under the Square, Beach

03/10/2010 10:43 am


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The frequency is “elitist”, the catharsis is “bourgeois”, the program is “fun for the semi-educated middle class “, the scene is like a “trawler of the Savassi youngsters” (the best one!) etc. But hundreds of people turning a square in beach every Saturday override any critique about the event by said politicized (and ridiculously critical) bloggers. When the beach began in January, they were 100 people; last Saturday (March 6), they were already 700. The square administration did not turn on the water jets to spoil the party, but then they called a tanker truck with thousands of liters of water. In December 2009 the mayor of Belo Horizonte issued a decree forbidding any events at Station Square; the immediate popular reaction was the beach.