This slideshow is combined with a selection of fragments from the interviews we did. You hear 8 fragments of the 25 interviews we did til so far, in the folowing order
Heraldo da Silva, Engineer of the Abraham Lincoln tower and member of the Purchasers Association
Sr. Nilson, member of the Association of Purchasers for the H Tower
Anibal Costa Filho, president of the Acquirers Association of Torre Abraham Lincoln
Marcio de Queiroz Ribeiro, Trafecon – Consulting and Engineering Projects Ltda.
Armando de Abreu, Architect who organised Seminar on Barra da Tijuca
Gerônimo Leitao, School of Architecture and Urbanism, Universidade Federal Fluminense / Brazil PhD in Architecture
Delair Dumbrosck, president of ‘Câmara Comunitária’ da Barra da Tijuca
Augusto Ivan de freitas Pinheiro, is an architect and urban planner and wrote a book about Barra, ‘A construção do lugar’
Advertisement of early 80's: "Athaydeville, O sonho ja se tornou realidade" - the dream has become reality
Advertisement of early 70's: "Viva no paraiso: a nova forma de viver" - Living in paradise: a new way of living
Tower Abraham Lincoln, Torre H
PARAÍSO OCUPADO
This project is focussed on what used to be called 'Athaydeville' an area in Barra da Tijuca that nowadays is called Centro da Barra. Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro is known as an area for the rich, the fortress of the 'nouveau riche', providing a way to escape from the violence and unsafety in the city. Barra is often characterized as the 'new Miami', with distances requiring the use of cars and a landscape defined by its shoppingmalls, condominiums and gated communities. Barra da Tijuca represents the mentality of a city in which people, if they are able to afford, prefer to withdraw themselves behind the walls of gated communities. We believe that these places create a bigger segregation and therefor a greater social injustice.
In order to understand Barra da Tijuca we focussed our project on the early urban devellopment. In the sixties Barra was still underdeveloped. It was a beautiful natural reserve with clean and quiet beaches, swamps and a big variation of vegetation and animals. The city of Rio de Janeiro needed to expand its borders because of population growth and Barra provided the space. In the early adds of the new developments, Barra was promoted like: 'O paraiso existe: este aqui!' (Paradise exists: it is here!) or 'Viva no paraiso: a nova forma de viver' (Living in paradise: a new way of living). Most of these new projects would be constructed in urban islands, like Athaydeville. In the late sixties the main devellopments started and the open fields, swamps and dunes soon became an urban eldorado for real estate developers and the paradise got occupied.
It is said that when Rio de Janeiro ceased to be Brazil's capital in 1960, the city government wanted to compromise this loss of importance by competing with Brasilia's ambitious modernistic urban planning and architecture. Rio needed to invest in an urban development that was similair spectaculair. So they asked Lucio Costa to design a masterplan for the urban expansions towards the SouthWest of the city, that was bigger than the master plan of Brasilia. But unlike Brasilia, Costa could not start from scratch; the land in Barra was already divided by a lot of different private investors who had speculated with the land during the sixties. The political situation was very unstable. Some years before the developments in Barra started, the coup took place that resulted in a military regime. The dictatorship stimulated capitalist industrialization. In 1967 the economy began an impressive climb. Sadly, in those years of the supposed "economic miracles," criticism and labor unrest were suppressed with arrests, torture, and censorship. This political climate gave space for speculation and corruption. One of the people that took full advantage of it was Mucio Athayde.
Mucio Athayde, the developer that worked together with Oscar Niemeyer created a plan for Centro da Barra. This plan was called Athaydeville and it would include 76 residential towers, with sophisticated names like: Torre Abraham Lincoln, Torre Charles de Gaulle, Torre Ernst Hemmingway and Torre Jean Jaques Rousseau. In the promised plans the towers would be accompanied with public community services like a school, a club, parks etc. The municipality was afraid of an uncontrolled urban sprawl of hundreds of these towers, so they commissioned Lucio Costa to regulate the urban growth in the region. Lucio Costa liked Niemeyers design and based his Master plan of Barra on the design of Niemeyer. The original plan of Lucio Costa included several 'islands' of circular towers for different social classes with in between the preservation of the natural landscape. Lucio Costa's master plan was supposed to be used as an open grid; the architects should have had the artistic freedom to experiment and use their own signature. Also he wanted to leave parts of the region open, in order to plan these parts in a later phase. Lucio Costa needed the control of a powerfull municipality that would support this approach, but instead the local politicians seemed to be more in favour of the private sector that proposed clear money-making plans. This frustrated Costa so much, that he disconnected himself from the project. Despite all the advertisement campaigns the circular towers of Mucio Athayde didn't become very succesful either. Due to construction flaws and bad design the project failed completely. People didn't want to live inside tiny appartments that looked like pizzaslices. This failure gave way to other devellopers that started building more succesfull condominiums, with less sophisticated names like: Sun Coast, Costa Blanca, Sunset, Aloha and Barra Summer Dream.
Our research is concentrated on one of the circular towers, called the Abraham Lincoln tower. 'Desenvolvimento e Engenharia' (Mucio's compagny) pretended for almost 35 years to strive for completion of the Abraham Lincoln tower, but in fact nothing happened. In 2005 the compagny got bankrupt. The original buyers of the appartments never got what they paid for. At least 250 of the 454 apartments in tower H do have owners. Some of them are waiting 41 years, some inherited an apartment and some bought one in the late eighties when Mucio started a new advertisementcampaign. It's questionable if Mucio Athayde ever aimed to finsih the tower - we read somewhere that he invented the trick of leaving buildings unfinished - a trick that has been used by other developers as well, like Encol. Some speculate that the bankrupcy of Dessevolvimento was self-inflicted. In 2004 the tower got squatted by more than 400 people from the surrounding favelas. They say that this invasion of tower H was set up by the developing compagny itself, in order to receive an official complain of the owners. These complain eventually led to their bankrupcy. This bankrupcy freed Mucio Athayde from further responsibility.
The invasion and the lawsuit brought the owners together for the first time in four decades. 'Associação de Adquirentes da Torre H' started to work on plans for the completion of their tower. They are looking for a developer who wants to finish the tower and sell the rest of the appartments. The lawyer of the Association told us that if the association doesn't succeed within two years, the tower will be imploded. The landmark that reminds us of the failure of the plano piloto for Barra and the golden age of real estate scams, will be changed soon. It will either be finished or demolished.
The stories related to the failure of Torre Abraham Lincoln should not be forgotten. In 2004 the name ‘Athaydeville’ officially changed. Many people agreed with the name-change and interperted this as an indication of a better future for Centro da Barra. Some were more critical they may agreed with the necessity of changing the name of the area but they warned for the negative consequence of erasing the past too suddenly. According to the critics changing the name is an example of how the country deals with the remembrance of the years of the repression and the golden age of the corruption scams.
The proposal for this monument will be a virtual replica of The Abraham Lincoln tower. The tower has 37 floors, 454 appartments and is 110 meters high. The model will be made with a lot of details, showing all visible traces of 41 years of vacancy. The model will be put online and will allow visitors to walk through the building. We invite experts such as: developers, politicians, building corporations, architects, urban planners, historians, neighborhood associations, engineers, real estate companies, residents, etc. to reflect upon Barra da Tijuca. Every appartment in the tower will be dedicated to an interview, so every person we interview is given a room in the virtual model. When a visitor of the virtual monument enters one of the 454 apartments in the tower, he/she will hear one of the interviews. It is our aim to occupy the abandoned tower with voices; all the empty apartments will eventually tell a story. All stories together will give an insight in all that defined the urban fabric of Barra. The project will officialy be launched at the moment the tower gets demolished at the implosion event or at the celebration party of the long awaited completion.
The project 'Paraiso Ocupado' is initiated as a attempt to announce the tower as a monument. The work is an proposal to keep the building as a concrete skeleton, as an important remembrance of a failed modernistic project and as a prove for the corporate greed and corruption scandals. We announce the tower as a monument against the 'new way of living', against the segregated world of the privileged versus the ones that live outside the gates. The tower should be kept as it is, open and transparant, unable to shelter, as a prophetic warning, a beacon showing the downside of the neo-liberal capitalistic system.
List of people interviewed so far:
1: 30.04 - 10:30 Laudimiro Cavalcanti, real estate broker who wrote a real estate scams guide
2: 04.05 - 9:00 Pedro Paulo Tolentino Alvares, former president of autonomous Real estate association
3: 04.05 - 15:00 Hamilton Quirino Câmara, Lawyer Acquirers Association of Torre Abraham Lincoln
4: 05.05 - 10:00 Sérgio Andrade, Federation of Neighborhood Associations da Barra da Tijuca e Jacarepaguá
5: 05.05 - 16:00 Dr. Wagner Nascismento, Administrator of the bankrupt Desenvolvimento Eng. Ltd.
6: 06.05 - 15:00 Manoel Maia, Professor of property rights
7: 07.05 - 15:00 Inacio L. Obadia, Architect
8: 11.05 - 16:00 Roberto Barboza, Member of ABM, ABM- Neighborhood Association of Bosque Marapendi
9: 11.05 - 16:00 Janete Rocha Martins, Member of ABM, ABM- Neighborhood Association of Bosque Marapendi
10: 11.05 - 16:00 Joao Luiz Rabello, Member of ABM, ABM- Neighborhood Association of Bosque Marapendi
11: 13.05 - 12:00 Ney Robinson Suassuana, president of Acibarra, Commercial and Industrial Association
12: 14.05 - 10:30 Heraldo da Silva - engineer of the Abraham Lincoln tower
13: 14.05 - 15:30 Armando de Abreu, Architect who organised Seminar on Barra da Tijuca
14: 18.05 - 16:00 Maria Clara Amado Martins, Professor at UFRJ - Wrote thesis about Barra
15: 19.05 - 16:30 Marcelo Parente, Director of Construction Company Santa Isabel
16: 20.05 - 11:00 Carlos Alberto Pinheiro, Director of Blue Chip real estate
17: 20.05 - 16:00 Augusto Ivan de freitas Pinheiro, architect and urban planner and wrote a book about Barra
18: 21.05 - 16:00 Sr. Nilson, member of the Association of Purchasers for the H Tower
19: 25.05 - 14:00 Gerônimo Leitao, Professor, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF)
20: 27.05 - 12:00 Anibal Costa Filho, president of the Acquirers Association of Torre Abraham Lincoln
21: 28.05 - 11:00 Delair Dumbrosck, president of 'Câmara Comunitária' da Barra da Tijuca
22: 28.05 - 16:00 Marcio de Queiroz Ribeiro, Trafecon - Consulting and Engineering Projects Ltda.
23: 08.06 - 13:00 Vera F. Rezende, Adjunct Professor, Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF)
24: 19.06 - 16:00 Luciana Araujo, co-author of book "Desvendando a Barra da Tijuca e Jacarepaguá"
25: 19.06 - 16:00 Valdeir da Costa, co-author of book "Desvendando a Barra da Tijuca e Jacarepaguá"
