Which are the projects of past architecture you most admire?

 

We are interested in the ancient and the modern city combined, a developing world urbanism retrofit with the latest sustainable technology. Although, our interests move between HelioOticica’s “Tropicalia” experiment, Vilanova Artigas Sao Paulo buildings and Team 10’s built examples, our influences have been drawn from our investigations in cities around Latin America, North Africa, Middle East and India.

 

We believe that the priority is to understanding the spatial pluralism found in informal settlements since it is the key to several of the most vital issues we face: not only population density but also social density. Refugee camps, slums and post catastrophic sites are places where we find inspiration and urban pioneers, who without means mobilize agencies to build a transformative modernism. 

 

Do you imagine your mode of practice as a specialty or do you wish to set a model for the profession?

 

Our practice started as a research enterprise on the “Informal City”. We immersed ourselves into design for cities of the South with local municipal authorities, that are financially challenged or broke and it became essential to proceed to prototype projects and find innovative ways to provide cutting edge research to these areas. Our first concern was our relationship with built-form; the second, creating energy passive architecture; and the third, housing the urban poor.

 

With our toolbox, we propose a working method for a new supportive architecture that empowers people at the margins of the global south's growing cities and promotes sustainable development in the slum areas. Our agenda in devising and applying the toolbox has two objectives: We conceive this approach as a means of shifting the emphasis of contemporary architecture and architectural education from the form-driven to the purpose-oriented, to reduce the disconnection between a design and its social impact. 

 

How can architecture reach larger parts of the global society that don’t yet have agency?

 

Architecture can offer physical places of inclusion and integration to help fight poverty for the billion plus who live inhuman conditions today in cities. The politics of design as we understand them have to be made actively, by both moderating processes and animating participation.

 

The master plans applied today in South American cities has resulted in more segregation of cities into ghettos and gated communities. These spatial, economic, physical asymmetries are the challenge for designers in the global south for the next years. Rather than having a purely ‘artistic’ objective, architecture thus seeks to create buildings from more efficient, locally-produced, industrial materials, assembled in a kit of parts. We envision a viable, quick-fix urban architecture that functions as a life-support agent for the perpetually changing city, to the benefit of all cities and cultures in urgent need of solutions. It is, quite simply, activist architecture with the potential to be a major force for positive urban change.

 

How do you see the role of the architect in the global society of the future?

 

After more than a decade of studying various favelas, interviewing residents, and testing and implementing new slum-upgrading concepts and solutions, we now turn our efforts to a socially oriented architecture.

 

Through or experience we learned that architects must advocate for the users, agents of change that have to be accomplished thoughtfully and carefully, one step at a time to be viable and durable. We strive to bring cities together and create a greater sense of individual responsibility to a stronger community. All the investigations we made and solutions we propose are tested by one over-arching question: are people better off than they were before we arrived?

 

Our approach to the Global South resumes the battle where Team 10 left off acknowledging and introducing the need for greater complexity in the planning agenda of the modern city. Urban Think Tank is actually wrestling with the rethinking ofthe architect as interpreter and facilitator of the needs and desires of a particular community to its fullest extent.