Memories from Brazil

Brazil is completely different from the rest of Latin America. In terms of size, language, and culture, it is quite literally its own continent. There is a vibrant intensity of life, like that of New York or Hong Kong, but even more so beyond just the rush and the energy. People dance everywhere in Brazil. There is music everywhere. The 7 days we spent in Sao Paolo and Rio were unbelievable.

We traveled everywhere in a huge tour bus, since there were about 30 of us on the trip. There were us the students, plus Claudio and Sergio. Another local architect Johenu, joined us at the last minute, and the three of those guys cracked each other up the entire trip, and I think they actually had more fun than we did.

We arrived in Sao Paolo in the morning, dropped our stuff of at the hotel, and took a bus tour of the city. Sao Paolo is ringed and infiltrated with Favelas, slum neighborhoods built on unusable land and completely out of control of the municipalities. Some steal power and utilities from the cities, but they are poorly built by the inhabitants, filthy, and dangerous. We passed them all the time from the elevated freeways.

Sao Paolo has been described with some accuracy as a New York in the jungle. It's the third biggest city in the world (behind Tokyo and Mexico City) and the industrial and financial capital of Brazil. Skyscrapers everywhere. Extremely tropical with unbelievable trees and mist everywhere. It's a fight between the gray of the fog, clouds, concrete, buildings, and the green of the trees, plants, and mosses.

Our first stop was lunch at a cafeteria that sold food by the kilo. You get food from the buffet, bring it to the weigher, and they put your total on a barcode card. If you want more food, you refill your plate, and they weigh it and scan your card again. Lots of meat, and rice and black beans in Brazil. The black beans are incredible. I really missed spices in Buenos Aires. At the end of the meal, I brougt my card to the cashier and paid the total. That's actually the way most of the bars and clubs worked over there too. They gave you a card with all the drinks and marked the ones you'd had as you bought them, and you paid your tab before you left.

We stopped at the hanging subway entrace by Rocha, the refinished Pinacoteca art museum by Rocha which was my favorite building in Sao Paolo, and finished the day at a cultural center complex designed by Oscar Neimeyer and Burl Marx, the two main architectural figures in Brazil. Neimeyer does extremely scupltural buildings in whitewashed concrete and has hundreds of buildings. 93 years old, he's still having his sketches translated into actual buildings. Burl Marx was a landscape architect who created highly abstracted landscapes using Amazonian plants.

At the cultural center, the Biennal was going on for Sao Paolo, which is a huge art+culture+design exhibition with enterants from all over the world. The exhibition was in a huge hall with three floor and it was a trippy experiance. My favorite work was this scluptural/performance piece. It was a small rectangular plot of astrotruf maybe 15'x 10', surrounded by two 10' high fence tipped with razor wire, and the space between the two fences littered with machetes, scythes, and rubber gloves. The installation included black uniformed guards patrolling the perimeter. In the center of the grass was an obscenity- a naked, armless human figure with the head of a vulture.