Looking South

Our site in São Paulo (red). The narrow end faces the Avenida Paulista, home to MASP (white outline).

In just a few days our studio will be off for five days in Brazil, visiting the ersatz site, and hopefully a lot of the rest of the city. We've been working on understanding the World Social Forum through a variety of means: their website, our conception of an institution, the formal arrangement of program in a single surface, etc. Sunil Bald's idea is that by generating a number of attitudes toward the project--none of which have to do with São Paulo--before we go, we will have the maximum 'response' when we do encounter the site and the city for the first time.

This is novel approach--most of my studios have begun with intensive site analysis period during which I become fascinated in a completely unhealthy way with the historical maps available for the area. One can imagine, in this vein, how Studio Krier was one of the most navel-gazing efforts of analysis. Maps of the French military campaigning against the British colonial forces provided ample opportunity for me to tickle myself. Also deadly is any area where I can find several generations of Sanborns.

So Sunil's emphasis on starting from somewhere else besides the site has been refreshing. But I'm really looking forward to what we'll see in Brazil, not the least of which is the Museu de Arte de São Paulo by Lino Bo Bardi. It's right down the street from our site, and ever since I saw a lecture last fall by Esther da Costa Meyer on Bo Bardi, I have been fascinated by this woman and her work.

The lecture was the lone history lecture of the semester, but it was probably the best of the fall. Unfortunately, I can't find the Fall series on the school's website right now, but below I've linked to an essay Meyer wrote for the Harvard Design Magazine.

In more mundane observation, the traffic in São Paulo is supposed to be truly horrible. Note the response on the picture: all of the high-rise office buildings have the little blue square of a helipad.

§ Esther da Costa Meyer in HDM, After the Flood: Lino Bo Bardi's Glass House.

§ The BBC on SP's helipads.

Can't Get Enough

A few days ago I found a site with a concise and relatively charming history of Holyoke, but when I wanted to link to it from this morning's post, I kept getting a Java error in my browser. Thinking this was a Safari problem, I waited until I got onto my PC in the studio. The problem persists, so who knows what they did to the site.

In it's place, I offer this truly scary series of images by the Berkshire Design Group, "an award-winning firm of landscape architects, civil engineers and land surveyors specializing in park and recreation design, site planning and commercial development". This redevelopment is in the vein of what has been done to other cities, but, having been to see these canals, I can say that wacky relationship between the scale of the figures and the scale of the buildings would indeed be a problem. These people are out of their minds.

§ BDG's The Holyoke Canal Walk Project

A much more positive event is the sense of humor from the Holyoke schools reunion page: