EYE ON RIO

“CLOSING YOUR EYES DOESN’T MAKE ME INVISIBLE”
Rio De Janeiro, the most famous metropolis of Brazil, has always been a city of disputes, where the obvious wealth contrasts with the extreme poverty.
Economic and social division that is materializes in the physical division between modern skyscrapers and favelas, home to thousands of people, discriminated because of their social status, implicated as dangerous and let live in a community completely isolated, with its own laws and “traditions”. A city where a person is “carioca” only by birth, and not out of a sense of belonging to the same social structure.
Two worlds so far away and yet so close: the favelas are located along main roads or on the hillsides, not far from the city center. Causing a forced coexistence between the “Morros” and “asphalt”, these neighborhoods of poverty are often a matter of shame for a city, a nation, that wants to show the world “we can do it”. To promote economic growth, one of the steps to take is to make sure all the inhabitants participation in the new urban ascent, both economic and social: our idea is to make the favelas of Rio more accessible, because now favelas are consolidated as the rest of the urban reality and no longer ignorable. Our solution provides the complete overturning of this view: to avoid segregation and hide the problem by cutting out the favelas from the social economic cycles of the city, we intend to create ritch obliged to create flows of people that pass through the favelas, in order to better connect it with the rest of Rio. Waves of tourists and citizens in the middle of the barrios means that it is not the favelas to be brought into the city, but the city is brought into the favelas, in order to “drag” other urban services such as shops, police stations and other services that will be needed on the new main road .But how to attract these ‘foreign’ categories in these places? Creating focal points in which to concentrate tourist attractions, also useful to citizens of the favela. A place that takes advantage of the special feature of the barrios: the fact of being on the slopes of the hills, at the top .And here’s the idea: a viewpoint that includes open places of entertainment where people meet or watch a recital. A place that “observes” Rio from the top of the favela , who searches the world that has long discriminated against. In short, an eye on the city, which is reflected in a structure that reproduces this sensory organ, a structure almost suspended in space, near to a small open-air theater, and juts out over a second space, conceived as a public square to the favela and its inhabitants, or even as a market place. The favela becomes a place crossed by the traffic ,tourists, from the goods and wealth is redistributed, a place with its new symbol, the Eye, visible from the favela itself, but especially from the snob districts , almost in a rematch ,of the carioca poorest, who can now look at them from the top for the first time.