Carioca’s Wall. Cohabitations of carioca’s conditions

CITY Rio de Janeiro is a paradoxical city because of the conditions it creates, despite the Redeemer statue standing on top of the Corcovado, this metropolis relies on force and order to fight damnation. All objective assessments won’t change anything. The beauty of this metropolis lies in its capacity to create antithetical conditions. The city shows us its requirements, its frugality, its vanity and its brutality filled with its insatiable tropicalism. Its different timeframes and uses make it an archaic yet scholarly city. It possesses countless qualities that are inherent to these contradictions. The Olympic Games and the Football World Cup led to a wave of massive securisation, a sine qua none condition prescribed by the CIO and the FIFA. The city reflects this constant duality, by being attractive and frightening at the same time. Urbanism often has a secure and repressive element to it. The Olympic Games were the opportunity for the authorities to straighten up the heterogeneities of Rio that are the source of the frictions. The Carioca social diversity combined to the proximity of great wealth and poverty prompted a complete remodeling of the city’s structure. Like many other cities in the same scenario this remodeling takes place through gentrification, pushing poor people away to the outskirts and keeping the Olympic and historical center stable and rich. Rather than having a city that rejects its asperities to the edge, we prefer a diverse city that assumes its separations. The contemporary city doesn’t correspond to the romantic ideal of a permeable city, easy to cross and apprehend. The contemporary city is undoubtedly severed, heterogeneous and doesn’t allow wandering. VISION The project is a network of walls that sample and isolate the different carioca’s conditions. The wall can be Rio’s allegory and its catalyst. The wall limits, separates, protects, exacerbates, reveals, hides and supports but is not an end in itself. It might be destroyed or replaced and this will show the limits of this process. This network of walls is a testimony to social and urban resilience. Represented in its prolific form, it shines a light over an existing politic, questions its limits, and testifies of the conditions inherent and singular to Rio. It is not a form of redemption or damnation but it draws its qualities from the inherent carioca culture to exist and offer another perception of the city. It creates a third framework of interpretation that liberates itself from the notion of sick and wonder through their cohabitation. The wall federates as well as it separates. It claims the need for a negotiation. The wall is an adjoining space. It belongs to the people on either side. This wall defines different spaces as it would in a house, and like in a house the cohabitation of antithetical functions elaborates its unity. The wall separates the city in distinct rooms, revealed to one another. The walled city is the anti-dull city.