From Moscow to Rio

Looking to the future, Pedregulho complex, Rio, 1951

The tarmac was melting. The buckled temperature clock read 47 degrees. Nobody was out on the streets, apart from me. I was on a mission to track down Alfred Reidy’s epic Pedregulho complex in the north of Rio.[1] After several buses and a short hike, the streetscape began to warp. As the buildings merged into a hazy miasma, I flagged a taxi. The driver was confused by my sweaty attempt to explain that I was looking for a famous housing scheme that resembled a giant snake languishing on top of a hill. I showed him a photo. “Not sure about that mate, I’ll take you as close as I can.” He stopped well away from the entrance. “That’s you.” The week before a colleague of his had been shot at trying to drop a client off and he wasn’t prepared to go any further. Completed in 1951 to great international acclaim, by the late 1990s this masterpiece of didactic neighbourhood planning had fallen into disrepair. A prototype workers’ housing scheme for over two thousand inhabitants that included a creche, market, school, health clinic and gardens designed by Burle Marx, its position overlooking the city made it a perfect fortress for dealers and organised crime. I do not think there is such a thing as a socialist architecture, nor for that matter a socialist city.  What we can talk about concretely is programmes for architecture and urban design that are driven by socialist principles such as the provision of collective infrastructure, egalitarian planning, redistributive policies on the allocation of resources, and the design of high-quality public schools, housing, and hospitals. Pedregulho was born out of this tradition of social and technological experimentation and its DNA can be traced back to early modernist ideas that well planned architecture could change people’s lives for the better. Whilst this type of social idealism has been largely abandoned, for good and bad reasons, we should not lose sight of the ideal. The German philosopher Ernst Bloch distinguished between utopia and what he termed the utopian function, that is the difference between trying to implement blueprints for the future and the necessity of thinking and dreaming about them, of imagining other possible worlds. Pedregulho is an example of this complex relationship. On the one hand driven by good intentions, and architecturally and tectonically inventive, but from a social and anthropological perspective highly problematic. Like other adventures in social engineering, it sought to impose ideas about urban living that ignored the traditions and rhythms of working-class life. One apocryphal story tells of the women who isolated in their flats missed the social activity of washing clothes collectively and descended the hill to do their laundry in the swimming pool. I have spent years trying to  unravel the contradictions of a politically engaged and progressive architecture, looking for that glimmer of other worlds that resides in the spatial dimensions of  social movements and revolutions. At one point I knew Moscow better than any other city, and it was there in my investigations of the revolutionary avant-garde that I found the most fertile territory for ideas about what a post-capitalist architecture and city might mean. One of the most pivotally important ideas to emerge from the explosive cultural revolution that took place in art and architecture schools was the Constructivist idea of the Social Condenser. It referred to any element, building, or assemblage that celebrated and supported collective arrangements for urban life, from kindergartens and public kitchens to integrated neighbourhoods. The idea of combining housing with social infrastructure in itself was not a revolutionary idea, and there are plenty of examples of left leaning liberal local governments throughout Europe who piloted similar experiments. The difference of course was the scale at which such a programme could be enacted after the decree on the nationalisation of land in 1917. One of the most famous examples of the social condenser was Ginzburg’s and Milnius’s, Dom Narkomfina, ‘house of a transitional kind’, built in Moscow, 1926.[2]  An urban protype of a new way of life that combined individual and collective living arrangements, it is as ancestor of the Pedregulho in the same way that Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseille is a cousin. The Narkomfin’s fate is uncertain. Luxury hotel, architectural museum , or obliteration, it sits on valuable real estate next to the American embassy. Pedregulho’s future is also unknown. It has been substantially renovated, and although  away from the hub bub of downtown tourist Rio, it is not completely inconceivable given its spectacular views that it will be gentrified and reborn as an elite condominium. In the meantime, you can visit it cinematically in Walter Salles’ film Central do Brasil.

[1] It is a building that has a long literary pedigree, not least a feature in the Architecture Review, 1950. A more recent article can be found in Docomomo Journal, 65, 2021, Preserving a modern housing model: the restoration of Pedregulho Housing Neighborhood, by Flavio Brito do Nascimento.

[2]  A special issue of the RIBA Journal of Architecture, Routledge, Volume 22, No 3, 2017, was devoted to the history of this building. My own contribution dealt with my obsession that has continued for forty years, Molodoi Chelovek, my origins lie in the past, but I am from the future. Download available from my website.