ACT OF SETTLEMENT.

A housing scheme at the edge of Guanabara Bay outside Rio de Janeiro replaces a shanty town with architectural imagination and intelligence.

Sergio Ferraz Magalhaes observes that about a third of Rio's inhabitants live in favelas, the illegally constructed shanty towns scattered about the hillsides and wastelands of the city.' Often built without services or proper roads and subject to landslides and floods, the favelas are nevertheless strong self-governing communities with rich traditions of music and dance. Popularly associated with samba, they nurture some of Rio's most famous sambistas. The presence of drug barons who preside over their own territories is another ingredient of a heady brew.

Despite attempts in previous decades by Rio's authorities to disperse favelas, they have grown in number and extent, swollen by immigrants from rural hinterlands. 'Until the 1980s', Magalhaes points out, 'they were officially regarded as a temporary problem that could be solved by rehousing their inhabitants'. [2] But the social disruption this caused and problems manifested in unloved and run-down estates persuaded the authorities to accept the fact of the favelas' existence. Since then, public funds have been channelled into improving infrastructures, using mutirdos - self-governing associations of unskilled workers, supervised by volunteer technicians - to construct drainage schemes, lay sewers and install water mains. Political attention has recently been focused on Rio's chronic need for more and better public housing, and as a result, the city's housing department has been engaged in several extremely interesting schemes. More than the simple provision of dwellings, such schemes are complex exercises i n social and urban integration that try to blur separation from the larger community while accepting economic realities and often intricate social relationships.

Mare is a settlement on a site next to Guanabara Bay, to the north-east of Rio. The site was formed from the silting of the bay, and 25 years ago did not exist. Mare, designed by a group of architects, replaces a favela that had grown up on unstable, condemned land at the edge of the bay's murky waters. At high tide, inhabitants were at risk from flooding; devoid of drainage and sanitation, the place was rife with disease.

Providing dwellings for 630 families, the scheme draws upon the intricate street patterns, the stacked-up forms, layerings and open spaces of traditional villages. Echoes of traditional settlement which reappear in favelas are partly responses to topography or opportunity, but are also spontaneous attempts to recreate the familiar. At Mare, the architects manipulated logic to suggest spontaneity and used inexpensive, readily available materials. They developed a building system that, based on the vertically perforated clay brick which is common in favelas, can be assembled without specialist knowledge or sophisticated equipment.

The scheme consists of four distinct and unequal blocks, arranged as four quarters of an irregular rectangle bounded on the west by a canal. The blocks are separated by lanes which meet in the middle to form a square and communal meeting place. Other open spaces next to the canal integrate the new community with the existing one on the opposite bank.

There are four house types, constructed out of multiples and divisions of a basic volume measuring 3.30 x 3.30 x 2.60m. Each quarter block on the site is subdivided into clusters of houses stacked up and arranged round a series of garden squares linked by alleyways. Clusters are three or four storeys high, the various configurations yielding open terraces and cantilevered rooms, with houses on the upper levels reached by open stairways. The result is an intricate interleaving of private and defensible public open spaces. But underlying the satisfactory appearance of jumble(careful study reveals the patterns) is the economy of shared walls, slabs, roofs and foundations and of building methods tailored to levels of local skill.

It is difficult for an outsider to gauge if Mare's inhabitants feel assimilated into the larger community. Favelas seem impermeable and the groups of watchful, muscular young men (almost certainly armed) deter even casual inquiry. The proliferation of ghettos, whether of the rich or the poor, which seems a feature of Rio and Sao Paulo must be detrimental to health -- and probably prosperity. But schemes like Mare (a precursor of others), provide potential for breaking down some ghetto walls; and the commitment and enthusiasm of the architects is admirable, as is the architectural intelligence informing their design.

(1.) Sergio Ferraz Magalhaes, architect and housing officer of the Prefecture of Rio de Janeiro. Abitore: Brasil: 374 June 1998.

(2.) Ibid.