Work in Progress:  The Halls of a Tower in Barra da Tijuca Will Have Their Stories Told on the Internet

The Skeleton Comes Out of the Closet

Dutch Artist Duo Make a Virtual Replica of Oscar Niemeyer’s Abandoned Paradise

The famous round tower in Barra da Tijuca – officially called Abraham Lincoln, nicknamed Tower H – is going to gain a virtual version.  Dutch artists Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis are creating the “Paradise Occupied” project, which scrutinizes the construction projected by the legendary Oscar Niemeyer in more than 20,000 photos.  The idea is to create a replica that will expose problems and questions related to the building and its historical context.

“Our objective is to create a reflective platform in which circumstances, delicate subjects, and unspoken hopes and dreams can be questioned and discussed,” says Elke.

The work, which began more than 41 years ago, has never been completed.  Because of real estate speculation and corruption scandals, the building never had residents, and many of the property owners have already died without ever even holding the keys to their apartments.  In this project, the Dutch artists will investigate what happened, through interviews with architects, engineers, politicians, urbanists, historians, and property owners, and produce a virtual monument for the “concrete skeleton.”

The research has been going on since the beginning of 2010, and began during the couple’s residency at Capacete Entertainment.  The progress of the project can be accompanied on the couple’s blog: wouterelke.nl/rio

Tower of Memories
Dutch [Artists] Make a Virtual Version of Niemeyer’s Abandoned Work in Barra da Tijuca

Silas Martí
Folha de São Paulo
6 July 2010

Twice a day, a caretaker climbs the 37 floors of Tower H, in Barra da Tijuca, on foot.  Sometimes he is armed, in order to expel invaders.

That is because no one has ever lived there.  With the exception of a squatters’ occupation in 2004, the tower projected by Oscar Niemeyer – one of the first to be built in a real estate mega-complex – has been empty for 41 years.  Of the 70 towers – all of the same size – planned to house Barra’s residents, four made it off paper, three are still standing, and only two are inhabited.

Advertisements from that era said “Paradise Exists:  It is Here.”  Today, six guards fight over flashlight batteries in order to police the forgotten giant:  454 apartments over 110 meters, with no electric lighting, plumbing, or elevator.

In the beginning of everything, Lucio Costa designed the pilot plan for Barra, and Niemeyer made the towers.  Construction began in 1969 and was supposed to finish three years later, but it dragged out until 1984, when work stopped without explanation.

In 2005, the construction company went bankrupt, leaving one crowded tower and its empty clone.

This was the first vision that the Dutch artists Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis had of this part of Rio.  They spent three months in residency at the Capacete project in Glória, but they couldn’t get this “skeleton of concrete” out of their heads.

Only later, in their studio, did they exhume all of the modernist cadaver.  They discovered names behind the project and found, in archives and personal collections, original plans that the construction company sold at the time as a “new way of life.”

But nobody expected that the change would be for the worst.  Osterholt and Uitentuis scanned the entire site.  They took more than 20,000 pictures of apartments, going up and down the stairs.  They are going to recreate the entire building in a virtual version.

Part of this study can already be seen in a small show at Teatro da Arena in São Paulo, and on the pair’s blog.

“We want to make this tower into a monument, a symbol against a new way of life,” says Uitentuis, in a car stopped in congested traffic on the way to Barra.

From the South Zone, it’s normal to waste an hour and a half in transit.  At the time of construction, an advertisement boasted that the entire commute would take seven minutes.

After conquering the bottlenecked traffic through the tunnels, there is another reality.  In a small house on the edge of the property, the only occupied part of the site is the Association of the Buyers of Tower H, which even today is trying to conclude the construction.

Dream and Nightmare

On the walls are old newspaper pages denouncing the tragedy.  They summarize the whole story as a “dream that became a nightmare,” a “soap opera of concrete and ruins.”

Weightier words, laments, and some excuses are in the interviews that the artists conducted with original buyers, as well as urbanists, engineers, and construction company lawyers.

“It is not so important to tell the exact story,” says Osterholt.  “The facts are in newspapers and in books, but we are more interested in different versions of this.”

In the virtual replica of Tower H, each apartment will have images and an interview.  There will be 454 testimonies to disentangle the human layers of the story beyond the concrete shell.

“It’s like writing a book, showing all the layers of the characters,” Osterholt compares.  “There’s silence around this tower.”

This silence begins with the name.  Originally baptized “Abraham Lincoln,” along with its neighbors Charles de Gaulle and Ernest Hemingway, Tower H later adopted the non-illustrious designation of the construction plan.  The construction companies at the time, in a “pact of giants,” seemed caught up in the economic miracle of the dictatorship.

Close to death, Lucio Costa wrote that “Bad fate came and did what it wanted with Barra.”  In Niemeyer’s works, there is no mention of Tower H.

PARAÍSO OCUPADO

Work in progress: Constructing a virtual monument dedicated to the development of Athaydeville, Barra da Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro

A project by Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis
Facilitation: Capacete Entreteinamnto Artists-in-Residence Program in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
With the financial support of: Fonds BKVB
Period: 07.03.2010 – 07.07.2010
Thanks to: Raphi Soifer, Maira das Neves, Isabel Escobar, Maria Almeida, Carolina Hermeto

This project is focussed on what used to be called ‘Athaydeville’ an area in Barra da Tijuca that nowadays is called Centro da Barra. Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro is known as an area for the rich, the fortress of the ‘nouveau riche’, providing a way to escape from the violence and unsafety in the city. Barra is often characterized as the ‘new Miami’, with distances requiring the use of cars and a landscape defined by its shoppingmalls, condominiums and gated communities. Barra da Tijuca represents the mentality of a city in which people, if they are able to afford, prefer to withdraw themselves behind the walls of gated communities. We believe that these places create a bigger segregation and therefor a greater social injustice.

In order to understand Barra da Tijuca we focussed our project on the early urban devellopment. In the sixties Barra was still underdeveloped. It was a beautiful natural reserve with clean and quiet beaches, swamps and a big variation of vegetation and animals. The city of Rio de Janeiro needed to expand its borders because of population growth and Barra provided the space. In the early adds of the new developments, Barra was promoted like: ‘O paraiso existe: este aqui!’ (Paradise exists: it is here!) or ‘Viva no paraiso: a nova forma de viver’ (Living in paradise: a new way of living). Most of these new projects would be constructed in urban islands, like Athaydeville. In the late sixties the main devellopments started and the open fields, swamps and dunes soon became an urban eldorado for real estate developers and the paradise got occupied.

It is said that when Rio de Janeiro ceased to be Brazil’s capital in 1960, the city government wanted to compromise this loss of importance by competing with Brasilia’s ambitious modernistic urban planning and architecture. Rio needed to invest in an urban development that was similair spectaculair. So they asked Lucio Costa to design a masterplan for the urban expansions towards the SouthWest of the city, that was bigger than the master plan of Brasilia. But unlike Brasilia, Costa could not start from scratch; the land in Barra was already divided by a lot of different private investors who had speculated with the land during the sixties. The political situation was very unstable. Some years before the developments in Barra started, the coup took place that resulted in a military regime. The dictatorship stimulated capitalist industrialization. In 1967 the economy began an impressive climb. Sadly, in those years of the supposed “economic miracles,” criticism and labor unrest were suppressed with arrests, torture, and censorship. This political climate gave space for speculation and corruption. One of the people that took full advantage of it was Mucio Athayde.

Mucio Athayde, the developer that worked together with Oscar Niemeyer created a plan for Centro da Barra. This plan was called Athaydeville and it would include 76 residential towers, with sophisticated names like: Torre Abraham Lincoln, Torre Charles de Gaulle, Torre Ernst Hemmingway and Torre Jean Jaques Rousseau. In the promised plans the towers would be accompanied with public community services like a school, a club, parks etc. The municipality was afraid of an uncontrolled urban sprawl of hundreds of these towers, so they commissioned Lucio Costa to regulate the urban growth in the region. Lucio Costa liked Niemeyers design and based his Master plan of Barra on the design of Niemeyer. The original plan of Lucio Costa included several ‘islands’ of circular towers for different social classes with in between the preservation of the natural landscape. Lucio Costa’s master plan was supposed to be used as an open grid; the architects should have had the artistic freedom to experiment and use their own signature. Also he wanted to leave parts of the region open, in order to plan these parts in a later phase. Lucio Costa needed the control of a powerfull municipality that would support this approach, but instead the local politicians seemed to be more in favour of the private sector that proposed clear money-making plans. This frustrated Costa so much, that he disconnected himself from the project. Despite all the advertisement campaigns the circular towers of Mucio Athayde didn’t become very succesful either. Due to construction flaws and bad design the project failed completely. People didn’t want to live inside tiny appartments that looked like pizzaslices. This failure gave way to other devellopers that started building more succesfull condominiums, with less sophisticated names like: Sun Coast, Costa Blanca, Sunset, Aloha and Barra Summer Dream.

Our research is concentrated on one of the circular towers, called the Abraham Lincoln tower. ‘Desenvolvimento e Engenharia’ (Mucio’s compagny) pretended for almost 35 years to strive for completion of the Abraham Lincoln tower, but in fact nothing happened. In 2005 the compagny got bankrupt. The original buyers of the appartments never got what they paid for. At least 250 of the 454 apartments in tower H do have owners. Some of them are waiting 41 years, some inherited an apartment and some bought one in the late eighties when Mucio started a new advertisementcampaign. It’s questionable if Mucio Athayde ever aimed to finsih the tower – we read somewhere that he invented the trick of leaving buildings unfinished – a trick that has been used by other developers as well, like Encol. Some speculate that the bankrupcy of Dessevolvimento was self-inflicted. In 2004 the tower got squatted by more than 400 people from the surrounding favelas. They say that this invasion of tower H was set up by the developing compagny itself, in order to receive an official complain of the owners. These complain eventually led to their bankrupcy. This bankrupcy freed Mucio Athayde from further responsibility.

The invasion and the lawsuit brought the owners together for the first time in four decades. ‘Associação de Adquirentes da Torre H’ started to work on plans for the completion of their tower. They are looking for a developer who wants to finish the tower and sell the rest of the appartments. The lawyer of the Association told us that if the association doesn’t succeed within two years, the tower will be imploded. The landmark that reminds us of the failure of the plano piloto for Barra and the golden age of real estate scams, will be changed soon. It will either be finished or demolished.

The stories related to the failure of Torre Abraham Lincoln should not be forgotten. In 2004 the name ‘Athaydeville’ officially changed. Many people agreed with the name-change and interperted this as an indication of a better future for Centro da Barra. Some were more critical they may agreed with the necessity of changing the name of the area but they warned for the negative consequence of erasing the past too suddenly. According to the critics changing the name is an example of how the country deals with the remembrance of the years of the repression and the golden age of the corruption scams.

The proposal for this monument will be a virtual replica of The Abraham Lincoln tower. The tower has 37 floors, 454 appartments and is 110 meters high. The model will be made with a lot of details, showing all visible traces of 41 years of vacancy. The model will be put online and will allow visitors to walk through the building. We invite experts such as: developers, politicians, building corporations, architects, urban planners, historians, neighborhood associations, engineers, real estate companies, residents, etc. to reflect upon Barra da Tijuca. Every appartment in the tower will be dedicated to an interview, so every person we interview is given a room in the virtual model. When a visitor of the virtual monument enters one of the 454 apartments in the tower, he/she will hear one of the interviews. It is our aim to occupy the abandoned tower with voices; all the empty apartments will eventually tell a story. All stories together will give an insight in all that defined the urban fabric of Barra. The project will officialy be launched at the moment the tower gets demolished at the implosion event or at the celebration party of the long awaited completion.

The project ‘Paraiso Ocupado’ is initiated as a attempt to announce the tower as a monument. The work is an proposal to keep the building as a concrete skeleton, as an important remembrance of a failed modernistic project and as a prove for the corporate greed and corruption scandals. We announce the tower as a monument against the ‘new way of living’, against the segregated world of the privileged versus the ones that live outside the gates. The tower should be kept as it is, open and transparant, unable to shelter, as a prophetic warning, a beacon showing the downside of the neo-liberal capitalistic system.

Yesterday we started mapping the entire tower. We started on the roof and descended 23 floors until we reached the 16 th floor by the end of the day. We made 8035 photographs of 260 apartments. Next Friday we will continue with the last 15 floors. In apartment 3505 we found a damaged ‘Desenvolvimento e Engenharia’ helmet, a telling symbol from the past.

Interview with Gerônimo Leitao

Interview with Delair Dumbrosck

Interview with Marcio de Queiroz Ribeiro

Interview with Vera F. Rezende

Interviews of week 21 and 23:

Gerônimo Leitao, School of Architecture and Urbanism, Universidade Federal Fluminense / Brazil PhD in Architecture
Anibal Costa Filho, president of the Acquirers Association of Torre Abraham Lincoln
Delair Dumbrosck, president of ‘Câmara Comunitária’ da Barra da Tijuca
Marcio de Queiroz Ribeiro, Trafecon – Consulting and Engineering Projects Ltda.
Vera F. Rezende, Adjunct Professor, School of Architecture and Urbanism, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil

Athaydeville in the early 1980s

Condominium ‘Mirante Cruzeiro do Sul’ and ‘Mirante Cinco Estrelas’, constructed by the Construction Company Santa Isabel

Interview with Marcelo Parente

Interview with Carlos Alberto Pinheiro

Interview with Augusto Ivan de freitas Pinheiro

Interview with Sr. Nilson

Interviews of week 20:

Maria Clara Amado Martins, Professor at UFRJ – Wrote thesis about Barra in 2008: “Barra da Tijuca: uma arquitetura entre a ética e a estética”
Marcelo Parente, Director of Construction Company Santa Isabel
Carlos Alberto Pinheiro, Director of Blue Chip real estate
Augusto Ivan de freitas Pinheiro, is an architect and urban planner and wrote a book about Barra, ‘A construção do lugar’
Sr. Nilson, member of the Association of Purchasers for the H Tower