Everyday, the twelfth edition of the International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo (12th BIA), proposes to professionals and the public to reflect on the everyday – the most trivial dimension of reality – to investigate architecture and the built environment of the 21st century.

Everyday presents practices and projects ranging from construction to design, planning, photography, pedagogy, research, policy making and activism, crossing disciplines, scales and boundaries.

Everyday takes place from September 10 to December 9, 2019. At Sesc 24 de Maio from September 10 to September 28, 2019 and at Centro Cultural São Paulo (CCSP) from September 13 to December 9, 2019.

Everyday is structured around three thematic axes: Everyday Stories, Everyday Resourcesand Everyday Maintenance.

Photo: Ciro Miguel

Oscillating between powerlessness and megalomania, architects and urban planners have long sought to design entire habitats, civilizations and even the planet. However, in the current climate of geopolitical insecurities and revisions of the rule of law, occurring against the backdrop of unprecedented environmental changes, design professionals acknowledge once again the vulnerability of their field. Confronted with the challenges of an uncertain future, combined with the expectations of new automation technologies, architects shift their focus to the quotidian. As a result, they reinvent their activity in an over-designed world from banal objects, daily routines, rote maintenance protocols, and the use of basic resources. Within the last decade, the potential of the everyday has influenced both practical and theoretical domains of architecture and urbanism by triggering a new ethic and aesthetic of humbleness.

The discrete power of the everyday lies in its ability to translate the way we inhabit, use natural resources, and maintain space, into common practices, which make design relevant and a shared concern. The daily routines of human beings—regardless of where they come from, who they are, and where and how they live—can be boiled down to primary needs met by architecture and embedded in space: a clean home, a warm meal, a bathroom with running water, a well-lit street. These everyday necessities speak not only of the body and the house, but extend outward to the city and its infrastructure, the nation and the management of its resources, the Earth and its ongoing health. The everyday therefore emerges in architectural discourse and practice as a commitment to act responsibly and more inclusively.

Everyday is structured around three thematic axes: Everyday Stories, Everyday Resources and Everyday Maintenance. Everyday Stories examines the myriad ways architects and other design professionals reinterpret the everyday, reporting real or fictitious stories linked to the production of space, ranging from the poetic subtleties of the quotidian to the revelation of the violence, crises and inequalities that affect lives daily. Everyday Resources addresses the growing awareness and critical engagement of architects, landscape designers, and urban planners (among others) with processes and uses of everyday resources—both in urban and rural contexts— in the Anthropocene era. Everyday Maintenance explores the maintenance of architecture and the city, a long overlooked subject now gaining attention in current political spheres, in theoretical debates and with technological research worldwide.

The Centro Cultural São Paulo, CCSP, is a multi-activity public building that constitutes one of São Paulo’s architectural masterpieces designed by Eurico Prado Lopes and Luiz Telles. Since its inauguration in 1979, the CCSP has been an important center for everyday life in São Paulo, having been strategically connected to a busy subway station. Around 2,500 users are seen daily rehearsing choreographies on the outdoor mirrors, practicing sports on the green roofs, studying in the library, chatting over a meal at the restaurant, or taking up one of the numerous classes and workshops in its basement. The CCSP is the epitome of the everyday.

The exhibition Architectures of the Everyday shows architectural projects, urbanism, installations, photographs and videos that attempt to reimagine how the everyday shapes our world. An International Open Call was launched and evaluated 710 entries from 52 cities in Brazil and 101 cities in 30 countries, selecting 70 works.

Everyday life in large cities is based on the coexistence of elements, flows, and tensions. Through socio-cultural exchange and economic configurations, such routine peppers these scenarios with specific temperaments and contours, giving rise to huge social organisms.
In such dynamics, architecture plays a central role in forming habits, occupying spaces, sharing times, and in characterizing the ways of life. At the same time, it is capable of shaping its program from what it is presented as everyday life or, possibly, the ideal. In current times, it can be made apparent when dedicated to the uses and procedures that focus on maintaining and sustaining cities and buildings.
By associating with the present conjuncture, aimed at fostering reflexive and functional propositions, the 12th edition of the International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo encourages observation and action in the urban quotidian, making use of more organic, inclusive and responsible practices that are accessible to society. Also, it seeks to operate within a certain sustainable order by becoming aware that the environment requires solutions.

Together with Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil (IAB-SP) and Centro Cultural São Paulo (CCSP), Sesc contributes to the development of a new edition of the Architecture Biennale. At the same time, it intends to shed light on one of its most recent buildings, Sesc 24 de Maio, designed by Paulo Mendes da Rocha and MMBB, a place with its own urban gears and flows. Thus, in keeping with its socio-educational efforts, it aspires to intensify and further the discussions on Architecture in the human dimension of the city.

To rethink the urgencies of the urban life using the practices and projects that pan across and establish a dialogue with architecture, design, photography, pedagogy, public policies, and activism. In this sense, nothing could be more natural than the cultural heart of São Paulo city to host—together with Sesc 24 de Maio—this edition of the Biennial, which maintains a direct conversation with our history. After all, CCSP, an iconic building in São Paulo designed by Eurico Prado Lopes and Luiz Telles, is the city’s largest cultural amenity. A pioneering, multidisciplinary institution, and one of the most important architectural works in the country, which, ever since it was inaugurated over 35 years ago, has been part of the affective memory of the people of São Paulo, spanning several generations and establishing itself and a key space for life in this city.

CCSP is the perfect reflection of this edition’s theme, with visitors enjoying on a daily basis its hallways, theaters, libraries, restaurant, gardens, vegetable garden, exhibitions, concerts, workshops, among so many activities, in this building-manifesto of the quotidian and freedoms. A space that is free and plural for all visitors, whose original design is the starting point to understand its vocation: a place of welcoming, belonging, protecting and respecting individualities. Where the streets merge with the facility, and vice versa, and whose construction both stands out and blends with the landscape of the avenues that surround it. A place for live, pulsing encounters, whose events reflect the most current and important themes in the country.

Our time is of hic et nunc, the here and now. Time to reinvent everyday life, to go beyond it, to find new ways to translate how we inhabit not only physically, but also subjectively, the city. And to remember that there are always new ways to envisage and hear, other knowledges, and more ways to be. Because, as Clarice Lispector once said, “What kills me is the day-to-day. I only wanted exceptions.”

Each and every day, the world over, scientists discover 52 new species, some 3,561 people die in car accidents, 37,000 are forced to leave their countries, 356,000 are born, the Internet receives 300 million photos, and together we consume 93 million barrels of oil.

In Brazil, every day, 544 new cars are sold, Uber drivers are called 1.1 million times, 89 people are arrested, and 57 of them are of African descent. Sixty-one workers die in civil construction accidents, 35 million do not receive clean water through their faucets, one species is discovered in the Amazon, 20.6 km2 (7.95 square miles) are deforested, and 6,565 beauty salons are opened.

The residents of São Paulo city consume over half a million pizzas, they lose 249 objects on the subway, make 102 phone calls to complain about Brazilian funk parties, daily. Eleven die from diseases worsened by environmental pollution, 675 blow into breathalyzers, 811,000 families sleep in precarious conditions. One hundred and forty-five street markets are organized, two of them organic, and City Hall removes 32 trees. Sixty-two thousand elevators go up and down all day long.

Every day, the curatorial proposal selected for the 12th BIA (International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo), the first edition in which this choice was made via a public contest, aims at reflecting on the protagonism of the quotidian in the architecture and urbanism of the 21st century.

There is no way to portray everyday life in a universal, generic fashion. Its infinite possibilities, with diverse forms, call for our reflection and practice concerning the constructed environment to turn to the urgencies of urban life, prioritizing situations of higher vulnerability. A focus that questions the abstract practices of planning and designing, which are distant from the trivial aspects of life in the cities, putting people first.

The Institute of Brazilian Architects (Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil or IAB) brings articulated architects and urbanists together in favor of the democratic and sustainable building of cities. Ever since it was founded in 1921, IAB has sought to promote professional practice as a means to confronting the socio-spatial inequalities in Brazil.

The department of IAB in São Paulo, founded in 1943, represents the category in São Paulo together with the public authority in social participation, as well as acting as a platform for discussion and dissemination of architectural and urbanist culture as in International Architecture Biennials, held since 1973 by IAB-SP. This 12th edition is also a prelude for the 27th World Congress of Architects – UIA2020, in Rio de Janeiro.