→ Mutual self-help housing
My father has made about twenty houses and countless renovations. He is not an architect, but he does architecture. The place where I was born and lived until I started the architecture course was made by him and the last house he built was my sister’s – a house that I designed, he built, and she will live. I tell this because I was reflecting where my enchantment for architecture in mutual self-help method came from. And I have good memories of this last “our home” because it was made by many hands and many affections. I remember the Sundays when relatives and neighbors came to build the slab at home – the days off on the city outskirts are working days, on which the houses of construction workers themselves are built. They are made little by little, we never finish, they are houses in process, and this also delights me.
The mutual self-help effort, the technical advice, the city outskirts, the autonomous management, the processes, the popular technical knowledge, and the cooperations represent the architecture that I believe for Brazil, so I apologize for not talking specifically about a project. Here you can know much more about the Conjunto Paulo Freire and about the incredible work of Usina, technical assistance in operation since 1990.
→ Website USINA_ctah
http://www.usina-ctah.org.br/paulofreire.html
Legenda: Conjunto Paulo Freire
To speak of mutual self-help housing only makes sense if collectively, so I suggest here other projects, processes, and assistances that for so many years give some room so that the protagonist of architecture is not only the architect.
→ Parque do Gato (Peabiru)
http://www.peabirutca.org.br/?painel_projetos=parque-do-gato
→ União da Juta (USINA)
http://www.usina-ctah.org.br/uniaodajuta.html
→ Alvorada
http://www.peabirutca.org.br/?painel_projetos=alvorada
One-year-old me, in 1982, in our house built by my father.
My father, Mario, mixing the concrete in 1984, in Ribeirão Preto.