Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil
Every city transforms. At the household level, children grow older and move out, freeing up rooms that become offices; parents age, abandoning homes to return to live with children or caregivers. Small changes in the master plan cause houses to lose their real estate value and become seen merely as land—major demolitions make way for new residents or the investment market. In the commercial sector, shopping mall stores rotate at high speed to keep up with trends, while corporate offices close and open with the immaterial fluidity of the stock market. Behind a contemporary so-called digital world, to which immaterial words like fog and liquid are associated, persists a material universe that, for convenience, we forget.
The vertigo of coming into contact with what the city throws away every day is an experience shared by few architects. Every day, a team tours buildings slated for demolition or radical transformation in search of reusable elements.
The Archive serves as a temporary home for architectural elements through the temporary lease of a space in the Ondina neighborhood of Salvador. Check-in, storage, sorting, cataloging, recovery, and resale take place at the headquarters. Buildings constructed from the archive are often an amalgamation of parts of the city, but the opposite can also happen: a building is dissolved into dozens of small renovations.
The work tells the three stages of the process of dismantling and building from what already exists in the world.