The São Paulo Municipal Government launched a bidding process this week for companies interested in constructing eight pedestrian access points to the João Goulart Elevated Highway, popularly known as the Minhocão, in downtown São Paulo.

Developed by the Semeia Institute and the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), Parques para Todas e Todos is a tool to inspire the creation of more diverse spaces by incorporating a gender perspective into the planning and management of urban parks. It offers guidelines, suggestions, and ideas to begin designing parks that address everyone's needs.

Guilherme Wisnik talks with Bruno Dunley, a visual artist, teacher, and co-creator and member of the project ali: arte livre itinerante, a nomadic art school that bridges centers and peripheries, operating in the district of Cidade Tiradentes on the far east side of São Paulo.

The National Archives Wiki-Contest is an editing competition on the Portuguese Wikipedia that aims to improve articles related to Brasília. It is part of a series of activities throughout 2020 conducted in collaboration by the Wiki Movimento Brasil User Group and the National Archives. The Wiki-Contest aims to encourage the Wikipedia editing community to improve entries related to the National Archives' Inter-wiki WikiProject initiative, which has been active since 2017.

Nearly two years after the collapse of the Córrego do Feijão mine dam in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, the city's residents will receive a monument to honor the victims. The Brumadinho Memorial was designed by the firm GPA&A, founded by architect Gustavo Penna, and will serve to remind all Brazilians of one of the worst environmental tragedies in the country's history.

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Victoria is a Canadian city famous for its flower gardens. Its climate favors the cultivation of different types of flowers, earning the city the reputation of Canada's flower capital, or the "Garden City." However, the coronavirus pandemic has slightly changed this landscape. The city's gardening team has prioritized planting vegetable seedlings to be distributed free of charge, as public interest in growing one's own food has grown considerably during this period.

Pé na Estrada is an outreach project of the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Brasília, active since 2011 as an extracurricular activity. Its primary goal is to organize and promote study trips across Brazilian cities. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project had to adapt to social distancing, launching new heritage education initiatives and encouraging alternative ways of experiencing spaces studied in the classroom to expand the knowledge and creative vocabulary of both students and the community. 

Faced with the current emergency imposed not only by the largest pandemic in modern history but also by the complete lack of governance ruling this country, compounded by structural inequality that causes a veritable genocide of our society's most vulnerable population, we, architects and urban planners representing technical advisory groups in the State of São Paulo—with a historic trajectory of action and housing production guided by the struggle for the right to the city—believe it is essential to take a stand on the importance of effective actions by this body, which represents our profession, aimed at the needs of organized communities living in informal settlements or in situations of social vulnerability:

One of the world's most prestigious architecture-focused film festivals, the Arquiteturas Film Festival is launching a retrospective series of its seven previous editions, held between 2013 and 2019, with online screenings of some of the key films from each year. To kick off the series, the Canadian film Misleading Innocence (2014), directed by Francesco Garutti and Shahab Mihandoust, will be available between June 12 and 19 on the festival's website.

In this week's debate hosted by Escola da Cidade, Guilherme Wisnik speaks with Vladimir Safatle, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo and a visiting professor at the universities of Paris VII, Paris VIII, Toulouse, Louvain, and Stellenbosch. Safatle is one of the coordinators of the Laboratory of Research in Social Theory, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis (Latesfip/USP).

LabCidade at FAUUSP has conducted several studies on methods for mapping COVID-19 across São Paulo.

The rethinking of public and private spaces has been considered by numerous architects and urban planners for the post-pandemic era. The gradual reopening of businesses and the resumption of other activities across the country require owners, employees, users, and customers to change habits and behaviors to ensure everyone's health.

Six commercial spaces frequently used by many people — gyms, beauty salons, offices, corporate offices, reception areas, and classrooms — have received guidelines for proper operation, developed by architects and urban planners Maria Paula Dunel and Ingrid Joyce Almeida de Jesus.

Urban precariousness, social vulnerability, racial exclusion, health crisis, environmental catastrophe, genocidal state. Growing dissatisfaction on the streets, falsification of pandemic data, economic recession. What social and political pacts will be possible to reshape democracy in a shattered country? Guilherme Wisnik speaks with Tainá de Paula, architect and urbanist, urban struggle activist, who holds a master's degree in Urbanism from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, the international “Coronavirus Design Competition,” organized by the platform Go Architect, encourages students and professionals from various fields to think about how to develop products, objects, and equipment that help the population remain physically and mentally healthy in a scenario of so much uncertainty. Brazilian architect Leonardo Dias is competing, alongside more than 100 candidates from around the world, with a proposal for an urban totem that promotes hand sanitization, citizen information, and the humanization of data.

On June 18, the fifth anniversary of the publication of Laudato Si’ – Pope Francis’s encyclical calling for global unity in combating climate change – the Vatican published new guidelines containing more than 200 recommendations for environmental protection.

The document, titled “Journeying Towards Care for Our Common Home: Five Years After Laudato Si’,” suggests practical measures to curb global warming and issues stark warnings about the dangers of environmental degradation. It calls on the world to decarbonize the energy and economic sectors, making renewable energy accessible to all, and advocates for fossil fuel subsidy reform and CO2 emission taxation. 

Architectural photographer Guilherme Pucci shared with us a series of images of the Ascension of the Lord Church at the Bahia Administrative Center, designed by João Filgueiras Lima, known as Lelé. Completed in 1975, this classic of Brazilian architecture reveals Lelé's design sensitivity, visible in how the building integrates with the site's topography, the quality of the materials used—concrete, glass, wood, and stone—and the tension created by light and shadow within the church.

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The Eiffel Tower, designed and built for the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle, celebrated new industrial methods and materials, alongside the innovation of high-rise construction. Although only one platform was completed in time for the exposition, the tower already offered visitors an aerial view of the city. This was particularly compelling at a time when the recent Reforms of Paris (1853–1975) by Baron Haussmann, with his rational, innovative, and controversial urban plan, were being celebrated.

Architecture is a discipline deeply connected to the perception and construction of space, and could be introduced in early childhood education. With this in mind, the architects at Studio dLux proposed the Bird House project, a workshop for elementary school children designed to introduce the design and construction processes of a birdhouse.

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The development of digital interfaces, combined with the daily bombardment of advertising images, increases the demand for clarity—a clarity we tend to take for granted. This is what Baudrillard called the "world of hypervisibility." Art, however, can offer a slowing down of perception, pointing us to deeper dimensions of experience where speed becomes delay.

Guilherme Wisnik talks with Michael Wesely, a German art photographer best known for his photos of cities, buildings, and landscapes taken with a special ultra-long exposure technique. From 1986 to 1988, Michael Wesely attended the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich before studying at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.

Prete-Indígena is a directory designed to map and promote Black and Indigenous people working in the fields of design, architecture, and web development, created by Fabiano Procópio and Gabriel Biselli. It arises from the question of where Black professionals are active, not only in research but also in the practice of these fields.

As part of their partnership in art-education and cultural mediation exchanges, the Tomie Ohtake Institute and the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo have launched the digital publication Our Home Is Where We Are. The project is supported by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Brasília.

The appearance and long-term maintenance of a work of architecture or interior design are heavily dictated by its materiality and the products used. If the selection of materials and products is not precise, the project can be compromised both aesthetically and functionally. 

This is why specification is essential to achieving the desired result, and the professionals responsible for this stage must have a broad knowledge of the materials and products available in their region. But is material specification done similarly across all architecture firms? Do the initial and final stages of the project receive the same attention? How close is the relationship between architects and materials, really?

Videos

Paulo Mendes da Rocha is interviewed by Paulo Markun in another episode of the series “Conversas na Crise – Depois do Futuro” [Conversations in Crisis – After the Future], organized by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IdEA) at Unicamp in partnership with the UOL news portal. The interview addresses topics such as the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on cities, the public health crisis, and the precariousness of urban housing in Brazil.

For the first time, Escola da Cidade is broadcasting the architecture school's inaugural lecture, delivered by Oscar Niemeyer in 2002. In a lucid and conscious address to young students, Niemeyer emphasizes the social function of architecture and presents, through sketches and images, some of his key works, including the Pampulha architectural complex and Brasília.