Prologue:

 

common story: three partners buy a ruined house at auction, with the intention of renovating and activating it, but, in the subsequent years, lose the money for such. The owners failure of the owners is multiplied by a real state crisis, and the house—without resale value and no possibility for investment—is abandoned in a kind of limbo. After ten years, the homeowners had lost all hope in the progressively ruining property. 

 

How to create hope in the bankrupt spaces, both financially and subjectively, that commonly define the historic downtown of brazilian cities? 

 

Mouraria 53: Material-everyday

 

Mouraria 53 presents the story of an experiment, which, expanding the category of “everyday materials”, incorporates ‘everyday life’ as material: remains of the routine demolitions of Salvador, a city where nothing gets recycled; but also people who know each other, exchange experiences and produce space. Against architecture as a contextless object, our process is essentially specific: people have names, materials have history. Performing such a construction, designed between chance and intimacy, is necessarily nonlinear; the resulting architecture is not the faithful execution of a drawing but a palimpsest of materials, designs, conversations, mistakes and dreams. To make our experience comprehensible, for this exhibition the house is split into three parts. 

​

1. In “Exchanges”, the process is presented as a network: the dissolution of authorship among hundreds of actors, from the owners who lend the property in exchange for its recovery to the collective that intervenes the house in exchange for its occupation. Architects donate materials that would otherwise be discarded, teachers take students to participate and learn in the house construction, musicians build in order to use spaces in their presentations, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, photographers, artists and curators; Individual dreams magnetized in a collective delirium. More than noneconomic exchanges, we show ‘use’ as a space builder—sometimes literally. 

 

2. In “Acts” we deny the tradition of architectures built in complete layers (structure, walls, finishings), which are  never inhabitable until the ‘handing over of keys’. As the Great Wall of China, built in complete stretches of a few kilometres— which placed achievable goals in a task greater than life — we operate in acts. The house is considered to be ‘finished’ at all times; We inhabit the ruin, seeing in it  a palace. Dialogues between use and construction or between space and deposit, as well as material and spatial experiments, are presented here.  ‘Coherent design’ is revealed to be a sum of parts with different management, design and construction models. 

 

3. “Materials” of  both contemporary use—sliding glass shutters used in gourmet balconies—and contemporary disposal— hardwood floors and wooden windows— received by the experiment. We work with paranoia—“all we have” becomes “all we need”—,seeing in the floor a window, in the window a wall, the wall a door and in door a floor; the box in which was brought model is made with through process. By incorporating matter of the city in its body, the house becomes a portrait of it in its neighborhoods, classes, and times. 

 

Separation in acts, exchanges and materials is obviously arbitrary: exchanges trigger acts and acts enable new exchanges. Materials, as much as people, are parts of the network that defines when and how things will be constructed. The project is tactical, always updated from its recent events. 

 

The ruins of downtown do not find  in Mouraria 53 a prototype; our experiment is functional for both owners and collective, but extremely improbable. Perhaps improbability is all that can be learned: incorporating luck; accepting the process, understanding the crisis as a possibility, placing people in architecture and architecture in the city—always unpredictable. Designing with it.