Urban poliphony E-Book

Adriana Levisky

• Herausgeber: Editora Senac São Paulo
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 331

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

In Urban Polyphony: Architectures, Urbanisms, and Meditations, the author draws a panorama of the more than eighteen years of the Levisky Arquitetos | Estratégia Urbana architecture firm, discussing and showing the projects that they have been developing, such as the Diversity Boulevard, the expansion project of Albert Einstein Hospital, the Open Museum of Colônia's Crater, requalification of Jardim Colombo neighborhood, Colégio Santa Cruz, Senac São Miguel Unit, City Caxingui neighborhood, Victor Civita Square and Jockey Club São Paulo. Throughout this book, Adriana Levisky shares with the reader her impressions about the role of the architect and urban planner as being proactive and a mediator, considering aspects that go beyond the regional dynamics from places, discussing social, economic, legal, cultural, geographical, and political matters, highlighting the importance of this active voice to propose projects that can provide a better quality of life in cities. With this book launch, Senac São Paulo aims to instill the contemplation and propel new solutions for the urban environment from the view and experience of someone who works daily with architecture and urbanism in a metropolis.

Leseprobe

Urban Poliphony

architectures, urbanisms, and mediations

Adriana Levisky

Contents

Editor's note

Acknowledgments

Prefácio: Um ouvido atento às vozes da cidade

Author's words

Introduction

Part 1

The Architect and Urban Planner and the Political Sphere

Chapter 1

The strategic posture of the architect and urban planner

1.1 Victor Civita Square: the process creates the continuance of enterprise relationships

1.2 Urban master plan for the expansion project of Albert Einstein Hospital - Morumbi Complex

Part 2

Projects, Possibilities, and Dialogues

Chapter 2

The culture and the unveiling of values: the space as a translation of culture

2.1 Where are the urban projects?

2.2 Architecture as a cultural consumption value and as a translation of cultural aspects: views and proposals of "living museums"

2.3 Investigations from urban projects: culture and city close together

Chapter 3

Urban sustainability: creating bonds and civic awareness

3.1 Acknowledging Jardim Colombo neighborhood

3.2 The intervention project and the bond acknowledgment

3.3 The relationships between the built environment and empty spaces

Chapter 4

Micro- and macroscale: everything together and at the same time

4.1 The project and its scales

4.2 A vital solution for macro and micro drainage in cities

Chapter 5

Urban project and its interlocutors

5.1 Reading and building a territory

5.2 Relationships and interlocutions on choosing for the subdivision

5.3 Other interlocutions: the essential dialogue with social work

Chapter 6

The project as a mediation tool: the community benefits, cooperation, and other agreements

6.1 City Caxingui Neighborhood Experience

Chapter 7

The institutional building to qualify urban spaces: the decision to elaborate projects of private infrastructure

7.1 About hospitals

7.2 About schools

7.3 About museums

Part 3

Legislation and Opportunities

Chapter 8

The architect and urban planner and the familiarity with the urban and building legislation

8.1 Brazil and the legislative maze that surrounds and regulates the architecture and urbanism

8.2 Professional activity and legislation

Chapter 9

Authorship and technical responsibility

Chapter 10

Convergence between public and private spheres

10.1 The perspective of improvement on urban public-private actions

10.2 Concessions and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs): differences and similarities

10.3 Urban Intervention Projects (UIPs): other modality of public-private actions

10.4 Cooperation agreements

Projects that stayed on the drawing board

Courses of action and challenges

Afterword: Urban polyphony and collective interest

References

Technical data

Collaborators of Levisky Arquitetos firm

About the author

Image credits

Landmarks

Sumário

Colofão

Cover

Title Page

Preamble

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Prologue

Chapter

Afterword

Bibliography

Contributors

List of Illustrations

Copyright Page

Imprint

Editor's note

A dialogue, interaction, and reaction resulting from knowledge on architecture and laws ruling society and its territory with all of their demands. For Adriana Levisky, the architects and urban planners must act as entrepreneurs that not only solve what they are requested, but that are also one step ahead, listening to the people, to the public and private institutions, contextualizing problems, and presenting means and solutions that were not thought of before to optimize social dynamics and public spaces.

To that end, the author shows in this publication some selected projects developed in her architecture firm, telling their history and evolution to the reader - or not - throughout the process. One thing that caught my attention was an email sent to the architect from a community leader from a quota neighborhood that had a risk of collapse and where the land subdivision Rubens Lara was built, rebuilding the self-esteem of the local population: "All of the sudden, you could see a new car in someone's garage, then in someone else's, and so on. (...) In general, the families got all engaged in improving".

Other high points of this book relate to the architect's scope of work that is sometimes limited by the laws and by the poor organization from architects as a professional category. The author also reflects on matters that affect projects' final results, reverberating to society and its ways of living.

Senac São Paulo, being aware of the cities' dynamics and the need for urban projects that meet different demands, presents this publication on Architecture and Urbanism to stimulate the debate about those matters amongst professional and general audiences.

Acknowledgments

It was possible to end this journey, the fruit of four years of introspection and reflection on the themes that structure this book, thanks to the participation and contribution of different people before and during it.

To these people, I extend my immense gratitude.

As I try to understand the collaboration received for developing this work by field, I will risk using a thematic organization. That is, to organize by those who dedicated me kindness, ethical sense, courage, and energy; by those that opened up to me important doors to knowledge and opportunities, and by those who accompanied me in the front line of the making of this book.

In the field of kindness, ethics, courage, and energy, my deepest loving thanks to my parents David Léo Levisky and Ruth Blay Levisky; my daughters, Nina Levisky Loureiro and Lis Levisky Loureiro; my brothers, Flavia Blay Levisky and Ricardo Blay Levisky; my partner, Manoel Fernandes Barreira Neto; and my friend and also sister, Maria Eugenia França Leme.

In the field of knowledge, my deepest gratitude to Marcelo Suzuki, Elisabeth Goldfarb, Gianfranco Vannucchi, and Roberto Aflalo Filho, who showed me paths and connections with such generosity. To Carlos Guilherme Campos Costa, community leader of the Rubens Lara subdivision, and Ivanildo de Oliveira, community leader of Jardim Colombo neighborhood, who taught me a lot about the wisdom of generosity and living in collectivity through their actions.

In the field of opportunities, my thanks to my friend Elisabete França and my friend Lair Krähenbühl who provided me with genuine experiences in social interest urbanization and re-urbanization of irregular occupations, and in understanding the dynamics of life in communities. To my friend Claudio Lottenberg, who enabled me to start a long trajectory of investigation and learning in the health field. To my friend Heloísa Proença, who incited in me a better understanding of administrative and public management issues. And to dear Abram Szajman, who provided me with sensitive and comprehensive learning in the field of public and social interest issues.

In the field of the investigative partnership of all hours, in the health area, to my friend Antonio Carlos Cascão and, in urban and building regulation area, my dear friend Pedro Luis Ferreira da Fonseca.

My warm thanks to Sophia da Silva Telles, who directed and redirected the intricacies of this publication and paved the way for a pleasant friendship with delicacy and assertive critical analysis.

To Keila Costa and Marcello de Oliveira, my thanks for the continuous dedication and encouragement for us to finish the job.

Last but not least, my deepest gratitude to my partner of all hours, Renata Gomes, who has allowed me to dream and tirelessly keep the flame of doubt, restlessness, and dreams over the years.

Foreword

A trained ear for the voices of the city

Contemporary cities are privileged spaces that stimulate reflections about the implications and the meanings of living in a community. Being densely populated, and at the same time, full of contradictions that carry different problems, they challenge public power, the private initiative, and civil society and end up offering very concrete possibilities for actions focused on social responsibility and improving

people's quality of life.

Part of the fascination that those urban agglomerations cause seems to be related to their ambiguous characteristic of welcoming the fulfilling impulse from human beings, shaping the most distinct entrepreneurial dreams, and being exclusionary, denying fundamental rights to a significant part of the population. On the one hand, the city allows — or should — the fulfillment of the most basic needs, such as housing, mobility, education, culture, and leisure, and on the other hand, they are often precarious and needing investment and requalification.

Etymologically associated with the idea of "a reunion of citizens," the cities, by definition, invite for participation and demand the practice of citizenship. Cities then open channels for collective construction of their paths, involving the State, business community, non-governmental organizations, and those imbued by the civic spirit to contribute to society's existence. Therefore, the formula which has allowed adequate addressing of current challenges lies in the reciprocity and balance between the action of the public power and that of the private initiative, the complexity of which is directly proportional to the multiplicity of conjured aspects: social, economic, political, environmental, legal, cultural, and geographical.

The urban territory, a controversial field in which ideological claims and disputes emerge more expressively, demands permanent negotiation between the actors who live in the space, making it possible — demanding, so to speak — to elaborate pacts in the name of the collectivity and public interest. In this context, in the profusion of voices from the streets, it is more than desirable to have a mediator who listens, accepts, and gives rise to what is being said; it is essential.

Being a connoisseur of the city's logic and dynamics, the architect and urban planner can occupy this strategic position by becoming the link between the different actors, mapping interests, and suggesting solutions. With about 15 million square meters in architecture, urbanism, and consultancy projects in the portfolio, it is precisely in this place in the middle where Adriana Levisky and Levisky Arquitetos I Estratégia Urbana work architecture firm, interpreting the current legislation, establishing neighborhood agreements, and creating public-private cooperation models.

As the president of Federation of Trade in Goods, Services, and Tourism of the State of São Paulo (FecomercioSP), I could follow closely the development of the requalification plan of the area surrounding 14 Bis Square, in the district of Bela Vista, in São Paulo, under its responsibility mainly when the mediation amongst the different agents involved was concerned. But, not yet started, as Adriana tells in the book, its thorough elaboration, followed by its interruption by the public authorities, until the present moment, expresses some of the obstacles in this trajectory. This is, by the way, one of the virtues of the publication that brings together personal experiences in the business, institutional and project fields: the attempt to highlight difficulties in the work process.

In this sense, the task of making cities more welcoming, effective, and sustainable, a long-term endeavor and with an extended impact, affecting significant portions of the population and sometimes implying the reorganization of socioeconomic sectors, usually finds resistance in the brevity of partisan political projects — hence again the importance of partnerships with civil society organizations.

Still, it is an effort that you cannot abandon. Experiences such as that of Victor Civita Square or the Urban Master Plan for the expansion project of Albert Einstein Hospital, narrated in this work, demonstrate that identifying shared interests and defining the counterparts, even when there are many agents involved, can bring benefits to the city as a whole.

From experience as the head of institutions like Senac and Sesc in São Paulo, I can assure you that the implementation of teaching, culture, and leisure units has positive impacts within a radius of many kilometers away from where this infrastructure is. Present in cities with a large population concentration, sometimes on land provided by city councils and integrating broader urban requalification projects, their structures, carefully thought out to enable a complete experience, in harmony with the environment and with the socio-cultural characteristics of the surroundings, emphasize ideals that we wish to see incorporated into each and every project: accessibility, sustainability, hospitality.

Aware of these ideals, Adriana Levisky and Levisky Arquitetos I Estratégia Urbana have a grander ambition than simply meeting their clients' previous demands. Together with them, they seek to assess possibilities, measure risks, and design solutions, articulating the dialogue with other agents when appropriate. Instead of being passive actors providing services based on market requirements, they offer a purposeful action to influence the market itself, the State, and society.

Adriana Levisky idealizes, therefore, the architect and urban planner as an entrepreneur. The political dimension of the discourse is associated with the desire that this posture transcends their own firm and is assimilated by other professionals in the field, who have a valuable instrument in this publication. In this sense, in the rush of urgent matters, past experiences and reflections on the architect's place in contemporary society are intertwined and point to the design of the city of the future.

Abram Szajman

President of the Federation of Trade in Goods, Services, and Tourism, of the Trade Center and of the Regional Councils of Sesc and Senac in the State of São Paulo

Author's words

Urban Polyphony: Architectures, Urbanisms, and Mediations is not an academic book in the traditional sense that this classification represents. Nor does it refer to an illustrated catalog of the professional production of an architecture firm. Instead, perhaps, its structure is a hybrid, resulting from the commented compilation of a series of personal experiences in the corporate, institutional, and project fields.

This is a book of reflections. Freely and spontaneously, I intend to show and share with the reader several themes that occupy my thoughts and that inspire the routine of our firm.

Which reader?

Well, anyone who has an interest in architecture and urbanism. For opportunities to interact with the city. Students. Professional colleagues or colleagues from complementary activities. Those interested in the practice of this profession through its most varied actuation niches. In its errors and successes. In the fragility of some points of the professional education and qualification. In the silent thoughts that help in the structuring strategies and the maintenance of an architecture firm. In the choice of a public persona that aims to communicate with the society in its broadest spectrum, due to its professional production. In choosing the most consistent channels for interlocution in the pursuit of building a public and political position as a professional. In the reflection on the conditions, rules, and vices that characterize public and private relations in work practice.

Through an unpretentious report, this book intends to group experiments, bets, points of view towards society, which in some ways have been sewing, aligning, and structuring our work from the various projects and processes that we have been developing for the past 18 years.

Possibly, this book is a way, or rather, a desire to expose myself in the search for building greater intimacy with those who probably also carry similar concerns and motivations resulting from professional practice in architecture and urbanism in Brazil and from the desire to interact with contemporary cities and society.

Talking a little about our firm, the history of Levisky Arquitetos | Estratégia Urbana traces back from 2003 and is the result of a change in a partnership from the evolution of the desired directions to define the desired professional and existential future.

After leaving FAU-USP in 1992, as a newly graduated architect, I gave continuity to my previous professional experience, which started when I was still an intern at Instituto Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi, with the architect Lina Bo Bardi. From this experience, which brought me the unique opportunity to study Lina's work, persona, and views on Brazilian culture and technique, came the possibility of living for a year in Europe, when I was able to know, recognize and experience a series of places, stories, projects, people, and cultures.

From this trip, I brought in my luggage the draft for my master's dissertation, seeking to consolidate essential aspects of culture in the society's imagination and aesthetics through a better understanding of the "time" factor. Thus, the dissertation The sacralization of space and the spatialization of the sacred was concluded and defended in 2000 at Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, USP, under the supervision of Berta Waldman, co-supervision of Michel Leipziguer, and special participation of Hilário Franco Junior and Salete Clara.

From this journey, several fields of reflection opened up, mainly in the areas of History of Culture, History of Mentalities, Linguistics and Semiotics - disciplines that played a fundamental role in my search for understanding spaces, places, and society, essential and recurring characters in my subsequent professional activity as an architect and urban planner.

In my previous experience as a partner of the architect Alexandre Santos Loureiro in Levisky Loureiro Arquitetos Associados (1996-2003), elaborating construction projects and their monitoring were the main activities. Still, at the time of the opening of the new firm, Levisky Arquitetos | Estratégia Urbana (since 2003), as a partner of the architect Renata Gomes, the core axis became the city and its relations. Such dialogue was established seeking to bring architecture and urbanism together by simultaneously providing consultancy in urban legislation in the fields of planning, urban design, and real estate market, as well as in the architecture projects of institutional buildings and urban buildings, as foundations for the communication between city and society, and between culture and economy.

From the first experiences in the capital city of São Paulo, which coincided in time with the approval process of the Strategic Master Plan of São Paulo (Law No. 13,430, of 2002), up to the present date, the firm has organized itself into operating segments, always guiding, or better, having as the first interlocutor, even if sometimes silent, the city. Thus, the firm was structured on the following pillars: strategic consultancy for new businesses based on urban legislation; institutional projects, especially in the health, education, and culture areas; and urban projects, especially those of urbanization and re-urbanization, with a focus on housing of social interest, and on culture and education based on experiences in the urban space.

The interrelationship between these activity segments has allowed the firm to reflect on contemporary issues that affect us and seek to contribute coherently with the values, mission, and actions that we have been developing over time.

I hope that through the firm's achievements — projects, work methodologies, difficulties, mistakes, and successes — we can comfortably instigate the reader, but not too much, through an intimate, sensory, emotional, and contemplative journey to reflect deeply and sincerely about complex issues of the professional architect urban planner.

Adriana Blay Levisky

São Paulo, 2021

Introduction

In the last 18 years, the practice of architecture, urbanism, and elaboration of urban strategies brought Levisky Arquitetos | Estratégia Urbana a series of challenges regarding its practice, its exercise in understanding each scenario worked on and, above all, the challenges faced with the perception of the mediating role that the firm and its professionals have taken on in the most different projects they have developed. These challenges provided an accumulation of experiences, a specific repertoire in the face of the many conflicts and solutions that contemporary cities face and demand.

In Brazil, the role of the architect and urban planner underwent, undergoes, and will undergo through essential changes in at least three main spheres: 1. in their academic background; 2. in their professional activity — which also encompasses the formalization and organization of their job category and their political-institutional relationship with public and private entities, as well as among their peers —; 3. in the relationships and practices that define project authorship and technical responsibility. With their numerous developments, these three axes make up the complex scenario in which the architecture and urbanism professional works.

The urban context — in its broadest dimension — can be interpreted and taken into consideration by the architect and urban planner in such a way that there is participation and the capability to transform and improve the living conditions of a society by promoting experiences with space. There must be an opening for the insertion of creativity, technology, and art in the transformation of cities, especially from the perspective of inclusion, the creation of bonds between people and their living, interaction, work, leisure, creation, health, and education spaces, claims, agreements and disagreements, construction of memory, reconstruction of histories and stories. It is necessary to reflect on an actual condition of urban polyphony, full of vibrations and often contradictory forces that make up life in cities and that can be mediated and translated by the action of the architect and urban planner.

For this reason, in this book, we want to propose a frank, direct, and open dialogue about the relationships that involve the daily life of the profession, based on the experiences that the firm has accumulated in the exercise of the activity of designing, dealing with urban impediments and with the knowledge and interpretation of legislation — away from the glamor and spotlights, myths and awards that surround the universe of architecture.

The practice premises of the architect and urban planner demand hard work and, before any move, a decision to place themselves as protagonists in the political sphere to lead to the proposition, mediation, interrelationship, elaboration, and implementation of projects. And this is an elementary matter to be discussed, as it not only determines the professional's education and position in the labor market but also directly interferes in the dynamics of planning and construction, in micro- and macroscales, in the most varied action fields that can be attributed to architecture and urbanism.

It is not from today that Brazilian architects and urban planners debate about their working conditions, qualification, professional devaluation/recognition, and the thorny issues involving authorship, plagiarism, partnership, project cost, ethical posture, legal security, and technical responsibility for projects. The Council of Architecture and Urbanism (CAU) foundation in 2010 was a historic achievement for the category, which had sought greater autonomy and representation 1 for decades.[1]

In fact, the creation of its own Council has given and will give more strength to the category, but it does not guarantee that such representation will move from theory to becoming consistent practice by itself. For this to happen, work and commitment from all professionals are required, and they must be willing to and go under a clear and demystified analysis of their own career, which will make it possible to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the professional scenario.

This book intends to contribute to this professional debate on architecture and urbanism from an exercise without any make-believe, sharing thoughts, reflections, mistakes and successes, weaknesses and expectations, and statements from the daily activities and architectural design processes developed by Levisky Arquitetos | Estratégia Urbana, as well as its institutional, academic, commercial, social, and political activities. Therefore, it can be said that this is a meta-reflection, in which the exposition of the intimacy of an architecture and urbanism firm exposes sensitive points of discussion about the professional activity and, thus, it hopes to lead the reader to a critical reflection about the profession and bring an opportunity for more frank dialogues on the subject.

[1] The Council of Architecture and Urbanism of Brazil (CAU/BR) and the Councils of Architecture and Urbanism of the states and the Federal District (CAU/UF) were created with Law No. 12,378 of December 31, 2010, which regulates the exercise of architecture and urbanism in the country. It was a historic achievement for the category, which had brought greater autonomy and representation for the profession. A federal autonomous entity incorporated under public law, the CAU has the function of "guiding, disciplining, and supervising the exercise of the profession of architecture and urbanism, ensuring the faithful observance of the principles of the category’s ethics and discipline throughout the national territory, as well as to strive for the improvement of the exercise of architecture and urbanism” (Paragraph 1 of art. 24 of Law No. 12,378/10). CAU/BR Portal. Available at: https://transparencia.caubr.gov.br/apresentacao/. Accessed on: September 25, 2019.

Part 1 — The Architect and Urban Planner and the Political Sphere

Chapter 1

The strategic posture of the architect and urban planner

I honestly believe that talking about the architect and urban planner is often to discuss his role as a strategist and mediator between the political, cultural, and social spheres.

To guarantee such a position would permeate the ground of these professionals, from their academic education to the perception that the society itself has about the category, whose organization and institutional representation is fragile. The number of groups, professional associations, and institutions representing the professional category already reveals the ineffectiveness of each one of them to face the many issues that involve the context of the profession.

Among the causes and consequences of this situation, we have in our country a very shy history — not to say almost non-existent — of urban planning and design. The number of public projects and interventions on an urban scale developed in our cities is minimal. Competitions for projects, which could be a strategic instrument of significant transforming and qualifying potential, in this sense are also few and, in general, lack parameters and indexes to guide them, which often compromise the results, causing projects not to be built or discontinued and modified, the professionals to be poorly paid, the surfacing of plagiarism, and undue assignment of rights, among other problems. Therefore, it is natural that professionals' perspectives regarding work opportunities in the urban sphere are dissipated because of these deficiencies.

It is worth saying that when we talk about the strategic posture of the architect and urban planner in the political sphere, we refer to politics in its broadest and primordial sense: the art of directing, organizing, and interacting with business and public interests, common to all citizens.

Thus, the political sphere is the dimension in which public affairs are or should be discussed by public and private actors, in constant dialogue with society, and, in this context, the role of the architect and urban planner is to mediate the interaction between all these agents, contributing with solutions for more cohesive, welcoming, intelligent, and humane cities.

Unfortunately, this is not a recurrent practice of the professional category in the country. Brazilian architects and urban planners act much more like service providers, from a passive position of meeting market demands than like entrepreneurs, agents of proposals for change, and articulators of ideas in the urban context. Few professionals — self-employed, employees, or entrepreneurs — adopt a proactive attitude towards career and business opportunities.

By moving away from a more pragmatic and entrepreneurial posture, the category ended up relegating production to other players of the civil construction industry, which were able to equip themselves and become more competitive and inserted in the market. In this sense, in addition to building projects, the few urban projects carried out in the country traditionally started to be contracted and developed within the scope of the bidding, reducing the role of the architect, who would have many more opportunities if he acted in a more proactive and entrepreneurial way, seeking to enable public and private interventions with more competence in the scope of the urban complexity.

For example, I refer to the myriad of public infrastructure projects — roads, mass transportation, ports, urbanizations, and re-urbanizations — which have their contracts structured primarily on the bidding processes that become satisfied by the presentation of project's price and cost spreadsheets, prepared from basic projects that the winning bidder usually changes. The author and technician responsible for the project, or both, are relegated to the detailing stage of the Executive Project — which unfortunately often occurs concurrently with the period of execution of works and, in most cases, by professionals who did not author the project until its Basic Project stage, distorting in most cases the projects that structured the scope of work.

In other words, incomplete projects (Basic Projects) are treated as an item of opportunity to fulfill the strategic stage of contracting works, from Law No. 8,666/93, and can be and easily replaced without representing any commercial loss, and technical and ethical responsibility issues to the contracting part, simply because they are treated almost as a superfluous item, with a low cost and low technical detail. It is difficult to unravel, at this moment, what comes first: the low cost that leads to unskilled projects or the low qualification of complex projects that leads to poor remuneration. Regardless, it is possible to say that this is an unfortunate vicious cycle that needs to be broken by a more proactive and professional attitude in the category.

Undoubtedly, it would be of great value for architects and urban planners to capacitate themselves to become entrepreneurs in the sense of creating and promoting business opportunities or both. It should be in their DNA: to be an entrepreneur, to have a voice, to be able to mediate solutions, and mitigate conflicts. They are not entrepreneurs in the meaning used herein if they do not have a voice. It is useless to complain about working conditions, the little knowledge that the society has about the role of the architect and architecture if the professionals do not participate in this debate in a strategic, technical, and organized way.

The problem starts with education. Our Architecture schools are poorly equipped to instruct students to think about their own careers in an entrepreneurial way. An endogenous education still remains in the academic tradition, from itself to itself, as if the function were restricted to thought, innovative design, and personal success. I would venture to say that it is because of this tradition being so present and rooted in the country that the category has difficulties establishing dialogues with the labor market, industry, government, and society in a systemic way.

An aerial image showing the implementation of Victor Civita Square. In the foreground, solar panels on the roof of the event stage and domus ensure natural zenith lighting in the space dedicated to environmental education.

Victor Civita Square: the process creates the continuance of enterprise relationships

Indeed, the architect and urban planner must be a critical professional, able to think about the urban context in an independent, free and creative way, but at the same time, after reflecting on their questions, they must enter the debate, use their voice, and act as the mediator of this dialogue; it is their quintessential role.

Throughout the trajectory of Levisky Arquitetos | Estratégia Urbana, a series of situations put us in front of the career's "bvious"[2]: to act proactively or wait for assignments by demand. We chose to follow the first path. Respect for our customers, society, and cities led us to comprehend the urban context and its potential in each challenge presented, which brought us some practical repertoire that we want to share. As illustrative examples of these actions, we will discuss the projects for Victor Civita Square and the Urban Master Plan for the Expansion of Hospital Albert Einstein.

1.1 Victor Civita Square: the process creates the continuance of enterprise relationships

The experience from the Victor Civita Square project illustrates well the context of strategic action that Levisky Arquitetos | Estratégia Urbana used as a guide. The entire process of designing this project and the solutions presented for intervention in the space came from a work methodology developed to detect, interact, and mediate conflicts and demands between all actors involved in the process.

First, we were invited by the entity responsible for the project as we were recognized as a qualified firm to develop legal and methodological strategies that could be adopted in some intervention in that space. At that time, there was already a Letter of Intent signed between the entity responsible for the project and the City Council of São Paulo, in which both expressed interest in finding joint solutions for the site's recovery. Therefore, our initial demand was to outline this cooperation's possibilities, evaluating the legal instruments that could be applied. From there, the methodological approach was to identify the agents previously involved and those potentially likely to be involved in the process, seeking to understand their interests and demands.

The initial dialogue was with two solid figures that were willing to intervene in the space: the City Council, which did not represent itself by a unified voice, but rather by various administrative representations with different demands, positions, and rules; and, of course, the entity responsible by the project.

It was about coordinating a public-private action when there were no models or many experiences of them focused on the urban space, nor other modalities of concession of public spaces to private entities applied to urban requalification situations.

At the time, instead of presenting a written document to formalize the legal modeling of this partnership, we strategically chose to integrate the proposed urban and environmental planning into the required legal model. Thus, we were creating an embryo of a public-private partnership without legal precedents yet structured for this context. Therefore, it was of utmost importance to consolidate the document for the cooperation agreement between the City Council and the entity responsible by the project, consisting of its legal part — which contained the rights and duties of each of the parties, as well as the validity and conditions for renewal of this cooperation — and for the architectural/urban project, which established the conditions for use and occupation, installation, and operation of the then called Victor Civita Square.

This course of action resulted from a careful process of recognizing the players involved, which allowed us to understand the divergences, demands, and conflicts represented by each of its agents and was intrinsic to the creation process. Among the players, we can highlight the following ones: Government Secretariat, Subprefecture of Pinheiros, Municipal Company of Urbanization (EMURB, currently SPUrbanismo), Municipal Secretariat of Green and Environment, represented by the Department of Environmental Quality Control (DECONT) and Department of Parks and Green Areas (DEPAVE), State Secretariat for the Environment (current São Paulo State Secretariat for Infrastructure and Environment), represented by the Environmental Sanitation Technology Company (CETESB), and also, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), the neighborhood, the entity responsible for the project, and the team of project design consultants.

Evidently, this was a new process filled with lots of expectations. However, by identifying the interests of each of the parties, we started an actual mediation process, in which the urban project took on the role of translating the different demands, serving as a trial balloon that transformed and adapted to each interdisciplinary meeting.

The City Council did not have a specific project for the site, and the entity responsible for the project did not know which legal, environmental, and urban solutions were viable or not, especially in light of the reports on soil contamination presented by CETESB and Embrapa. The complexity of the space required us to bring into the conversation technicians from CETESB, the Municipal Secretariat of Green and Environment — represented by its Planning Department and DEPAVE and DECONT —, EMURB, Government Department, Subprefecture of Pinheiros, among others.

With the participation of all these agents and public entities, it was our firm's role to coordinate the dialogue. It was the beginning of our active role as a mediator of demands, roles, and responsibilities within the urban space.

Unfortunately, in Brazil, it is pretty standard that administrative structures and organizations for each public department are in charge only of its attributions, with no figure or instance that brings together shared and joint actions, aiming at interventions in public areas, especially in urban areas, at the municipal, state, or federal spheres. Because of that, the architecture firm or the project coordinator needs to go to each of these instances to present a cohesive solution.

The Museum of Sustainability, requalification of the old Garbage and Medicine Incinerator. It is possible to see its strategic location along the Pinheiros River, with access by medium and high-capacity public transport (train, subway, bus, and active modes of transportation) and a cycle path along the Pinheiros River.

This laborious and complex path that requires the architect and urban planner, who is sensitive and willing, to act as a social psychotherapist, detective, customs agent, public law and urban planning law lawyer to gather information to develop the necessary interventions, translating and transforming them into legal and urban modeling, to consider social, environmental, and financial aspects. And it is precisely this role of the architect and urban planner that we are calling mediation.

The Pinheiros’ Incinerator, a remnant of the group of buildings responsible for treating urban waste. It was active from the 1950s to the late 1980s, and it incinerated hospital and residential waste. An important debate regarding environmental liabilities in cities stems from this solid model of waste management.

1st floor of the incinerator during the requalification works.

1st floor of the incinerator after the requalification works.

When we broaden this context's perspective, we can see that the architect and urban planner is a highly qualified professional for bringing these instances and interfaces together, putting them in contact with each other, and making them interact in order not to restrict the solutions to systematic protocols, often with the risk of coming across antagonistic positions, which could jeopardize the implementation of an intervention project, especially in the case of public spaces or spaces closely related to the urban complexity due to the lack of management of the negotiations between the parties.

In the case of Victor Civita Square, there was at first demand from the environmental agencies for having a single, thick, and homogeneous layer of clean soil over all of the land that had approximately 14,000 square meters, based on the prospection carried out in the subterranean waters and soil. The reasoning behind this demand was that it was necessary to completely isolate the soil because there were no reference standards or environmental laws for open spaces in Brazil that would guarantee regulated minimum safety factors to return the space to the population's use. The old Pinheiros' Incinerator, which for decades had been active in the incineration of garbage and medicines at the site, had its activities discontinued and gave way to a cooperative of garbage collectors that occupied the space, storing piles and piles of garbage all over the land. As a result, the area was included in the list of contaminated properties in the city and state. Based on the premise of the desired urban intervention to restore the building for the population to use, there were no indexes to deal with that type of contamination in a public and open space for leisure. Therefore, for safety reasons, the initial guidance presented by CETESB was to completely cover the area with a thick layer of soil and remove all existing fruit trees as required by EMBRAPA, to receive later an intervention project isolated from the environmental liability.

2nd floor of the incinerator, after requalification works (left), for the Training Center in journalism and publishing, 2010.

This solution, however, did not seem viable or sustainable since it would require dismantling mountains of clean soil (approximately 12,000 cubic meters), as well as the displacement of numerous trucks through the municipal and intermunicipal road systems, in addition to the removal of practically all existing trees — which, due to the layer of clean soil to be added, would have their trunks suffocated at the breast height, without any survival conditions.

From this perspective, assuming our strategic role in reconciling solutions, we presented a new proposal that dialogued with the initial demand established by the environmental entity. We understood that the environmental liability historically generated by society — including the responsibility of the public entity, owner of the property — was the main character of this new place due to its broad political, historical, and social context. Interactively, the future user of the square could not leave unscathed, unaware of their environmental, social, and civic responsibility to public spaces, to their public "places".