FAVELA

On a bright and clear day in July, 1987, I was driven to a favela in the Morumbi sector of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The labyrinth os shacks extended down a hill on the crest of which stood tall, white apartment houses, towers of the rich, commanding a valley of the poor. The newspaper and telivision reporters who took me there wondered what the reaction might be of a first-world architect to this local social diagram. It was late morning. The winter air was warm. We drove together down the hill on a rough dirt path that led into a small open space in the labbrinth. Children were playing in the dirt and sunshine, and a few teenagers stood about. They looked up as the car stopped and we got out, stepping into the ragged square. Their parents, I was told by the reporters, were away at jobs in the many busy factories of Sao Paulo, jobs that had drawn them to this place from the vast rural regions of Brazil. Because there was no housing for them, and no schools, and no medical care, they banded together, and built the favelas. The children stayed there during the day and into the night, waiting for the adults to return.



Here there was no electricity, no running water, no sewage system to take away human waste or the water from storms that rake this hillside, washing away from time to time the more fragil parts of their fragile city. The small houses themselves were constructed of as many different materials as their builders could scavange from the waste of the city-shard of wood, metal, cardboard, plastic, fastened tenuously together to form walls and roofs. I walked around for a few minutes, looking into one open house, then returned quickly to the dirt square. There a crowd of children had gathered, silently watching me. The reporters had taken a video camera from their car. One aimed it at me, while the other asked if I could please move a little to the right, so I could framed against the shacks and the white towers above. I walked towards the car and told them we should go. As we climbed into the car, a few rocks smacked its side. The driver shoved it into gear and we rode up the rough path, the rocks and bottles picking up their tempo. As we reached the well-paved street above, the reporters asked me what architectural recommentations I would make to affect the conditions we had just seen. I answered,'When you arrive at the scene of a human disaster, the first thing to do is stop bleeding. There is nothing architecture can do until that is sone.


I was wrong.