database architecture and urbanism: urban icons in the city of rio de

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DATABASE ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM: URBAN

ICONS IN THE CITY OF RIO DE JANEIRO

RODRIGO CURY PARAIZO, MARIA CRISTINA CABRAL

Address: Av. Reitor Pedro Calmon, 550, Prédio da FAU - Reitoria - 5° andar - sala 521, Cidade Universitária - Rio de Janeiro, RJ - 21941-901 e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

ABSTRACT

The work in which this paper is based is hosted by the Laboratory of Urban Analysis and Digital Representation, and brings together two research lines of the Graduate Program in Urban Planning (PROURB / FAU/UFRJ): History of the City and Urbanism and Digital Graphics.

The historical object studied is the work of the French architect Joseph Gire (1876-1933) in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in the first decade of the twentieth century, he designed a series of bourgeois houses in Paris, the hôtels particuliers. In 1910, Gire begins an international career designing many upper class buildings of considerable size. In Brazil, he designed many (although yet to be accurately quantified) projects in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. However, his work remains unknown in most countries, including France.

The research methodology is drawn from History of Culture, and seeks to map and understand the dialogues maintained by this architect in the city of Rio de Janeiro, contributing to the development of a strategy of analysis and presentation of the works in question. We depart from the notion of cultural exchange, the circulation of ideas and transculturation as a transitive process from one culture to another, therefore avoiding the notion of a one-way conversation with European ideas dominating local production. The analysis is not restricted to the classification of works by architectural styles, but has the objective to examine the transformations in the built environment, urban morphology and social processes either catalyzed or incorporated by these buildings, therefore characterized as “urban icons” at some degree.

Two of these urban icons are studied in depth, in order to help develop an online application that depicts the architecture works of Gire in Rio: the Copacabana Palace Hotel (1923) and a residential building at Flamengo Beach (1923). For the construction of the digital database, we studied interaction models seeking more subjective and flexible ways to classify, organize and relate data from different source documents as well as different architectural objects records. We also created a navigation prototype to demonstrate and compare tectonic aspects of the buildings, such as structure, materials and construction methods. It also allows the depiction of the buildings’ urban environments as well as their morphological, typological and social contexts, along with their uses and spatiality thus helping envision not only various aspects of the buildings, but also their relationships with the city and with different trends of architectural and urban thought.

C i t i e s , n a t i o n s a n d r e g i o n s i n p l a n n i n g h i s t o r y

INTRODUCTION

There are buildings that help define the shape of the city not only in space, but also in time. They are focal points of several historical narratives, from different fields of study. They affect their surroundings as physical objects as well as larger regions as influential designs. They work as beacons or models, representing different strategies to act upon the city. These buildings are what we will call here icons.

In this study, we focus on the architectural productions that altered the morphology and the urban landscape in the city of Rio de Janeiro, and that in some way have contributed to the process of modernization and transformation of the city. We decided to start with buildings from the first three decades of the twentieth century, a period of many global operations, large migrations, and technological, political, artistic, economic and social changes. The1920s were particularly relevant, because of the major urban works that shaped Rio de Janeiro, the federal capital at the time. It was also a time of coexistence of many different architectural trends: the late eclecticism with a strong emphasis on classicism, the art déco and neo-colonial.

The theoretical framework emphasizes the need for deeper understanding of the production before the onset of the Modern Movement, reassessing the contempt with which these works were treated. The canonical historiography in Brazil (the works of Paulo Santos, Yves Bruand, Henrique Mindlin, among others) proposed the thesis of phenomenal appearance of the Modern Movement from the building of MESP (1936-1943), nowadays called Capanema Palace, and the modern urbanism based on the Athens Charter. The European historiography, on its turn, makes a clear distinction between Modernism and the Modern, the first consisting of the demonstrations that have opened new possibilities of thinking about art, architecture and the city, such as Art Nouveau, the post-Impressionists and the pre-planners, that existed from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the transition to the twentieth century. The pursuit of tabula rasa, the degree zero and the break with the past pursued by Modern Art and Architecture in the first half of the twentieth century was made possible by these previous experiences.

The research re-evaluates the extent to which these manifestations of the first decades of the century became the foundation of modernity. Unlike it has been widely defended by the modern historiography in Brazil, the 1920s brought important questions that became quite relevant to modern architects and technicians.

DATABASES

Lévy (1999, p. 62-64) identifies four informational devices, or ways to organize information: linear narratives, network narratives, virtual worlds and data flow, from which the database is the most common occurrence. A database is an organized collection of data, and according to Manovich (2001,p. 252), databases and navigable spaces are key forms of computer-driven “new media”, benefiting the most from the computer’s capabilities of symbolic manipulation.

The use of databases in the field of Architecture has known great development with the adoption of Building Information Models (BIM), design systems that are three-dimensional databases of the architecture object, describing its constitutive parts in constructive terms. Geographic Information Systems, on the other hand, are


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available when it is the case to represent large areas of the city or even whole countries, using (mostly 2D) polygons to feed a spatial database.

The historiography of architecture has long benefited from the collections of architecture objects, since these sets help the historian recognize patterns and elaborate new associations among items (Rocha-Peixoto, 2010). It is only reasonable, then, to take advantage from the computer’s proficiency in database manipulation in order to enhance this activity. It should be a tool in the construction of Maulraux’s “musée imaginaire” (1965), or even Argan’s ideal framework based on the ultimate corpus (1993, p.62-66). It also comes to mind Bush’s Memex (2003), the mechanical-electrical desk capable of managing user created links among pieces of information – although never built, its goals remain alive in the digital realm, indicating that the usefulness of external memories is not limited to the storage of data, but helping the human mind in retrieving and recombining it.

When it comes to history or typology studies, however, it is hard to find fields that are useful and apply with equal ease to all records. It is not a problem of leaving blank fields in a record when it simply does not apply; the problem is when it applies differently. For instance, a field like “year” is immediately subject to further qualification: date of project, of construction, and even beginning or ending of the construction. All these variants could be applied to many modern buildings, but many older buildings would miss most fields, making those less useful. And while a modern era building can be traced to an exact year, many historical buildings have but a century to be located; since the first is a number and the other a text string, even if they could be entered in the same field, there is no simple direct way to sort and group them in chronological terms.

Less objective categories like “style” can generate entire discussions only to whether they should be adopted or not, let alone during the categorization of each object. Calling a building “Modernist”, regardless of using the word “style” or not, may raise an argument by itself. And while it is possible to adopt long text fields to allow more thorough explanations, they will make it more difficult to automatically group similar records.

These considerations are not intended to prevent the use of databases in social sciences, but constitute caveats instead on what to expect when using them. They also aim to highlight the importance of knowing which outcomes are to be expected to extract from the database in order to model its tables. Curiously, it is not uncommon, in this field, that many of the categories suffer considerable change during data feeding. In fact, previous attempts to describe subjective and qualitative features of architecture objects and urban projects have shown us both the importance of this process as well as the implicit difficulty in it (Paraizo, 2009).

Therefore, the database system should be able to accommodate these changes with minimum data loss, for this experimentation is indeed in the core of the positive outcomes for the adoption of databases in such cases. The very effort to establish an object in a group of “Modernist” works, for instance – and the parallel discussion if “Modernist” is indeed the best term to describe its members, after all – is certainly enriching to the field. In fact, while mathematical driven needs benefit the most after a large data set is fed into the database, social scientists learn considerably during the effort to construct categories and the classification of objects, given their usually heterogeneous nature.


The objective of the study, then, is the design of a system based on databases to assist the formation of architecture objects collections. It is intended to present these buildings to a larger audience interested in the formation of the urban landscape of Rio de Janeiro, as well as foster insights on the subject facilitating the perception of patterns out of the data collected.

CASE STUDY: THE WORKS OF JOSEPH GIRE

The first architect studied is the French architect Joseph Gire, author of three buildings that changed the urban profile of Rio de Janeiro: the “Copacabana Palace Hotel” (1923), the residential building “Praia do Flamengo” (1923) and the office building “A Noite” (1929), the first skyscraper in the city with a then innovative reinforced concrete structure.

Joseph Gire is also the acknowledged author of a dozen buildings in Rio de Janeiro: “South America Insurance” Headquarters, summer residence on the island of Brocoió, residential buildings “Paraobepa” and “São João Marcos”, Laranjeiras Palace. He is the alleged author of many others, as well as of many unbuilt designs.

Given the amount and prominence of buildings designed by him, it seems that in the early 1920s his office was one of the most actives in the city, a fact rarely considered even nowadays. While the application uses both “Copacabana Palace Hotel” and the residential building in Flamengo beach, this paper focuses on the analysis and description of the Copacabana Palace Hotel, in order to present the methodology and the most recurrent issues in the analysis of these icons.

Joseph Gire was born in January 10, 1873, in Puy-en-Velay, a French commune located in the Haute-Loire department in Auvergne region. In 1896, at the age of 23, he won a competition for a monument in honor of Charles Crozatier, a sculptor from the city of Puy-en-Velay. In the same year, he entered the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1900, he married Marie Pauline Deparchy and was appointed inspector architect of the Exposition Universelle in Paris. In the same year he joined the prestigious architectural firm of Lucien and Henri Grandpierre1. The Grandpierre company had a renowned clientele that comprised names of the aristocracy, the industrial bourgeoisie and the arts. Belonging to the great architects of the French Belle Epoque, they have built sumptuous palaces in decorative styles according to the taste of the times. The vast majority located at the 16th and 8th arrondissements, privileged regions in terms of richness and urban infrastructure at that time. From 1906, Joseph Gire played a leading role in the firm, alongside his colleague Jamin. Together, they applied a more sober decorative style in classic and simple compositions, inspired by the “Louis XVI” style. Among the major and better known projects carried out by them are the “Hôtel Singer-Polignac”, “Hôtel Nerys”, “Hôtel Carand'Ache” and “Hôtel Clermont-Nanterre”.

1 According to the information provided by the family of Joseph Gire.


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Figure 1 - Hôtel Singer-Polignac, Paris, H. Grandpierre, 1904. Photograph : Maria Cristina Cabral

At the façade of the office in Paris, there was a board where it could be read: “Cabinet H GRANDIERRE - GIRE et JAMIN, Paris et Buenos Aires”. It is estimated that Gire has built in Argentina from 1910 until the next decade, but the presence and work of Joseph Gire in that country is yet to be properly studied. It has been attributed to him the authorship of nearly a dozen major private and institutional buildings there.

The growth in demands in Brazil in the late 1910s and early 1920s has led to the gradual transfer from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro. His first designs in Brazil were commissioned by the wealthy families Guinle, Paula Machado and Rocha Miranda. Exactly how Gire and these families got acquainted is still under research, although the French origin of the Guinle family seems quite promising an explanation.

THE COPACABANA PALACE HOTEL

The Copacabana Palace Hotel has become a symbolic landmark associated with the image of Rio. Its foundation and physical presence defined the formation of Copacabana neighborhood. The Hotel was part of a well-plotted development strategy of the city. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the region of Copacabana was a huge sandy beach with a few fishermen huts and the little church at the end of the beach (nowadays “Posto VI”) after which the neighborhood was named. According to Abreu (1997), the American “Companhia Ferro-Carril Jardim Botânico” ─ originally “Botanical Garden Railroad Company”, the first company to be granted to operate trams in 1868 — was one of the first companies


interested in extending their operating area to the outskirts of Copacabana. Their interests joined those of the “Companhia de Construções Civis” (Civil Construction Company) and the Baron of Ipanema, among others, the land owners that were performing subdivisions in Copacabana. In 1890, the grant was signed, and the “Botanical Garden Railroad Company” drilled the first tunnel (now known as Old Tunnel), thus removing one of the barriers that prevented access to the neighborhood. Two branches were built: one towards Leme and the other towards “Igrejinha”, as the little church in the western part of the area was known. In 1894, the now named “Companhia Ferro-Carril Jardim Botânico” signed a contract with “Companhia de Construções Civis” where the latter, in agreement with the City Hall, should change the street layout of Leme in favor of the tram route extension. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the immense sandy area was filled with a handful of huts and some houses with higher construction standards, belonging to those that ran away from the denser neighborhoods of Guanabara Bay, such as Flamengo and Botafogo, where the upper classes established themselves. This gradually started a new urban culture, which came to characterize the city symbolically and economically, the culture of the beach resort. According to a report from the Railroad Company, the companies were in charge of this "civilizing action", leading to quality of life and increased income for residents. From the start it was planned the construction of a sports club and a great bath house. In 1904, the “Companhia Ferro-Carril Jardim Botânico” built another tunnel (dubbed as the “New Tunnel”), and, in 1919, Mayor Paulo de Frontin, among many other public works, doubled and paved Avenida Atlantica, located at the seafront. About Copacabana, Rosa Ferreira (1924) wrote, in1922: “Copacabana é hoje um arrabalde primoroso, com muito comércio, cerca de cinco mil casas, algumas de linda arquitectura, e a 45 minutos da cidade” [Copacabana is now a stylish suburb, with lots of trade, about five thousand houses, some of them being beautiful architecture, and 45 minutes away from the city].

Figure 2 - Copacabana Beach, view from Morro Babilônia


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The initiative of building the Copacabana Palace Hotel is associated with the Exposition of the Centenary of the Independence of Brazil in 1922. However, the building was completed only in 1923, after the fair. This has not prevented the hotel from becoming an international benchmark, receiving distinguished guests such as heads of state and international celebrities.

Figure 3 - Hotel Copacabana Palace, 1923, before the opening

By the late 1910s, the city already had a good hotel network, although none of them with high standards2. However, to meet the increasing flow of visitors to the Exhibition, it was planned the construction of three new hotels: “Hotel Sete de Setembro”, at the newly opened Avenida Barbosa; “Hotel Gloria” and “Hotel Copacabana Palace”, which was not finished in time. “Hotel Sete de Setembro”, the first to be built, had lower standards and was smaller than the other two. “Hotel Glória” was designed by Joseph Gire at the same time as “Hotel Copacabana Palace”. The idea of building a luxury hotel on the margins of Guanabara Bay has been around since the urban reform carried out by Pereira Passos at the turn of the century. The commission was made by Rocha Miranda family, and the Hotel opened in 1921. It was a luxury hotel by international standards, with eight floors. Over its 90 years of existence the Hotel has undergone successive reforms that changed its original configuration.

2 The main ones included: “Palace Hotel”, “Hotel Avenida”, “Rio Hotel”, “Hotel Central” and

“Hotel dos Estrangeiros”.


Figure 4 - Hotel Glória, 1921

THE APPLICATION “JOSEPH GIRE NO RIO DE JANEIRO”

The application analyzing Joseph Gire’s works was designed not as a database in the strict sense, but having these principles in mind. It consists of a hyperdocument – a non-linear networked message – using a type we named “array of categories” as its basic structure (Paraizo, 2003, p. 76-78). We decided to start analyzing two works simultaneously, in order to test more thoroughly the categories of analysis used. There are six main categories, which are mandatory for each building. Under them are nested subcategories that may or may not be present, according to each building and the availability of information. Whenever the user changes from one building to another, the system remains in the last category chosen (or subcategory, when available), in order to facilitate comparisons – the drawback of this type of interface, of course, is that for a given building every category must have an entry, and having varying (unmatched) subcategories is a compromise to make it easier accommodate different analytical needs.

The system is built using PHP (which stands for “PHP: hypertext preprocessor”), which is a language that allows dynamic Web pages, generating HTML code on-the-run, that is, at the moment the user visits the page. This means content and form can be treated separately, or at least modularly (as the application in case), making it much easier for corrections, updates and the generation of new content, since one does not need to recode everything for every addition or correction to the system. Because of this separation, it is also easier to have non-programmers to make simple additions to the application, for mostly it means filling the blanks in a given structure.


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The application, from the point of view of programming, can be broke down to two main parts: the menu structure and the modules of analysis. The menu consists of the list of buildings (currently two, but scalable to accommodate more), and the six main categories of analysis, all permanently on the screen; with subcategories showing when the mouse pointer hovers over each category. Each analysis, although departing from the same design template, uses its interface features, like image galleries or images with special markup accordingly, to the point of having built features when needed.

From the issues raised by the study of the Copacabana Palace Hotel and the other icons, we defined the following main categories: (1) general data, (2) urban integration, (3) spatiality, (4) program and (5) tectonics. In “general data”, one can find basic information about the icon, such as dates of commission, construction, inauguration, as well as owners, builders, and so on. “Urban integration” contemplates the urban processes and operations in the surroundings, in addition to urban morphological features, including the building volumetry. The category “spatiality” depicts the spatial qualities of the architecture, with emphasis on organization, layout and configuration of internal spaces of the building. In “program”, the importance of the building in its social and cultural aspects is analyzed. The “tectonic” section shows the constructive aspects of the building, such as structure and construction processes, as well as materials and ornamentation employed.

CONCLUSIONS AND PERSPECTIVES

As mentioned earlier, most database systems do not respond well to changes in their structures once data has been entered, so fields must be decided beforehand, under penalty of loss of efficiency or worse, loss of data. Even altering categories in a given field might be a problem. However, for Social Sciences, these changes are an integral part of the process, as in many cases the definition of classificatory fields and their contents constitutes a highly important element in the definition of the research problem – or the research problem itself, and it is easy to perceive the database as expressive medium because of that. The application here described approaches this problem with modularity and a flexible template for the analytical pages.

On the other hand, since the adopted system treats the analysis modularly, to provide in the future authorial comparative analysis we must either to subdivide them in each of the buildings mentioned or to create “off-menu” pages reached from each building in the corresponding category.

The current categories have proven satisfactory for both buildings, covering the main aspects that qualify them as iconic, that is, influential designs for other buildings as well as for the image of the city. The application is still a work in progress; further refinement is expected, although, mainly for the subcategories, with the eventual addition of new buildings to the list. It is also worth noting that if the system is to be employed to depict a different set of buildings, especially without the iconic characterization in mind, it should be expected to resort to a whole different set of categories.

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database architecture and urbanism: urban icons in the city of rio de