“An unexpected reservoir of unbounded possibilities” é o título de nossa proposta para o concurso Currencies of Architecture (Bienal de Chicago de 2015); uma afirmação dos vazios arquitetônicos das “palafitas”:
If modernism was a process of universal ambitions, its side effects are not always the result of a resistance to those ambitions, but often translate their exacerbation in local expression.
The “concrete palafittes” — a commom architectural accident in Belo Horizonte and many other cities in Brazil — can be seen as a corrupter of a well known object, or as an encounter against modernist architecture origins: it demystifies style to create an object that escapes and despises the pure morality and ethical uniformity of its creators.
The palafittes are a monstruous modernist byproduct that, being devoid of intention and language, act as such a grotesque caricature of the modernist grid that it is capable of causing strangeness. Untying a knot that once united structure and program, efficiency and beauty, they are an indeterminate and free space that modern architecture struggled to keep closed — and that here can be seen as an unexpected reservoir of unbounded possibilities.