Serra do Curral was once a natural element visually present in downtown Belo Horizonte. Conceived at the end of the 19th century, the original plan of the city considered the Afonso Pena Ave. as its main axis, as an inclined straight line that connected two landscapes: the Arrudas stream below and the foothills of the Serra above.
Much has changed in 120 years and little remains of those natural landscapes. The visualization below is an intervention that reconnects the avenue to the mountain by means of an inexorable monument built along the avenue. It is a three-dimensional grid (our beloved stilts!!!) that works as a compliment to an absence, the Serra. And that, even knowing that such a compliment uses a grid that congests even more a city not much concerned about maintaining its voids.
At first, the image looks like a reapplication of Superstudio‘s The Continuous Monument (Italy, 1969). But nothing is more similar and more different than these two proposals. The acid and ironic criticism of the Italians was based on inserting more modern architecture in cities already devastated by modern architecture, on making more arrogant what was already arrogant, on the force of separation and exclusion. While the grid is, for us, an open system loaded with freedom, hopes, expectations.
Why not build it right on Afonso Pena Ave.? Because it is the only place left to see some presence of the only natural element of the city, the Serra. Because the best futures in the existing city are in latent fields that need to be invented or discovered. Because the completed buildings must give way to open, procedural, unfinished architectures.
