Lucas Marques

Despite the urban interventions that sought to instigate the tourism and reclaim the lost coastline in the ‘Porto Maravilha’ region, what can be observed today is a segment of the city that only answers to the market demands, where the implementation of a multitude of corporative and high standard residential estate enterprises is being facilitated by the local government, without answering the proposals sought by its own port revitalization program.

Where the ‘Via Perimetral’ once stood, enormous corporative towers now block the view of the coastline, and the ‘Cidade do Samba’, which was to be a recreational center during the year, enclaves itself inside its massive walls, ignoring the port that one day stood in this same location. Because of the successive embankments along the decades and the construction of high-rise buildings along its perimeter, the port simply is not, and it is extremely naive to believe in the possibility of change when the market has such a firm grasp of the development in the region.

Stablishing a dialogue with the project ‘The river that is not’ by Luis Callejas, our proposal appropriates the premise that the ‘Porto Maravilha’ will not be, and instead uses this focus given by the filiation with the governmental project to propose an affordable housing complex, displacing the axis of the issue to shed light towards more important subjects, without directly confronting the real estate market.