São Paulo: Bridges, Tunnels, and Viaducts

Owing to the geography of the plateau on which the original sixteenth-century Jesuit village was founded, and to a taste for engineering and a firm belief in progress, São Paulo today is both intersected and interconnected by bridges, tunnels, and viaducts. The uneven topography and the two rivers that intersect the city have long been natural challenges to overcome by urban development, using ever more effective structures built according to the technical abilities and tastes of succeeding epochs.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, profits from the lucrative coffee industry laid the foundation for the great mansions of the Avenida Paulista and the metal structures of the Viaduto do Chá and Santa Efigênia. In the postwar period, with the arrival of multinational automakers, the English-built São Paulo Railway gave way to asphalt. Reinforced concrete substituted iron-based engineering, providing stronger bridges, wider viaducts, and longer tunnels, and made possible such structures as the open space of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (1947) by Lina Bo Bardi.

This will to construct, that built Brasilia in 1960, takes form in these bridges and viaducts, which create an elevated rational thread for urban circulation above the organic design of the streets. The beauty of these structures cannot be denied, evidence that while mathematics may not be able to move mountains, it can at least go through or over them. These are functional structures for increasingly fast urban movement, and they are symbols of development in what has been, for many years, the “country of the future.”

The imposition of these massive structures interrupts the organic development of the places where they are installed. The depopulation of the area and the negative space that they create by rising into the skyline initiate new forms of living. The best planned bridge, the most precise tunnel, the strictest of viaducts, are built together with the inverse of themselves, places whose identity we can't classify, blank spaces, areas without projects, where new forms of occupation can organize themselves out of a void.

In these spaces, the authoritarian forms of an urban project designed primarily for cars coexist with informal habitats on a more human scale. These are territories where the modern desire for a rational ordering of the world is condensed and juxtaposed with the contemporary reality of its organization by adaptability.

-Carla Zaccagnini