Plataforma Plus São Paulo — Bixiga + Teatro Oficina: resistance policies and different city desires

Abstract

The Plus São Paulo platform continues a work process started in Paris by the architects Frédéric Druot, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, who found a new territory for experimentation: São Paulo, through its areas that have great potential for transformation and densification, and which specifically had Vila Buarque as an object of study and project of the Estúdio Vertical discipline, in 2014, at Escola da Cidade. Since 2017, the Bixiga neighborhood has been incorporated into the investigation of Plataforma Plus, with research and exercises developed by the group itself, together with Estúdio Vertical, and also through the Experimental Research program of Escola da Cidade, whose final report, by the students Catarina Calil and Lais Silva, is the basis of the text published in this journal. Deeply connected to the issue of reusing existing urban situations, Plus focuses on raising the “capable territories”, that is, detecting opportunities to provide answers to the housing shortage, exploring voids, underused buildings, land to be densified. In this sense, Plataforma Plus seeks in the body of déjà-là the potential of future projects, demonstrating that building plus reflects building with the existing, linked to the current urban body, without the need to move outside it to find the available buildable space. Plataforma Plus is dedicated to the learning of urbanism and architecture, as an attentive way of looking at the city, in the simultaneous understanding of its various scales, from the interior of the houses, the way of each one to inhabit, to the issues of infrastructure, legislation urban, social, economic and environmental issues. Through a fine study of the current urban profile of the blocks around Escola da Cidade, as well as the Bixiga neighborhood, the Platform studies sought to reveal characteristics, identities and constraints of the territory in which the fabric transformation capacities will become legible. existing; seeking to promote generous, durable proposals that are inseparable from the desires of people who work, attend, pass through the region and, especially, those who live within the study perimeter defined for this platform. Plus São Paulo was built, then, with the dynamics of Escola da Cidade students and collaborating architects, guided by professors Fernanda Barbara, Camille Bianchi (until 2017) and José Guilherme Pereira Leite, in partnership with the French architect Frédéric Druot, who participates in the development of the project constantly in Paris and in intensive meetings in São Paulo, which take place periodically.