Mill island

The project is always an investigative action, abstraction and desire at the same time. In an exercise of the architect's "creative act", this work proposes an approach to possible methodologies/design systems that will always be speculative and chimerical. Thus, the fiction works as a tool to aid the theoretical and practical exercise of criticism.

The structural configuration of irregular houses isolated by the railway branch in the central area of São Paulo, instigated the look for the region and the desire to design. Since 2001, fires have been recurrent in the Slum’s land, resulting in the destruction of buildings of the Central Mill and the homelessness of numerous residents. Issues of violence between police and the community on the grounds of combating theft and drug trafficking are also frequently reported. In addition, in 2012 a 55-meter-long concrete wall was built as a way to prevent the expansion of the slum to the adjacent land and, in the meantime, apartment building towers emerged from the destruction of surrounding industrial warehouses. In line with Bernard Tschumi's statement that "there are key architectural statements that, though not necessarily built, nevertheless inform us about the state of architecture – its concerns and its polemics – more precisely than the actual buildings of their time", the following work seeks in this way to essay a project on the railway island of Central Mill, not with the solving all questions or problems objective, but to exercise the critical/speculative role that also falls to architecture and urbanism. The procedure presented here is conceived as a path, or a labyrinth without beginning or end, triggered by a series of considerations obtained by research, reading and approaching the territory. From these reflections, it was possible to rehearse a Project that is a fiction, or rather an allegory about the urban renewal and clashes that have been happening in the Slum. Therefore, Mill Island is a reading that carry historical value, made from the temporal condition in which it was conceived, at the same time that it is a proposal that subvert the order premise and materialize itself in a speech format, and which aims to exercise the critical role of the architect on these issues.