SuperPop Washing Machine, Chelles & Hayashi Design for Mueller Electrodomésticos

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SuperPop Glass Washing Machine, Chelles & Hayashi Design for Mueller Electrodomésticos

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Havaianas

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Solitário necklace, Oiti for Ronaldo Fraga

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Arapuca Shelf, Rodrigo Almeida

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Pindorama vinyl tablecloths, Marcelo Rosenbaum

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Consul Washing Machine, Consul

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Bananaplac, Fibradesign

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flyers for Fernando Gabeira's campaign for mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Tátil Design

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ZigZag Hanger, Nódesign

Quará hangers, Nódesign

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Gadget Shelf, Bernardo Senna for Tok&Stok

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"Jalapa" Project, Piracema Design Lab

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Condiment Jars, O Imaginário for CIV

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Limited edition Lacoste polo shirt, Fernando and Humberto Campana

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Rendeira Lounge Chair, Flávia Pagotti Silva

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During my first week in São Paulo last July, I couldn’t help but notice how so many residential buildings in São Paulo had their names set in the same typeface. I found it really intriguing, and it also reminded me of a blogpost architecture critic and D-crit teacher Alexandra Lange had written a few days earlier about house numbers in her Brooklyn neighborhood. I failed to take any photos of the said typeface during that week or on my second visit to the city. But when I came back to São Paulo last November, I made sure I took as many photos as I could of names, numbers and stylish building entrances in the Jardins and Higienópolis neighborhoods. There are a few more photos after the jump. For more, visit the set on my Flickr page. If you know what this typeface is or why it’s São Paulo’s typeface of choice, I’d love to find out. Feel free to comment or write me at frederico[at]05031979.net.

In perhaps a nod to this tradition, Livraria da Vila uses the same typeface for its identity (here on Isay Weinfeld’s Alameda Lorena building in Jardins)

I saw the great, inspiring documentary “Beyond Ipanema: Brazilian Waves in Global Music” last night at the 92Y TRiBeCa. After the screening, director Guto Barra went up on stage for the Q&A.
I really appreciated when he said he didn’t want to restrict the film to the history of Brazilian music (from Carmen Miranda to Bossa Nova, from Tropicalismo to Baile Funk), but rather on how what David Byrne calls Brazil’s main export for decades has been influencing so many other creative expressions around the world.

The invitation email to take part in TEDx São Paulo last Friday. This was very good news: not only I was one of about 700 people to be selected for this very exciting event, I had finally a reason to go back to Brazil.

I’ll be arriving in São Paulo Tuesday, November 11th and will be coming back Sunday 15th; I’ve already started writing to some of the people I didn’t meet in July and August, or didn’t have a chance to properly interview, to schedule appointments and interviews for my thesis. Can’t wait.

Patrícia and Renato

After meeting Patrícia Naves in New York during ICFF, I decided Belo Horizonte had to be a stop in my itinerary. After 4 days and also thanks to her, BH became my favorite Brazilian city – even if Rio would win the “where would I live were I to move to Brazil?” contest.

Patrícia and I we were introduced in New York by Zoë Melo, a fellow “mineira” (native of the state of Minas Gerais), as some of Patrícia’s designs are part of Zoë’s Touch collection and were shown at Destination Brazil, a Brazilian product design showcase that took place at the MoMA SoHo store in May of 2009.

Trained as an architect, Patrícia has her own product label, Oiti, and runs her own design store in Belo Horizonte, Grampo. She also designs accessories for fashion designer Ronaldo Fraga, a celebrated mineiro who has been taking the Brazilian fashion world by storm with his intricate, sometimes surreal fashion collections that establish dialogues between Brazilian culture and the contemporary world and are inspired by such disparate things as Disneyland or Santos Dumont (Brazil’s air travel pioneer).

I flew in from São Paulo on a Friday afternoon; Patrícia was going to leave town with her boyfriend Renato the next day for the weekend (she would also later go to Copenhagen for designboom’s designmart), so we planned to meet for dinner with some of their friends, which was a lot of fun.

Raquel, Alexandre and I

One of Patrícia’s friends I ended up spending a lot of time talking to, Alexandre Mancini, is an artist who works in the tile panel medium. He is also truly passionate about the history of tiles and tile panels, particularly the fascinating history that connects Portuguese and Brazilian tile panels and the many, virtually unknown influences between the two since the 16th century. Tile panels have been an important part of Brazil’s architecture from Baroque churches (excluding the ones in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais’ World Heritage town, which are tile-less – for a reason) to modern buildings in Brasília. Alexandre told me about Athos Bulcão, the celebrated artist who worked with Niemeyer on many of his buildings and developed a unique way of designing and building his abstract tile panels by creating modules that would later be randomly applied by workers on site. Alexandre speaks passionately about Bulcão, whom he sees as his main inspiration; the panels he’s designed for buildings by his architects and friends Carlos Alberto Maciel, Alexandre Brasil, Bruno Santa Cecília and André Luiz Prado (who also publish an architecture magazine, MDC) reflect that influence.

Together with Alexandre’s girlfriend, Raquel (who is a direct descendent of the Távoras, Portugal’s powerful and infamous aristocratic family) we talked about what is was like to live and work in Belo Horizonte and the culture of being “mineiro” – from the food to Guimarães Rosa, one of Brazil’s great modern writers. It was great to spend an evening with people so proud, but also actively involved, in the life, history and heritage of where they’re from.

Heloísa Crocco and Normélio

I got to know Heloísa Crocco and her work through Adélia Borges, whom I met the day before I left to Porto Alegre. I was going to stay in a hotel there, but Adélia called Heloísa to ask if her “wooden box” studio on the outskirts of Porto Alegre, by the Guaíba river, would be free the next 2 days. This is where she welcomes friends, artists and curators there as a sort of informal artists’ residence. Lucky for me, it was free.

Crocco's studio gorgeous sleeping quarters

Heloísa is trained as an artist, but has been working as a designer for many years. Most of her time is dedicated to the design of surface patterns and decorative panels, where she explores wood texture elements in varying levels of abstraction, namely in her own line of decorative ceramics at Tok&Stok. She is also a pioneer in developing community-based design and craft projects, and this was what interested me most in meeting her.

Heloísa is a co-founder of Piracema Design Lab, a research project dedicated to “form in Brazilian culture” initiated by a multidisciplinary 7-person team: herself, photographer Fabio del Re, artist and professor José Alberto Nemer, twin sisters and architects/designers Lui Lo Pomo and Tina Azevedo Moura, Renato Imbroisi and Marcelo Drummond. I met some of the other members later in my trip.

Image taken from a Piracema Design Lab presentation

Piracema is seen as one of the most consistent and respected projects in this field; through its “Faber” project, it has been instructing professionals (artists, designers, craftsmen) to work in projects that bring together design and craft. This is thus not a one-hit-wonder project where a group of designers goes to a remote community and teaches people how to improve their craft through design. In a way it’s also about that, but this 1-year program is mostly about providing the knowledge and tools to understand both the market (in its potential and limitations) and the communities these professionals will work with in the long run.

Through its scientific base and multidisciplinary approach, Piracema avoids the empirical methods and unilateralism of other, similar projects. Allowing the artisan to be sovereign over its work and authorship, it wishes to cultivate the product of his or her work as a materialization of a cultural heritage, observed in its context and anthropological complexity.

Jalapão (image from the rosenbaum® blog)

Mainly with the support of Sebrae, Piracema has developed community projects in several states, the last of which took place this July in Jalapão, a landlocked plateau region in the state of Tocantins. During the time I spent with Heloísa in Porto Alegre the experience of being in that remote place was still very fresh in her mind. We talked a lot about what happens when a team of designers goes to places like these: how the community they meet reacts, how much they learn from one another and how significant the impact of the experience is on both.

The day after I arrived we (Heloísa, her son Thomaz, Tatiana and myself) went up to Bento Gonçalves for the first day of the Casa Brasil Design fair. We got there just as Marcelo Rosenbaum was finishing his talk, right on time for him to join us for lunch. Rosenbaum had been the invited designer for Piracema’s Jalapão project, and this was the first they had reunited after the experience.

Heloísa, Thomaz and Marcelo ('s tatooed arm).

Over what was a remarkably northern Italian lunch near Bento Gonçalves, they shared many stories from those unforgettable ten or so days working with local people and capim dourado. This tall plant, whose naturally golden stem is used to make a myriad of objects, was the material of choice for this project. Also at the table was Ademir Bueno, design manager at Tok&Stok, who had been following this and other Piracema projects closely, as some of the resulting products find their way to its nationwide network of stores. You can see some photos of the project’s team and results on Rosenbaum’s blog or on Tok&Stok’s website.

Normélio's stuff

On our 2-hour car journey back from Bento to Porto Alegre, we bought bergamot oranges by the roadside, and as we passed the village of São Sebastião do Caí, Heloísa made sure she stopped at her friend Normélio’s to say hi. He welcomed us in the kitchen of his amazing wooden house for tea. Normélio collects and restores antique German colony furniture and surrounds himself of decade-, in some case century-old, artifacts that in this part of Brazil don’t feel even particularly exotic.

Normélio's Tea

Having turned 60 this year, Heloísa told me she feels it’s now time for her to go back to her own work and “pass on the torch”. She wishes Piracema to evolve as a project, to involve younger people and adapt to future challenges. Judging from her contagious enthusiasm and energy, but also Piracema’s talented team and track record, I have no doubt the project will remain as relevant and inspiring as it is now.

In dowtown Recife.

And in Óscar Freire, São Paulo (Havaianas store by Isay Weinfeld).

I only saw the sun for three hours during the six days I spent in Rio de Janeiro last August. My one and only stroll down Copacabana beach took place under a rain storm, while three-meter waves pounded the shore. I was lucky to even get a view of the city (above) from the top of the Corcovado. The last week of my one-month research trip in Brazil may have been anything but sun-kissed, but I didn’t need to get a tan to think Rio de Janeiro is today in a great place to become South America’s main design destination.

I say this three days before the International Olympic Committee decides the host city for the 2016 Olympics; running against Madrid, Chicago and Tokyo, Rio – and Brazil – is aiming high with its Olympic bid, as Alexei Barrionuevo tells in his recent New York Times article. What stroke me most about this piece was the following paragraph:

Rio is seeking to become the next Barcelona, Spain, a city that used the 1992 Olympic Games to improve its infrastructure and transform itself into a more popular destination for tourism and international events. Officials here say a Rio Olympics could help broaden the Games’ appeal to a wider and more youthful South American audience, while stamping Rio and Brazil with a seal of international approval.

This comparison is particularly fortunate: 1992 was Spain’s “golden year”, when Barcelona hosted the Olympics, Seville the World’s Fair and Madrid was European Capital of Culture. By then Spain was no longer the backward, southern European nation of before. Brazil doesn’t have to wait for 2016 to prove how far it has come: every day new statistics and news express the country’s social and economic progress, made possible by a burgeoning economy and political stability. Those changes are also expressed in its industry, design and – in what is the focus of my thesis research – its design community.

I’m not the first to say Brazil is a creative powerhouse of the 21st century, but I’d like today to make the case for Rio de Janeiro to be its new center. After losing its importance in the 1960s, as Brasília became the country’s administrative capital and São Paulo its industrial, financial and cultural heart, Rio went through some rough times. The derelict state of its downtown is an evidence of how it has been emptied of power, money and stamina.

There are however signs of a slow rebound – and I’m not talking about Olympic bid billboards. Expanding areas of downtown are now home to galleries, bars and restaurants. An ambitious new recovery plan has been announced for the city’s old harbor, which be the new address of Instituto Europeo di Design’s Rio branch (after it was denied to be housed in the legendary Urca Casino – thanks Filipe Chagas for pointing that out).

These are only a few hints on how Rio de Janeiro can be South America’s answer to Europe’s Barcelona: a cosmopolitan and tolerant city of incomparable natural beauty, known for its joie de vivre. Somewhere to call home that is large enough to feel urban, but not incommensurable and burdensome. These may not be the only requirements for the “creative class” to come here from all over the world, as it did in the past – after all, Rio (and Brazil) still has many problems to solve, crime being its most critical.

It also has a history in design: ESDI, South America’s first design school, opened in 1963; some of the country’s most interesting designers and studios are also based here. But as I often heard during my rainy week, São Paulo is where the real money is, so that’s where most people have been going – making it the world’s third largest megalopolis. Rio’s other handicap is the virtual absence of local industries; most are based around São Paulo or in the southern states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. But in our post-industrial world of digital connections and low-cost airlines, does proximity to industry matter most than closeness to other designers and creative professionals?

If Justin McGuirk’s London Design Festival review in The Guardian is anything to go by, no. Much like London, Barcelona, even Berlin, Lisbon or Cape Town (all differences considered), Rio doesn’t need industry to become a – and not necessarily Brazilian – “design hothouse”, an “international hub of ideas and dissemination”, a design capital for Brazil or for the whole of South America. It just needs to get its act together, honor its past, improve the living and safety conditions of its inhabitants and become an exciting city to live in – as it once was. The time has come for Rio de Janeiro to aim higher.

In his latest and highly critical Folha de São Paulo op-ed piece, Kennedy Alencar says Rio not only deserves the Olympics, but also a generous and intelligent elite that can lead a discussion about the city’s future. Rio’s designers should also be part of this discussion. The local design community is already beginning to do just that, as this video for last year’s Brazil Design Weekand this manifesto show. And it should be taken seriously. In the next few weeks, I’ll be posting profiles of people I’ve met there, who have been contributing to this creative reawakening.

Brazil is currently living its most fascinating moment in history, which may have its highpoint in seven years’ time. Rio should be the host city to that and to many other celebrations.