Of dwellings and streets that connect: a brief honey-moon

Abstract

This study explores spatial properties across successive urban scales – street grid, plot division and building footprint – which tend to be associated with certain patterns of use and perception. The adoption of the modernist formal repertoire in Brazil in the early 1930s spread from major cities to achieve nationwide scale in the late 1960s. In Natal, capital city of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, this phenomenon coincided with a period of intense urban expansion and housing construction in the 1950s. Many of these buildings displayed not only a nouveau physical appearance, more or less faithful to the formal canons of the international style, but also new relationships of permeability and visibility respecting the street, which parallel spatial properties found in the town’s global grid structure at the time, and appear to be associated with the socio-cultural context that framed that stage of urban development in Brazil. This argument is based on findings from distinct studies in which syntax analysis procedures, as developed by Hillier and Hanson (1984), were used to investigate space configuration in diachronic perspective: that of Natal’s urban grid, and that of middle-class housing in various north-eastern towns. They revealed a turning-point in the global-to-local relationship of Natal’s urban spatial structure around 1955, when the potential accessibility of the grid achieved maximum level and newly-built residences were highly permeable and visible to the public space. Drawing from Hillier’s (1996) principle of natural movement, that peak in accessibility points towards a configuration that was more movement-orientated than ever before or after. Those highly street-exposed dwellings seem, therefore, to have been designed to take part in that animation. As the notorious averseness between dwellings and streets in the 18th and 19th centuries, recurrently stressed in the literature re-appears in the heavily walled and gated condominiums of the present era, the panorama of residential neighbourhoods presented here evokes the idea of a brief, bygone honey-moon.