gambiarra
building technique interchanges between the architect and the self-builder
/ɡã. biˈ a. ha/ means making the most with what you have and improvising solutions — it is the slur most utilized to describe the scrap-building of homes in favelas throughout Brazil. This research initiative is focused on the realistic and immediate improvement of living conditions of the inhabitants of Sururu do Capote — a community situated in Maceió, Brazil — by sustainably approaching self-building methods and providing construction and urban solutions to be performed by residents in response to failed government interventions, all the while actively preserving labor rituals and community relationships. The work encapsulates the daily tribulations faced by residents of the favela, who grapple with the structural resilience of their dwellings due to the lack of resources and environmental exigencies associated with residing on the fringes of a lagoon. The architectural narrative provides contextual insights into Maceió, highlighting the geographical and environmental ramifications affecting the community in question. Emphatically stressing the imperative necessity to devise sustainable remedies to ameliorate the quality of life for the denizens of Sururu do Capote, the overarching objective is to confer empowerment enabling their self-started transcendence of challenges within their environment. The research documents existing methods of construction and urban typologies, and subsequently produces solutions based on available materials and environmental needs, working back and forth between the scales of detail, design, and urbanism. Notably, the development was physically built by the architect — with the aim of understanding self-building by first performing it — and only then translated into step-by-step construction drawings, aimed at the largely analphabetic audience of self-builders in the community who will perform the construction of the modules. The discourse underscores the multifaceted environmental quandaries confronting Maceió, encompassing recurring inundations and the dwindling coastline, warranting comprehensive intercessions to safeguard the populace’s welfare and the ecological equilibrium.
While fixing a fallen piece off her roof, Dona Luzia told me begrudgingly about how the flood takes everything away from her, only for them to build it all again, over and over. Little by little, as resources allow. She’s a Marisqueira and carriage worker, bustling up and down the peripheries of Maceió on a daily basis, trying to find enough money or donations to keep going. Being a marisqueira is hard work: Dona Luzia wakes up at four in the morning to prepare with Seu Damiao to go out in the lagoon. He takes the boat out to dig for sururu while she takes yesterday’s batch to the market to sell. By 8am, she’s sold her inventory, and comes back to the barraco to de-shell the sururu seu damiao found. She navigates up and down the narrow alleys of the community, between where Damiao is stationed and her kitchen. While she cooks and de-shells the mollusk, Seu Damiao goes out fishing, trying to get food for the day and fresh inventory for the restaurants in the afternoon. Mid afternoon, they both leave with their carriages to find anything they can make money off of, mostly plastic by the beaches. They get home at 8pm, exhausted.
So at my concern about her crumbling house she said: now who has time to figure out how to keep this roof from falling every time Yemanjá says hi? Shoosh.
Dona Luzia and Seu Damiao are residents of the community at Sururu do Capote, living on the barracos which sit directly on the edge of Laguna Mundaú in Maceió, a small city in the northeast of Brazil. Their home — like all of the homes around them — is built with found and donated scrap, in whatever way they can manage to: this is called Gambiarra, the practice of making improvised solutions with what you have, which is the standard building form in favelas throughout Brazil. However, the alarming issue with the way Gambiarra has been employed in Sururu do Capote is that the poor structural integrity of their homes cannot withstand the environmental pressures on the edge of the lagoon, causing their homes to fall apart — sometimes fatally — due to continued stress of daily flooding and storms. They cannot leave, because their labor is intrinsically tied to the location and their home life, and the government considers them a liability and will not help them unless it is by kicking them out. With the extreme financial constraint of depending on found material, the environmental constraint of location in the edge of a flood zone, and the typological constraints of labor dependence, this thesis aims to find a solution to the issue, with the ultimate goal of improving the daily lives of Sururu do Capote residents. Empowering them to stay… just teaching them a new way to build GAMBIARRA.
Our story begins in the northeastern waters of Brazil, where the the flat, turquoise ocean waters amalgamate with western flowing springs and flood the low-lying lands of the coastal state of Alagoas, forming the geomorphic attraction that is the city of Maceió — indigenous land named in the Tupi language as Maçayó/Maçaio-k/Massayó, or that which occludes the flood — where the geography forges a cyclical laguna (Mundaú) shaped by a slim silicate bank which chokes the fresh water into a miniscule estuary which is in turn invaded by the salty waters of the atlantic ocean at high tide, flooding and retreating in daily and seasonal cycles. In its eternal management of waters, Maceió relies heavily on the local ecosystem of mangroves which lower surge levels and minimize the energy in flooding waters. However, the city falls victim to its own historical practice of land-filling — as a response to increasing population, the city, which was once populated only at geographical high points, landfilled all of its low-lying land to pave way for housing, simultaneously choking its own natural protection system, and putting its population closer to the risk areas. As a result, Maceió is no longer named appropriately, as it now sees catastrophic floods with high frequency — no longer the one which occludes the flood, Maceió effectively has drowned its own defenses, and is set to have significant reduction in inhabitable coastline in the next 100 years.
Meanwhile, as the affluent city develops in the low-lying lands of the oceanic coastline — where the government throws money in projects to revitalize and protect from floods —, peripheral communities are also growing at unprecedented rates, being pushed closer to the edge of the laguna, where the flooding is at its worst — the most impoverished amongst them often being the fishermen and carriage workers. The population of these communities, known as the Sururu do Capote conglomerate, grows rapidly and informally, as any favela typically does, which in turn attracts political attention due to the high potential voter numbers and the opportunity to appease to the aristocracy by ‘fixing’ the ‘ugly’. Thus, unsurprisingly, the government in the city of Maceió is constantly constructing government subsidized housing for those registered, building entire communities in unpopulated areas of the city to relocate those in need, with particular focus on the informal communities in the oceanic and laguna coastlines. The project for the relocation of the communities in the Sururu do Capote conglomerate has been in full swing for over twenty years, building enough housing to rehouse the informal population of Maceió three times over, and yet the favelas in the laguna are filled to the brim, and still growing. Housing which separates them from their site of labor, with bus commutes over an hour long to return are simply infeasible when your laboring is incessant. Adding in the continual influx of families migrating to the city from rural areas, it is safe to say that the communities labor-bound to the edge of the laguna are bound to keep growing. The government’s other attempt at a solution to these circumstances was to build housing directly on the edge of the laguna, failing due to the population’s lack of financial resources to maintain multi-story housing, and lack of adherence to their typological needs. The solely top-down approach to urbanism and housing has the consistent pitfall of ignoring the daily lives of the population which it attempts to ‘help’. It is common knowledge that relocation of favelas does not work — there have been enough tests. It is also common knowledge that those populations cannot afford to live in communal buildings, and that the government cannot bear the burden of management effectively. It’s also been proven that the population will always come back to where they settled; so if the purpose is to help them, why keep knocking on the same door? Therefore, as we find the limitations of an approach zoomed-out, this thesis proposes we zoom-in. Looking from the top-down can allow us to visualize the problematic and its possible influences, but our solution should be holistic and informed bottom-up — from the people we wish to affect, out into the world.
So what exactly are we working with? Well, it starts and ends with labor: the communities at the edge of Laguna Mundaú are populated by a large number of carriage merchants, fishermen, and Marisqueiras — the women who are the driving force behind the fishing industry of a local type of bivalent mollusk called Sururu, also known as ‘the poor man’s oyster’. Labor is at the center of the community, with the shacks servicing labor and the socializing which comes with it; thus, the architecture follows typologies which are directly derived from the labor.
In this line of thinking, this thesis proposes a possible solution: let people stay, but teach them how to build. While the residents of the community have building knowledge, the local vernacular which their labor is adapted to is too expensive for these particular financial constraints. They build little-by-little, and their building knowledge is informed by traditional pau-a-pique mud housing techniques. However, this materiality, breathable mud and wood building, cannot withstand the seasonal flooding of this location. So how can we use scrap material more effectively to build in Sururu de Capote? Based on the available materials and existing building techniques, the language of fragmentation, and the environmental constraints needing to be addressed, this thesis proposes the adoption of a modular system which complies with the economical model and time constraints which lead to the community’s homes only being able to be built “little by little”. One of the ways to adopt this they already do: by building with small pieces and piling them on top of one another, but this solution brings on structural problems which then become catastrophic during rain. The proposition here, then, is to use a material in abundance: the wood pallet, which allows for modularity and a solid structural base for walls, roof, and floor panels that can be built individually and slowly replace the current envelopes in place. The concept behind this also emphasizes the importance of being able to have a manufacturing line within the community, adopting materials and solutions that can be taught, repeated, and shared for the consistent production for those who wish to partake. A single person could finish several of the pellet ‘panels’ in a single day, and they could either be implemented ‘little-by-little’ or single handedly erected into a new home within a day. In this modular system, the introduction of a buoyant foundation, allows for resilience in the face of flooding, and promotes the longevity of the homes. With the tectonic system in place, the modularity of the existing typologies can remain while improving the overall conditions of living. This system and everything in it is an amalgamation of architectural and local knowledge, with the ambition of amplifying the life and labor which happens within the webs of this ecosystem, not to artificially reflect that which is not.
This work now becomes the work of distribution. For while this thesis might seem like a response to the solutions of a corrupt government, it advocates for an emancipation of the poor by giving them the tools to act on their own behalf, regardless of its illegality. It is in their best interests then that the information be shared, accessible, and legible even when one lacks formal architectural knowledge — architecture is not solely in the conception of a building and its parts, after all nothing is new; but particularly in the communication of that intent in drawings which allow for it to be built. In order to draw for a builder, an architect must empathize with them, and in this order, for this builder and client, one must build in the manner they do: Gambiarra. As such, the thesis has explored and developed building methods from the material, its availability, and labor, by building first, as they do. Now at its distribution, in order to become a tool, it was drawn in the manner the builder of Gambiarra can understand; through these series of step-by-step videos and accompanying drawings, explained plainly and clearly. The ambition in this work goes beyond the city of Maceió, or even informal communities around the world. It is to drive attention to the lack of inclusivity in the ways architecture is spoken about in our circles, and how it alienates those which might need our skillset. While there is much to be done everywhere, I refuse to believe that architecture cannot service those who must serve themselves; while many of us might not be able to help many people by donating countless hours of our time to build with them, some of the work we produce can be of service if the way to explore the future of architecture is by setting our starting point at seeing people for who they are, not who we want them to be.
