Concrete Jungle: Houses That Explore the Contrast Between Concrete and Vegetation

Written by Adele Belitardo | Translated by Diogo Simões
Published on August 06, 2023

There is something very attractive about the combination of lush vegetation and exposed concrete roughness. This is what the book Concrete Jungle: Tropical Architecture and Its Surprising Origins, published by Gestalten, proposes to investigate. The publication offers a reading on modern "tropical architecture", presenting houses located between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and their relationships with their cultural, constructive, and environmental origins. It features several projects and architects, from the 1950s to the present day, tracing a multifaceted panorama that includes residential buildings located in regions as distinct as Brazil, Mexico, India, and Kenya.

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Concrete Jungle "is an attempt to understand concrete houses as more than just beautiful buildings but as the result of a much broader phenomenon." Inserted in their specific and plural political, economic, and cultural contexts, many of these architectures can also be understood as examples of reinterpretations and elaborations of some modern canons and parameters, seeking to adapt to their means and possibilities and create and establish their narratives, questioning a certain discourse of architectural universality that has been present in the field for decades.

From an essentially imagetic and visual reading, complexified by four textual essays, the book allows us to weave relationships and approximations between these buildings, often temporally and spatially distant. Without failing to recognize the specificities of each project, it illuminates many of their timeless characteristics. The publication juxtaposes classics of modern architecture such as the Casa da Canoa, by Oscar Niemeyer, or the Cuadra San Cristóbal, by Luis Barragán, with more recent constructions such as the houses of Marcio Kogan, from Studio MK27, and Angelo Bucci, from spbr arquitetos. Furthermore, it illustrates how the residential typology can also be used for experimentation and composition in architecture.

Beyond a discussion or attempt to establish a "style", the publication seeks to expose the plurality of architectural manifestations and elements employed in these residences that can be seen as design potentialities even today, especially in their relationships with the natural characteristics of their sites, such as the climatic and geographical features, widely visualized through the book's photographs. In a climatic and environmental crisis, these elements become even more important for discussion. They reaffirm the importance of these constructions as reference possibilities for numerous projects. The study and use of solar parameters, topographical features, vegetation, and local materials, combined with technologies such as reinforced concrete, create houses that dialogue with their sites in a unique way.

In Europe and the United States, architects have long worked to control the natural environment, and isolation from gray, severe, and cold winters. But modern architects in warmer climates had no choice but to accommodate, as the Pritzker Committee noted in 2006, "the omnipresence of nature." These buildings represented not only a new political order but also a recognition of man's place in nature, an ideal that is more relevant today than ever. - Michael Snyder

These constructions contrast, with the lightness of their compositions, the vivacity of the surrounding vegetation with the harshness of exposed concrete. This creates a harmonious relationship between inside and outside, intervention and pre-existence, architecture, and nature. At a time of intense global urbanization that often occurs to the detriment and harm of the natural environment, these architectures are a breath of fresh air. They are also a possibility moving forward.

Check out some of the projects selected by the publication: