Urban Screens / Telas Urbanas
São Paulo, 2002

Construction screens serve as a temporary medium that covers the present and foreshadows the future as countless buildings are erected and renovated each day. Always in the public eye, these screens could be used as art supports, converting urban skeletons into temporary monuments and creating an interesting interplay between urban exhibition and collective memory. They simultaneously highlight what was, and is, and what will be. The act of construction becomes notable through the images displayed on the screens. Once construction is done, the screens are removed, and replaced by the image of a building, a new addition to the urban environment.

This action would actively highlight the neighborhoods and areas where construction boost is happening, shedding light on where real estate speculation occurs plus the type of building program that has been prompted—institutional, housing, cultural, and so on. This could be seen as an opportunity to investigate legislation, building codes, planning rules, segregation, and discrimination in order to promote incentives in areas that are in need, also revealing where the city’s potential new construction, renovations, adaptive-reuse and demolitions take place.

The urban screens bring art to the masses and into people’s daily lives. They become reminders, and play a part in people’s memories, creating a temporal relation among space, time and identity through the image displayed. 

The screen material, a mesh fabric that provides strength and ventilation, would be the same as that which has been used for advertising. Metro and other public authorities and organizations would have maps showing the ‘monuments’ located in various neighborhoods Private organizations would be motivated to sponsor these open-air ‘exhibitions’ through the use of existing cultural programs and tax incentives. Many artists would be interested due to the nature of the medium and the unique kind of public exposure that it offers. The city could have areas displaying specific themes and subjects. People would engage with those images in various forms.

The proposal was chosen by the School of Architecture at the University of São Paulo as one of the entries in a national architecture competition. 

“A street, or a housefront, or a mountain, or a bridge, or a river or whatever are not just a background. They also have a history, a personality, and an identity that deserves to be taken seriously.”

Wim Wenders, filmmaker

“The space appropriated, qualified, socialized, gives rise to the places of the city. … The generation of places is something triggered by the imagery contained in the cultural repertoire of the inhabitants of a given place.”

Lucrecia D’Alessio Ferrara, Brazilian Architecture scholar

Artists on display: Mauricio Nogueira Lima, Claudio Tozzi, Cristiano Mascaro and Gal Oppido. And the historical houses from Avenida Paulista. Those were some of the new construction, renovations, adaptive-reuse and abandoned structures back in 2001-2002