Jade Raymonds on Design

In addition to my previous post: an interview with Jade Raymonds.

Rio: Fashion From Favela Rocinha (2/2)

By 1990 Tetê, initiator and guardian of COOPA ROCA, was able to get the attention of the fashion industry and by 1994 they began to produce clothes for the catwalk. A new strategy was adopted: Tetê started to contact factories to convince them to hand over their waste luxurious fabric to the cooperative, and with this new approach a new concept came into existence. The traditional sewing techniques that were used by the women applied on the luxurious fabric resulted in an interesting combination for the fashion industry. As Tetê said, the secret is to surprise the buyer, a surprise which in this case is achieved by the unexpected combination of ‘poor’ (or culturally rich) traditional techniques with ‘rich’ (but actually recycled) luxurious fabrics.

Tetê was able to convince fashion designers to give workshops to the women of the cooperative on skills and trends and one day after their first workshop, both Elle and Vogue magazines reported on COOPA ROCA. Through the 2000 and 2002 exhibitions of REtalhar (‘patchwork’ or ‘to shape’), organized by Tetê, partnerships were formed with fashion designers to provide designs to the cooperative, like for example with Dutch designer Tord Boontje and French artist Stephen Dean. While the sales of the clothes started off in kiosks in shopping malls and at local markets, nowadays COOPA ROCA collaborates with big fashion brands like M.Officer, Eliza Conde, Amazonlife, Dautore, Osklen and C&A.

But COOPA ROCA is not only about income and fashion. It is also about perspective. There is a ‘New Generation COOPA ROCA’ project, that educates the art of sewing to girls in the ages from 16 to 21. Also, the girls receive education in dance and get sexual education. Quite an important issue, as Rocinha is the community with the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro. COOPA ROCA has the ambition to educate the future leaders of the community.

The group has grown from about 20 in the beginning to about 150 nowadays and still growing. But there is still a lot to be done. The cooperative does not have access to the Internet yet, so it is still hard to keep their website updated. And the central office has become too small, so small in fact that the Next Generation initiative had to be put on hold. But in 2006 the construction started of a new headquarters on a plot of land in the middle of Rocinha, that was a gift of one of the collaborators in fashion of COOPA ROCA.

It represents the start of a new phase in the life of COOPA ROCA.

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Rio: Fashion From Favela Rocinha (1/2)

Somewhere in 1981, Maria Theresa Leal, or ‘Tetê’ visited the Rio de Janeiro slum of Rocinha with her domestic helper, who was living there. The visit was quite unusual as people like Tetê, an art teacher from middle class background with a college degree in social sciences, are barely to be found in the favelas. Visting Rocinha, the largest slum of Latin America with somewhere between 150 to 500 thousand residents, she mentioned that there were a lot of women with sewing skills, but with no skills in marketing or commerce. And so she took the initiative to organize the women in order to provide them income and perspective. From this group, in 1987 the cooperative COOPA ROCA was formed.

The seamstresses of the cooperative, which vary in age from 18 to 65, work at home and define their own workload and deadlines. This way they continue to be able to take care of their domestic responsibilities. The cooperatives share responsibilities on production, administration and publicity that are discussed and decided upon in a meeting once a week in a central office. This office is also the central point to distribute new orders and fabric and to collect the finished clothes.

[ Some of the women of COOPA ROCA, Tetê to the far right in yellow]

Initially, old clothes that had been collected by children in a local recycling projects were recycled into new ones. As most of the favela women came from the Brazilian rural areas, there skills were traditional, such as Fuxico (broidering with pieces of fabric), crochet, and patchwork (with recycled fabrics). But as the fabric was recycled and the techniques traditional, the sales fluctuated and the prices stayed low.

To be continued…

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Architect/Mayor/Governor Jaime Lerner of Curitiba, Brazil (2/2)

The transformation of Curitiba was initiated with the realisation of a car free city centre as an icon for the city of the human scale. It was a controversial plan because there where no precedents in Brazil. Though IPPUC initially thought of a trial period of two months, this was brought back to one month to one week because of the expected protests. Eventually the planning institute could convince the local entrepreneurs to accept a trial period of only one weekend. Prior to this weekend the street in question, Rua Quinze de Novembro, got totally refurbished, streetlights and kiosks were placed and tens of thousands of flowers were planted, an investment with which Jaime Lerner as a director of the planning institute took a big risk with which he put his career in jeopardy. The test however was successful and when the local automobile club announced a protest the following Monday, schoolchildren were mobilized for a street drawing project to stop this protest. This way, the first pedestrian zone in Brazil was a fact within 72 hours.

Actions like this are typical for the way Lerner operates, and are typed by him as ‘Acupuntura Urbana’ – Urban Acupuncture. This is a strategic intervention with quick results that generates enthusiasm and support for further developments. In other words, momentum is generated. This working method made Lerner popular during his career as an architect, but was blamed on him as being populist in is career as a politician. As a politician, he could replace binary political thinking with complementary architectural thinking. Politics became design with the idea that the same dynamics, processes, limitations and systems influence both politics and architecture. With this approach it became possible to get maximum effect with limited resources. This got compensated by mobilizing the population, which became an alternative architectural resource.

“…The city is not the problem, it is the solution…” – Jaime Lerner

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Architect/Mayor/Governor Jaime Lerner of Curitiba, Brazil (1/2)

Architect Jaime Lerner (1937) played a central role in the development of Curitiba. As a student he was involved in the first ideas about an alternative plan for Curitiba and after his graduation as an architect in 1964 he got involved in the founding of the Instituto de Persquisa e Planejamento Urbano de Curitiba (IPPUC – Institute of Urban Planning and Research of Curitiba). After his first successes as director of the IPPUC Lerner was appointed by the military regime as mayor (prefeito) of Curitiba (1971-1975), aged 33 years old. In 1979 a second term followed (1979-1984) and in 1988 he ran for the third time, now in a democratic Brazil. He announced his candidacy 12 days before the elections and got elected for his third and last term as a mayor of Curitiba (1989-1992). In this position Lerner had the opportunity to implement and refine the reforms that he himself had suggested in the masterplan before. After being a mayor Lerner was elected in 1994 as a governor of the state of Paraná, and got re-elected in 1998. Since 2002 he is active as an architect again and he advices the United Nations in the reconstruction of Kabul and New Orleans, for which Curitiba is taken as a reference.

Abraham Maslow said: “…If you just have a hammer, you’ll approach every problem as a nail …”. Lerner looked further than the usual architectural toolbox and regarded architecture as a materialized system. In his words: “…If you present the solution as a bus, than it is a bus. If it is presented as a system however, people will understand…” Lerner considered architecture not to be product based, but service based.

Photo: Lerner (Center) at the inauguration of the Bus Express System in 1974.
Reference: www.jaimelerner.com
Book: Acupuntura Urbana

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