On March 15th, Studio X Rio, the experimental lab by Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) in Rio de Janeiro, opened the exhibition “Fight, Occupy, Resist: The Housing Alternatives of Social Movements”. With curatorship of Pedro Rivera, the director of Studio X Rio, the project aims to provoke a reflection on how the housing issue in Brazil has to be taken into consideration when it comes to planning the cities.
In the opening, Rivera and Amale Andraos, Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, talked about the accomplishments celebrated in those five years of Studio X in Rio de Janeiro and the positive impacts of the GSAPP presence in the city. According to the lab’s director, “Studio X has over 300 collaborators nowadays, from many different areas, which reveals its effort of thinking the cities on a broad and multidisciplinary way”.
Besides that, they reflected on the coming challenges for the lab’s projects and for the cities. Andraos highlighted the need of architecture to dialogue with other fields in order to better look at urban inequalities and better think of sustainable solutions.
The exhibition is part of the “Housing the Majority” initiative, in which Studio-X Network investigates housing issues in big cities at the global scale.