VAGA: essays about spatial opportunities

The project takes place on Rua 25 de Março a street in São Paulo’s downtown, known as an important commercial

centers, an open-air market where trading happens inside and outside the shops: among tents and hawkers who

occupies the street and sidewalks. A street where thousands of people, commodities and illegal products circulate

daily.

The first part of the project, the “Errant Landscape”, is the accurate reading of the landscape that Rua 25 de Março

produces: on one hand Rua 25 de Março reveals as an open-market and a potential meeting point, on the other

hand it’s a place highly controlled by security cameras and police patrols watching over the hawkers and the

pedestrians. Grating, ladders with lances and signs with "it is forbidden to stand or sit" conforms 25’s spatial

configuration stimulating the passive relation to the space, the fast consumption of commodities and the

precarious conditions of the informal workers.

From the "Errant Landscape" it was possible to approach to the main agents of 25: the hawkers, listening to their

perceptions and work conditions, which led to the second part of the project, the Incursions, a series of

interventions on the street speculating a common space in its everyday, seeking a gap, a place free from the

existing comercial relations, an opportunity. By appropriating an unused space, the Built Detail (the last

Incursion) not only revealed it but became "the park", "the point", "the pitstop", "the reading point" or any other

appropriation that occurred after its installation.