Casa Cidade Mundo – A Beleza Possível

The main goal of  the exhibition Casa Cidade Mundo [House City World] is to think about the issues involving social housing, urban development and growth under an artistic point of view, and to imagine or report proposals and solutions for the Brazilian case.

Curated by Evandro Salles, the exhibit presents around 100 works (some of which specially created for the show) by 57 artists, architects and thinkers that discuss art and architecture – two disciplines that were separated from each other in the country during the military dictatorship. The visitor will be able to see pieces that marked Brazilian art history, such as the mock-ups of houses created by Lygia Clark (1920 – 1988, Brazil) in the 1960s, and also recent drawings, models, photos and texts about the idea of the house as a fundamental sign of culture, thus opening space for a collective discussion about new configurations of the binomial art/architecture in Brazilian culture, having as base for that goal both the modern architecture as architectures with strong cultural roots.

The show is the first of three modules of the project A Beleza Possível [The Possible Beauty], idealized by the Instituto Instituto CASA – Convergências da Arte, Sociedade e Arquitetura, created in Rio de Janeiro in 2013 to promote relations between art and architecture in popular and social housings, in partnership with the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), which will host the next two modules of the program, in 2016: a seminar and an exhibition. A Beleza Possível departs from a reflection about the architecture currently developed in Brazil and looks for new housing models that unite compatible prices, quality of the project, quality of life, urban insertion, sustainability and technological development. Its final intention is to reunite major Brazilian and foreign architects to design low cost houses with high technical and aesthetical quality, to democratize the right of living, discussing technical and sustainability issues without forgetting about the aesthetical refinement.