Sunday 21 May 2000
Board Meeting
One of Rio’s art déco landmarks, the 1931 statue of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado Mountain is a well-known tourist attraction. The summit is also a superb vantage point for viewing Rio de Janeiro’s geography and city layout.
Official Opening of ICAM10 at the Rio Othon Hotel
The opening session will feature speeches by Luiz Paulo Conde, mayor of Rio de Janeiro, and Michael Snodin, ICAM president, followed by a Conference by Oscar Niemeyer.
Monday 22 May 2000
Session 1: Architects in Power
Chair: Oriol Bohigas, architect and town planner, Barcelona
A round table discussion with architects/mayors from South America and Europe, including Luiz Paulo Conde, mayor of Rio, Jaime Lorner, former mayor of Curitiba, Mariano Arana, mayor of Montevideo, Massimo Cacciari, mayor of Venice. The session will consist of 4 speakers followed by a discussion.
Visit to Brazilian Foreign Office Archives at Itamaraty Palace
Session 2: What’s New
Chair: Wim de Wit , Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles
As always in ICAM conferences, ICAM10 will enable participants, through contacts in and outside the sessions, to learn from each other’s experiences. What’s New is the session where we will discuss truly innovative developments in the architectural museum and archives world. We are interested in hearing presentations about all aspects of our work: new methods in the preservation and cataloguing of architectural archives, innovative approaches to exhibition design, or thought-provoking publications about an architectural topic. The session will consist of 4 speakers followed by a discussion.
Session 3: The role of Architectural Museums in Political Programmes
Chair: Jöran Lindvall, Swedish Museum of Architecture, Stockholm
Architecture is often seen as an art – applied in the sense that it must fulfil functional requirements and must use technical instruments to be built. But with its great impact on human life architecture might equally be seen as a political matter. In recent years national governments and local authorities have singled out architecture as an important territory for political action. Various kinds of programmes have been set up. The main aims are to improve the quality of what is built, to take better care of the already built environment and to open up the planning and building process to become more democratic.
Some architectural museums have been given various new roles within these new political programmes. Some institutions, particularly in city centres, can be seen as instruments for implementing national or local programmes for a built environment. These developments have given some architectural museums new, sometimes good, possibilities to fulfil their existing goals. But it might also bring them into situations where they are forced to act in contradiction to their positions as free cultural institutions.
This session will present the role of architectural museums within governmental or local authorities’ political programmes for architecture and discuss what favour we might win from this and what problems we might meet. The session will consist of 4 speakers, followed by a discussion.
The Museum of Modern Art, Exhibition Opening
Tuesday 23 May 2000
Session 4: What is original
Chair: Dietmar Steiner, Architecture Centre, Vienna
Collecting the original in the age of electronics. How to attribute authorship of computer aided designs? Discs can be distributed or sold to several institutions: which is the original version? Or is originality in the age of the world wide web important? Where is the intellectual properly deposited?
The session will consist of 4 speakers, followed by a discussion.
Departure for Sitio Burle Marx
Landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx (1909 – 1994) was one of the masters of 20th century garden design. This visit will take us on a tour of his home, studio and nursery garden in the hills west of Rio de Janeiro, on the site of a former coffee plantation. The extensive grounds are planted with an amazing collection of tropical species.
Session 5: The Modern Landscape of the New World
Chair: Marc Treib, University of California, Berkeley
In this century, some of the most substantial contributions to the world of the garden, the park and the city have taken place in the Western Hemisphere. To some degree the New World was freer to accept modernism in landscape design than its European counterparts: tradition had less of a hold upon the people, at least upon the middle class. In California, Thomas Church and Garret Eckbo -working with architects such as William Wurster and Richard Neutra – integrated interior and exterior space in the suburban house. Architecture and garden joined as commingled spaces set for contemporary living. In Mexico, Louis Barragan offered his personal modern idiom bred upon an austerity enriched with native folk traditions, embracing solitude and site as the sources for the new Mexican landscape.
In Brazil, of course, it was Roberto Burle Marx who linked the modern plastic arts of painting and sculpture with the particularities of biological species. With architects such as Oscar Niemeyer and Rino Levi he created a vibrant landscape vocabulary with sources in the arts, architecture and of course, the botany of Brazil. What and who else made significant contributions to the modern landscape in the Western Hemisphere?
These examples demonstrate how the various axes – geographic, botanical, social and aesthetic – intersected to form a modern yet indigenous landscape expression. It is just that idea – of a designed landscape at once modern and local, a ‘national modernism’ – that is the subject of this session.
The session will consist of 4 speakers, followed by a discussion.
Centro de Arguitetura e Urbanismo, Exhibition Opening
Reception at City Hall
Wednesday 24 May 2000
Session 6: Beyond Europe: Representation and Meaning
Chair: Nuno Portas, architect and town planner, Oporto
Maps, plans, iconography, descriptions and their role in the understanding and planning of territories, cities and architecture in Latin America.
The idea that Latin American document collections tend to have a distinctive character and content, also perhaps to be found in collections from other outlying areas and continents, is borne out by the predominance in these collections of so-called ‘naif’ representations by natives and settlers as against items displaying the relatively sophisticated techniques and instrumental aids used in contemporary Europe.
In Latin America, knowledge of origins and development of urban history and art is based on scant drawn and written evidence. Both descriptive and technical documents characteristically tend to substitute a symbolic and imaginative representation for the accurate rendering of reality.
The session will consist of 3 and 4 speakers, followed by a discussion.
Session 7: Beyond Europe: Representation and Meaning
Chair: Nuno Portas, architect and town planner, Oporto
Contents: see Session 6 above
Downtown Rio Tour and visit to The National Library
Rio de Janeiro’s city centre boasts prime examples of architecture from the colonial, neo-classical, beaux-arts and modern periods. After lunch at the art nouveau Colombo Teahouse, highlights of our visit will include the 17th century church and monastery of São Bento, the neo-classical Customs House, Lapa dos Mercadores Church, the 18th century Palace of the Viceroys, the neo-baroque Municipal Theatre (1909) and two pioneering landmarks of Brazilian modernism: the Press Association (1936) and the former Ministry of Education and Health (1937). The tour will culminate at the rare books division of the National Library.
Session 8: ICAPAR meeting
Chair: Robert Desaulniers, Centre Canadien d’Architecture
Discussions will be held on the function of the proposed section for architectural archives within the International Council on Archives. The results of the Working Group on Architectural Archives will be presented and the co-operation with icam will be discussed.
icam 10 Tropical Extravaganza Party
Thursday 25 May 2000
General Assembly
Closing of icam 10 Conference
Visit to Niemeyer’s Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói
Completed in 1996, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói, facing Rio de Janeiro across Guanabara Bay, is Oscar Niemeyer’s latest tour de force. Its unusual, saucer-like shape provides a perfect counterpoint to the spectacular setting, on a promontory overlooking the bay, with a breathtaking view of Rio’s mountains. The museum houses a small but comprehensive collection of works by young Brazilian artists.
