Cidade das Artes

Barra da Tijuca was designed almost entirely around the automobile, so ending up on foot here usually feels like an accident. When Christian de Portzamparc was handed this ninety-five-thousand square metre plot, he found himself marooned in the middle of Trevo das Palmeiras, a massive expressway cloverleaf mapped out by urban planner Lúcio Costa.

Most modern complexes caught inside a highway junction respond by building defensive perimeter walls, shutting out the roaring lanes of traffic. Here, the landscape architect Fernando Chacel chose a very different strategy. He went down. Chacel excavated the ground level into an interconnected series of reflecting pools, native aquatic plantings, and shaded garden walks inspired directly by the coastal mangrove swamps that used to define this shoreline.

If you arrive by foot from Terminal Alvorada, the neighborhood's main transit hub, you do not dash across twelve lanes of speeding traffic. A pedestrian tunnel brings you straight under the expressway and deposits you into this cool, sunken garden. And the physical relief is immediate. Shaded by the enormous concrete slab hovering overhead and cooled by the circulating water mirrors, the temperature down here drops several degrees below the blazing asphalt outside.

It is a clever piece of environmental staging. Before you ever look up at the architecture, the garden creates a microclimate that makes you slow down. Chacel understood that if a building claims to be a city of the arts, the very first thing it owes you is refuge from the asphalt jungle.