From Bond to Brazil

From Bond to Brazil

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News Staff

What began as a risky career move — changing subjects just two years before tenure — has taken Rice’s Fares el-Dahdah from James Bond’s villain’s lair to the modern world of Brazilian architecture, including board positions with some highly prestigious foundations.

El-Dahdah, associate professor of architecture, spent much of his career studying and teaching about architectural tropes in literature — like the villain’s lair in James Bond novels — and literary theory in relation to architecture. He found the work fascinating and was close to reaching tenure when he received an Arthur W. Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship that enabled him to travel to Brasilia, the place where he had grown up.

COURTESY PHOTO

El-Dahdah’s studio class explores Brazilian architecture.

El-Dahdah went to Brasilia to study the evolution of the “superquadra,” a particularly modern housing type that is the U.S. equivalent of the mid-20th century urban renewal housing projects. While a negative stigma can surround “the projects” in the states, the Brasilia’s superquadras are viewed very positively.

In the course of his research, el-Dahdah found that there was no shortage of archives that needed to be arranged and described, and these eventually led to numerous publications.

“There were archives galore of architects of national and international importance,” el-Dahdah said. “Getting them organized and making them available was important. I thought, ‘This is urgent. This needs to happen now. I can always go back to James Bond.'”

No turning back

Seven years have passed since changing his track, and el-Dahdah hasn’t gone back to literature. He has received grants and support to create archives and continue his research involving world-renowned architects and visionaries Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, who recently turned 100. El-Dahdah is currently preparing a monograph on Costa and the complete works of Niemeyer to be published by Infolio and Phaidon, respectively.

Because of his work in the field, el-Dahdah was recently elected to the board of the foundation for Niemeyer, a man whose entire body of work has been declared “national heritage” by the Brazilian government. El-Dahdah is the only foreigner on the board, which is comprised of architects, intellectuals and politicians — the new president of the foundation is the former vice president of the country.

El-Dahdah is also a trustee of the foundation for Costa. Through both foundations, he is involved with the organization of archives, the curating of exhibitions and the publication of books. The work he has accomplished in collaboration with the Costa and Niemeyer foundations is supported by grants from the Getty Foundation and Petrobras, the Brazilian Petroleum Company.

The fall semester gave el-Dahdah the chance to see his work in a new light as he took a group of students to Brazil. The trip was part of a studio course in which each student was given a research topic and the opportunity to have their work featured in a forthcoming exhibition sponsored in part by the Consulate-General of Brazil in Houston. El-Dahdah is also planning to publish the work of his students in an exhibition catalog funded by Petrobras.

El-Dahdah holds board positions with some highly prestigious foundations. He is a trustee of the foundation for Costa and a board member for the foundation for Niemeyer. COURTESY PHOTO

“The work generated in the studio has been very helpful in my own work on Brazil,” el-Dahdah said. “But it has also been so enjoyable to watch as they experience to what degree architectural modernity is ‘at home’ in Brazil.”

The trip, sponsored by Duke Energy International, Tramontina-USA and the School of Architecture, gave the students the opportunity to grasp many of the ideas that had been presented to them in the classroom.

“All the slides and photos came to life,” said Florence Tang, graduate student of architecture. “What we had studied became real. As architects, we need to understand three-dimensional space and the materials. The only way to understand is to experience it.”

Fellow graduate student Ernesto Bilbao agreed.

“Buildings might look suggestive in books, diagrams or photographs, but to personally feel them is totally different,” Bilbao said. “It was fantastic to experience the space, visual relations and context of most of them. That is why architecture is created — to be lived.”

Following el-Dahdah’s lead

Tang said it was especially helpful to have el-Dahdah lead the group because he took them to more than just tourist places and was able to get them access to spaces others wouldn’t have been able to.

“I saw things that I never thought would get built,” Tang said. “On paper it didn’t seem like anyone would choose to build them. But people did build those buildings. And because of this trip and Professor el-Dahdah, I got to see that.”

El-Dahdah also showed students something more personal: the house where he grew up.

“The trees I had planted with my father were now huge, maybe 50 feet tall,” he said.

Tang and Bilbao also noted that the impact of Niemeyer could be seen throughout Brazil in daily life — his designs are emulated in malls, office buildings and parks.

“Architecture definitely reflects the social and cultural status of any region or country,” Bilbao said. “It is remarkable how public space is so important in the Residential Axis of Brasilia. That consideration definitely impacted the project I developed in my course.” 

Creating further access

El-Dahdah has also involved his students in creating a visual database for the archives of Niemeyer and Costa. For the past three years students have been involved in constructing the site, www.arkhebrasil.rice.edu.

“Visual databases are labor intensive and it could not have been done without student participation,” el-Dahdah said. “It was difficult to set it up because there is no real blueprint for how to do it. For an architecture archive, you have drawings, photos, notes and other documents. We had to figure out how to respect the order of the archives and make them navigable.”

The visual database is a School of Architecture initiative intended to develop an archive system for organizing and supplying online access to various collections of digital material.

Though the archive currently houses only work by Niemeyer and Costa, el-Dahdah hopes it will expand to encompass all modern Brazilian architects.