The City That Poured Itself
Nobody decided to build a park. That is the first thing you must understand about the Minhocão, the elevated expressway that crawls three and a half kilometres through the centre of São Paulo at bedroom height. In 1971 the city poured a highway through its own living room, close enough to the windows that you could pass a cafezinho from a kitchen to a moving car. It was loathed immediately, and correctly. Then, decades later, someone closed it on Sundays — a traffic measure, nothing noble — and the city walked up the on-ramps and refused to leave.
The concrete did not change. This is the part the renderings always get wrong. No planners arrived with timber decking and ornamental grasses. The expressway today is exactly what it was: a brutal slab, expansion joints ticking underfoot, rebar showing at the spalled edges like bone. What changed was permission. On a closed highway a person can walk down the middle of the lane, and a person walking down the middle of a lane owns the city in a way no plaza has ever offered them.
Every city has a structure it is ashamed of, and the shame is usually a misfiled receipt. The Minhocão records exactly what São Paulo believed in 1971 — that the car was the citizen and the citizen was in the way — and it records it in a material that does not lie. You can read the pour lines. You can count the strikes where the formwork was reused past its life. Concrete is the only building material that doubles as a confession.
The engineers who fought to demolish it in the nineties argued from embarrassment; the ones who fought to keep it argued from arithmetic. Three and a half kilometres of standing structure is an inheritance, whatever your feelings about the relative who left it to you. To tear it down and pour its replacement would cost the carbon budget of a small nation and the memory of a large one. The laziest possible reading of an ugly building is that it should stop existing.
Stand on the deck at seven on a Sunday morning and the argument settles itself. Runners surface from the side streets. A man sells juice from a cooler lashed to a bicycle. The buildings that spent fifty years pressed against a traffic jam now open their windows onto the quietest street in the city, and the street is thirty feet in the air, and it is made of the exact same concrete everyone wanted gone. The city did not fix the Minhocão. The city finally agreed to look at it —