With the World Cup officially wrapped up, Brazil is facing that age-old problem of what to do with a collection of shiny new stadiums whose future levels of attendance and profitability are far from assured. In order to keep the locations of Brazil's 12 stadiums from ending up like the world's many forgotten Olympic cities—or at least to make waves with an entirely unrealistic but cool and fun proposal to that end—French architects Axel de Stampa and Sylvain Macaux have proposed embedding them with colorful modular affordable housing pods. Cool! Fun!
This kind of approach is the modus operandi of 1 Week 1 Project, a firm that de Stampa and Macaux founded in 2013 as an exercise in rolling out one pie-in-sky, problem-solving design scheme per week. (Twenty-nine weeks in, their oeuvre includes a few memorably hilarious tongue-in-cheek entries, including a halo-shaped home for retired popes.) Pair Brazil's desperate need for affordable housing with the reported $3.6B the country spent on the behemoths, and it's clear that this is a conversation worth having, no matter what its jumping-off point is.
As a commenter on 1W1P points out, the specified area of the prefabs, at 1,130 square feet, is so far beyond Brazil usual 377-square-foot affordable housing units as to seriously call into question how affordable these would be. But there's nothing inherently wrong with the occasional bit of adaptive reuse fantasizing. With Zaha Hadid
recently caving to the petition that her design for Japan's Olympic stadium be made more flexible, this imaginative exercise is an especially timely one.
· "Casa Futebol" Proposes a Different Olympic Legacy For Brazil's Stadiums [Arch Daily via Gizmodo]