What if Camillo Sitte visited Rio De Janeiro?

Abstract

This article intends to reflect upon and debate some theoretical aspects of Camillo Sitte’s (1843 – 1903) ideas, in the urban context of Rio de Janeiro, especially maintaining the original urban setting features around monuments. Camillo Sitte’s discourse opposes those of a rationalist urban trend, which emerged in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, that isolated monuments and integrated them into modern urban road projects. Under this perspective, we isolated two monuments and their urban settings in Rio de Janeiro: the Candelária church and the Quinta da Boavista Garden main gate access. Sitte’s assumptions are based on XIX century European urban planning development ideas that anticipated a phenomenon that affected cities from all over the world including Rio de Janeiro: monuments being isolated. The reflection proposed is based on Camillo Site works entitled City Planning According to Artistic Principles, first published in Viena in 1889 as Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen. The work impacted the theoretical debate on urban areas conservation throughout the world during the twentieth century. The theoretical assumptions put forth by Sitte were subsequently observed in concepts spread worldwide by theorists and charters related to the conservation of cities’ cultural heritage, such as Athens Charter (1931), Venice Charter (1964), Brasília Charter (1995), and others. All these charters strongly recommended maintaining the original morphology of the monuments’ surroundings.