architecture
Project designed during a workshop at Escola da Cidade, São Paulo in 2025.
The group reunited a few architecture students with the guidance of the architects:
Ana Garcia Ricci, Fernanda Neiva, José Maria Macedo and Rodrigo Messina.
Regarding zoning, the region is primarily composed of ZEIS (Zones of Special Social Interest), ZPDs (Zones for Environmental Protection and Recovery), and ZM (Mixed Zones), with the core of urban policy being the balance between housing needs and environmental preservation in the area. As for the topographical situation, hills and valleys are present along the reservoir’s edge, as well as some areas of erosion and irregularities related to the hydrological movement of the reservoir itself.
The Billings Reservoir, in turn, is an artificial lake considered the largest water source for public supply in the São Paulo Metropolitan Region, with its waters contained within the municipalities of São Paulo, Diadema, São Bernardo do Campo, Santo André, Rio Grande da Serra, and Ribeirão Pires. This lake is part of a hydroelectric power generation system, which moves part of the water volume produced in the Upper Tietê River Basin toward the coastal watershed. In addition to energy production, the waters stored in the Billings Reservoir also supplied the Rio das Pedras Reservoir through the opening of the Billings-Pedras Regulatory Dam’s floodgates. However, due to the high volume of pollutants pumped from the Upper Pinheiros River Canal into Billings, this was suspended indefinitely in 1989.
The proposed intervention for the Mar Paulista Park region aims to create an integrated project of three facilities outlined in the Hydroviary Plan: the Ecopark, Ecoport, and Marina, along with phytoremediation techniques. The modular structures designed for the project express the fluidity and convex movement between the two main elements: the reservoir with its waters, and the land with its vegetation. Within these modules, the project blends into the terrain, bringing some urban equipment intended to create places of permanence, as well as spaces that highlight the importance and value of Billings’ waters, reframing them around moments dedicated to environmental education, showcasing the fundamental role of water in the city of São Paulo.
In addition to the main project, there is also an intention to integrate it with the Cantinho do Céu Linear Park, through a network of linear parks connected by bike paths that will guide users around the Billings Reservoir, providing an intimate experience of contact with the water. Thus, it becomes possible to imagine further interventions that expand public enjoyment of the shoreline, with structures sensitive to the ecological environment: floating decks, fishing piers, viewpoints, and walkways that follow the rhythm of the water and local life, without imposing large landfills or disrupting the existing geography.
More than beautifying the landscape, the goal is to deepen the connection between city and water, valuing local knowledge, water-based transportation, and qualified permanence. It is a city project where public space is affirmed as a right, in harmony with life and with the memory of lived places.
In this context, phytoremediation takes on a dual role: ecological tool and pedagogical instrument. More than just a technical solution for soil and water decontamination, the intentional use of plants in urban projects becomes a symbolic gesture, a way to make visible the healing process of degraded urban spaces, integrating nature, the body, and the city.
In an urban environment historically weakened by human activity, where disorganized urbanization and environmental neglect have left deep scars on the landscape, phytoremediation emerges as a way to reconnect city and nature. In this specific context of occupation, such as Cantinho do Céu, it opens the path for the urban landscape itself to become a space for learning. In this sense, architecture proposes itself as a mediator between science and everyday life, allowing the individual, as they walk daily through that space, to recognize: “my city is being cleaned through nature.” This awareness, built in daily life, can be transformative.
Thus, architecture not only builds spaces but cultivates people—and the urban project becomes a continuous environmental education project, embedded in daily life, deeply rooted in local ways of living and in the processes of rebuilding bonds between humans and nature.
As Ailton Krenak reminds us:
“Estamos nos tornando uma humanidade que não sabe mais sonhar junto com a Terra — e talvez o mais urgente seja adiar o fim do mundo.”
(Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo)
“We are becoming a humanity that no longer knows how to dream together with the Earth—and perhaps the most urgent thing is to postpone the end of the world.”
(Ideas to Postpone the End of the World)
In this sense, architecture can recover that interrupted dream, by restoring the emotional, political, and pedagogical connection with the living landscape. And it is through the visible presence of plants, the slow and continuous regeneration of soil and water, that a new urban narrative begins.