Colossal Engineering in Carioca

VISUAL REPRESENTATION, MATERIALITY, AND MEDIUM

SPEAKERS: Erika Naginski, Harvard Graduate School of Design

When, in the mid-18th century, the Arcos da Lapa (or Aqueduto da Carioca) was inaugurated in Rio de Janeiro, it heralded not only the arrival of fresh water to the city, but, along with it, colonial infrastructural modernity itself—this, in ancient Roman garb. As the monolithic marker of a system channeling the springs of the Carioca River, the whitewashed stone structure was overseen by the Portuguese military architect-engineer José Fernandes Pinto Alpoim and erected with the labor of enslaved and indigenous peoples. Reaching some 890 feet in distance, it spans the void between the Santa Teresa and Santo Antonio hills by means of two tiers of forty-two round-headed arches and spandrels punctured by oculi. 

That Lisbon’s Aqueduto das Águas Livres was completed simultaneously has long fueled assumptions of unidirectional influence and, even, mimicry, leading from the metropole to the colony. While administrative hierarchies and technical knowledge bring these projects into relation, differences are notable: the presence, revitalization, and extension of an extant ancient Roman system as opposed to the absence of any such network or model in situ in Rio; the military architect-engineer Custodio Vieira’s structural deployment, completed in 1744, of a single string of thirty-five, chiefly Gothic arches with which to span the Alcântara valley over and against what its cousin across the Atlantic put on display; the incommensurability of a network extending nearly sixty kilometers and a less expansive endeavor that was daunting for other reasons; how to square distinct topographies, materials, and encounters; or how, why, and for whom water was delivered in an established as opposed to nascent capital. This paper considers some of the paradoxical aspects of this transatlantic, and deeply discursive, exchange and of the colonial artefact that issued from it. 

About the Speaker

Erika Naginski is an art and architectural historian of the early modern period whose research interests include aesthetic philosophy, theories of public space, and the critical traditions of architectural history. She holds the Robert P. Hubbard Chair in Architectural History at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Books and edited volumes include Polemical Objects (2004), Sculpture and Enlightenment (2009), The Return of Nature (2014) with the architect Preston Scott Cohen, and Paths, Sounds, Ruins: Imagining Architecture in Candelaria (2017) with the architect Jorge Silvetti. Before joining the GSD faculty, she taught at the University of Michigan and MIT. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (where she also held the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professorship).