Graduate shows 2016: Bartlett graduate Adrian Yiu has proposed revitalising a disused quarry in Rio de Janeiro's oldest favela to create an independent enterprise zone for local people (+ slideshow).
For his final-year project on the Bartlett School of Architecture's masters programme, Yiu designed a facility that would be built into the sides of an excavated canyon.
He sees the project as a response to the social oppression of residents living in the Morro da Providencia favela, which is situated on a hillside between a port and the city's main train station.

He suggests operating the quarry as a community-led cooperative, with all profits funding a programme of continued excavation and construction. The aim would be to provide residents with independence from state control. "The scheme aims to create an economically independent zone to provide social opportunities for the community by re-establishing the community?s quarry," said Yiu.
"It intends to provide an alternative way of appropriating the current issues of commercialisation and tyranny. More importantly it is to give visibility to previously unrecognised social subjectivities."

The quarry would be extended into the hillside to form a large gash reaching all the way up to the more prosperous areas above, and therefore connecting them with the favela.
The resulting opening would be carved to create a variety of cave-like spaces reaching down towards the excavation site at the base. Yiu's ...