In photos
Reidy's 260m serpentine block on pilotis — a modernist landmark.
Landmark buildingConjunto Pedregulho · Photo: Tiago Macedo, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The Conjunto Residencial Prefeito Mendes de Moraes — everyone calls it Pedregulho — is a 52,142 m² social-housing complex on the western slope of the Pedregulho hill in São Cristóvão. The site drops about 50 metres top to bottom; Affonso Eduardo Reidy answered that with a 260-metre serpentine residential block raised on pilotis, threading along the slope instead of fighting it.
Reidy designed the whole ensemble for civil servants of what was then the Distrito Federal: residential blocks plus an on-site school, gym, market, laundry, sports courts and swimming pool. Roberto Burle Marx did the landscaping. The 1947 project came before Reidy's later Gávea unit and stands, alongside Lúcio Costa's Parque Guinle, as one of the defining 1940s Rio modernist housing statements. It belongs in this guide as something to learn from rather than to buy — no real grasp of Rio's residential architecture is complete without it.
Address: Rua Marechal Jardim (morro do Pedregulho), São Cristóvão, Rio de Janeiro
Designed in 1947, with construction starting soon after. Reidy's brief was to house Distrito Federal civil servants on a 52,142 m² site with 50 metres of slope. His answer, a 260-metre serpentine block on pilotis, was one of the longest single residential structures in 1940s Latin America. Burle Marx handled the landscape, and the complex carried a school, gym, market, laundry, sports courts and pool on-site — close to a textbook version of the CIAM 'living unit' idea adapted to a Rio hillside.
At the 1st São Paulo Biennial in 1951, Pedregulho won first prize. It is registered by IPHAN and still occupied; its condition varies, and restoration plans have come and gone with intermittent funding.
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