Affonso Reidy's curved modernist housing block above the Gávea tunnel.
Landmark buildingThe Minhocão da Gávea is a single, sinuous apartment block snaking along the hillside at the top of Rua Marquês de São Vicente, near PUC-Rio and the Gávea mouth of the Lagoa-Barra tunnel — which today passes through the structure's hillside. Its curved slab on pilotis, with open corridor-streets running the length of each access level, earned it the 'big earthworm' nickname.
It holds around 308 apartments and remains a working residential building. Architecture students and visitors still come to see it, because it is one of the few built fragments of Rio's most ambitious era of public housing design.
Address: Rua Marquês de São Vicente, Gávea, Rio de Janeiro
Affonso Eduardo Reidy designed the complex in the early 1950s for the city's Department of Popular Housing, to rehouse families from the Parque Proletário da Gávea. The full plan called for five blocks with 748 units plus schools, a market, clinic, theater and sports fields — a sibling to Reidy's celebrated Pedregulho complex in Benfica. Only this one block was built, inaugurated in 1952, and the collective amenities never fully materialized.
Decades later the Lagoa-Barra highway works cut through the site, an indignity the building absorbed without losing its architectural force. It is regularly cited in surveys of Brazilian modernism alongside Pedregulho.
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