The engine and the dream

After my stay at the Copacabana Palace, it was time to breathe, so my enthusiasm for the Flamingo Park, Rio's lung, was palpable.

"Noble ambition, an act of love, to try to improve the city's living conditions by creating a new park, a living organism, made to measure for man". This is how Lota, its architect, described it. And so I was, expectant, ready to stroll through nature, a nature different from Samambaia's, more calm and organized, but no less impressive.

Already in the park, one of the largest and most beautiful in the world, I walked among paths, bushes and trees, and one name kept coming to my mind: Central Park. 

Lota used to walk in Central Park in the 1940s. At that time, she was just an incipient student, but she had a special connection with this place. Little did she know then how much it would influence her, to the point that some years later that same park would become a reference point for her most amazing work...

Lota's struggle to achieve this was astonishing. Plans for the space included a neighborhood of new buildings and lanes for traffic. But she understood the importance of having a living organism in the city, something that would breathe for us and inspire us in our daily routine. She didn't stop until she got it. 

I stopped to look at the bay and imagined Lota here, working, becoming one of the most influential women in 20th century Brazil. And I saw her, latent in her final product, walking alongside her colleagues, turning hills into flat spaces, drilling mountains and opening tunnels.

Lota managed to change the way I saw architecture. I sighed, I felt free, just as she felt when she created, when she dreamed, when she loved.

And I thought back to her inspiration for Flamingo Park and realized that it was not only her student years in New York that inspired her to make this park. It was she, Bishop, who also motivated her to bring a little bit of her homeland to her new home, because that's where she came from and many times, that's where she longed to return. And I thought: it's just like Chavela Vargas says, you always go back to the places where you loved life. That was the engine for Lota and why not, Bishop's dream.