The book ‘474 - Jacaré/Copacabana’, by architect and researcher Gabriel Weber, a PhD student at FAUP, has recently been published. It proposes a critical reading of the city of Rio de Janeiro based on the route of bus line 474 - known locally as the “line from hell”.

Line 474 crosses the city from north to south, uninterruptedly, seven days a week, functioning, during the week, as an essential transportation hub for the workforce that sustains the “marvelous city beyond the tunnels”. On sunny weekends, however, the line takes on a new dimension when it is used as an access route to the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema by residents of outlying areas. The book observes this phenomenon as an expression of the social tensions inscribed in the urban territory.

'474 - Jacaré/Copacabana' is the result of the master's thesis supervised by professors Carla Garrido Oliveira and Ana Alves Costa, presented at FAUP in 2022, a work that was a finalist in Archiprix 2023. The Rio bus line is shown as a cut-out of a city project, perceived and decoded by the drawing of a journey from the suburbs to the beach on a sunny Saturday. The work had already given rise to a first edition published by NoLibros (Barcelona) in 2024; the publication now launched by Sob Influência (São Paulo) is a new development.

Gabriel Weber is an architect, recipient of a research grant from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and a student in the PhD Program in Architecture at FAUP, where he is carrying out research on the Agudá Project, supervised by professors Carla Garrido de Oliveira, from FAUP, and Roberto Conduru, from Southern Methodist University-Texas. He was awarded the Fernando Távora Prize 2024 and the Viana de Lima Prize 2023.

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