Urban morphology and celebration of faith: Reflections about the structure of Largo da Misericórdia in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The places for the celebration of faith in Rio de Janeiro were a focus of dispute between the various Roman Catholic religious orders in the initial settlement that would centuries later become the present day metropolis. However, one place - known as Largo da Misericórdia - stands out for its social and cultural uses, its landscape values, its morphology that influenced the city’s structural development and, ironically, for being one of the few colonial sites that has held the same name since the second half of the 16th century. In spite of urban fragmentation, the result of the contemporary metropolitan dynamics, the place was the first largo of the city and its structure still conserves traces of its original morphology, revealing an authentic residual landscape preserving much of its formal elements but with very little of the original symbolic meanings.