Parading floats at the Sambadrome / AP

As finalists for this year's Wheelwright Prize gathered at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) to present their research, Gia Wolff, the inaugural winner of the $100,000 traveling fellowship, returned after two years of funded research to give a lecture. The Brooklyn-based architect and GSD alumna won the prize for Floating City: The Community-based Architecture of Parade Floats. Her talk recast the famous Carnival of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as an allegory of the city itself.

When Wolff began her research, she knew very little about carnival traditions, or the infrastructure, culture, and community behind the spectacle. She learned that mapping a float's route through the streets of Mangueira by drawing a set of precise arrows on an aerial photo wasn't helping her figure things out.

Carnival "is off the map". In the end, it's not about getting the sequencing and choreography of floats in the Sambadrome, a linear stadium, exactly right – "it is not really about that, but everything else".

The first surprising notion was that in Rio, carnival is not an event as much as a practice. Its duration and influence span more than a single show or the arena of a stadium. Wolff refers to this as the "cyclical nature of Carnival." It pervades the urban fabric and is deeply embedded in the culture.

Preparations begin long before the performance. Samba schools practice the music and dance throughout the year and the Carnavalesco designs the floats months in advance. Costumes and floats are constructed in old warehouses, disguising the work up until the eleventh hour–no small task for a float the size of a building.

In fact, the floats can't take final form until they enter the parading ground of the Sambadrome. After months of rehearsal, the "perfect image of Carnivil" is fulfilled only during the parade. It is as if sneaking a peak would jinx the final picture.

The Samba schools also operate under a fierce system of competition. Wolff likens the organization of the schools to a soccer league. Three tiers with varying degrees of monetary and cultural capital all participate in the carnival with their respective floats.

But while the first and second-tier schools parade in the Sambadrome designed by Oscar Niemeyer and built in 1984, the third tier moves through the streets, the original parading ground.

This reminds the audience that the Sambadrome is little more than a glorified avenue, constructed and reserved for a single purpose and only a few days each year. The surprising permanence of this structure contradicts its relative temporary function as a street, and the otherwise pervasive nature of Carnival.

But what really captured Wolff's imagination were the immense and utterly spectacular floats, which set the whole parade into motion. It's the float that drives the performance, draws the crowd, consumes much of the labor, and occupies the street.

The Portuguese term for float is carro alegórico, "the allegorical car." But she considered, "could it also be an allegory for the city itself?"

If not the city, perhaps its components. When floats "move through the city like mobile buildings," the sheer size of the floats–in this case, some of the largest in the world–transform the exterior realm of a street into a new interior. These temporary structures are made with steel frame, wooden construction, and foam, all in the name of a thematic story, which the float, the carro alegórico, tells.

The final transformational act, however, that makes the "allegorical car" into a live spectacle and truly gives scale to the construction is the addition of people.

Carro alegórico carioca (a Brazilian "allegorical car" in Rio de Janeiro) / Gia Wolff

We see an image of a large, crane-like machine lifting and lowering elaborately-dressed participants into position, to become part of the float itself. Even though the performers appeared grossly out of scale, they gave the float a dimension at the "unexpected architectural scale."

And then we see a short video clip from the Sambadrome that features a boat and rowers at the center of a large blue tarp. The tarp is suspended from the hips of the performers standing in dispersed perforations, and their coordinated hip-swaying is making waves in the sea.

The objects represented are everyday objects, but Wolff promises, their performance transcends the urban scale. In this way, she observes, Carnival presents "hyper-reality as a new sort of normal reality."

This guest post is by Lara Mehling, Student ASLA, Master's of Landscape Architecture candidate, Harvard University Graduate School of Design