Hasta La Ideas

This concrete photography studio in São Paulo by Studio MK27 features two folding walls that allow the garden to be included in shoots (+ slideshow).

Named Studio R, the three-storey building appears as a stack of concrete volumes with the studio itself occupying the entire ground floor.

Metal screens can fold up and down at both ends to offer the photographer a variety of environments. One reveals a gravel patio, while the other opens out to a plant-filled courtyard.

“The inner space of this photography studio flows into the side gardens of the building and into the urban space, establishing a spatial continuity between the square and the building,” says Studio MK27.

A green formica-clad box runs down one side of the studio and conceals a dressing room, toilet and small equipment room. “In this space, there is no interference from the structure,” add the architects.

Lighting in the floor highlights the bold colour of the walls and perforated openings let this light filter inside. A floating staircase is hidden behind it with a skylight directly above.

Offices and meeting areas are located on the first floor, where daylight filters in through a wooden mashrabiya screen. Another boxy volume sits in the centre of this floor, containing utility rooms and a second staircase leading up to the top floor.

A red-painted mashrabiya screen lines the edge of the second storey, which is a social room opening out to a rooftop deck. This storey is offset from the two below, creating a cantilever that projects out towards the building’s entrance.

The ground floor space has a white resin floor, while wooden flooring gives warmth to the two upper storeys.

Brazilian practice Studio MK27 is led by architect Marcio Kogan. Recent projects include the concrete Casa Cubo, which has no ground-floor walls, and the timber-clad Toblerone House, which was filmed through the eyes of the client’s pet cat. See more projects by Studio MK27 or see more architecture in Brazil.

Other photography studios we’ve featured include one lined with herringbone parquet and one constructed from glass.

Photography is by Fernando Guerra.

Here’s a project description from Studio MK27:

Studio R

Facing a small urban square, the Loft Studio opens entirely to the outside. The inner space of this photography studio flows into the side gardens of the building and into the urban space, establishing a spatial continuity between the square and the building.

The façade, an aluminum gate is recessed into the concrete binding, integrating the front patio with the square; further, two large swinging metal gates – each more than 11 meters wide – permit fluidity between the gardens and the open space of the studio. Opened, these swinging gates make all visual barriers between internal and external space disappear. Closed, they allow the light in the photography studio to be controlled artificially.

In the opening of the ground floor, there is a box clad in formica-china, where we have the lavatory, dressing room and the technical area. In this space, there is no interference from the structure, which is built into the side walls of the building. Behind the green box, the stairs – lighted by a skylight – leads to the first floor, where we find the offices and the library.

A volume with metallic material organizes all the space on this floor, separating the rooms and corridors. On this floor there is a kitchen the lavatories and the stairs that lead to the top floor. The negative of this volume is the work rooms which can be opened or closed – depending on the desired privacy – through sliding panels which are built into the central box.

In the main office a fixed mashrabiya panel filters the light, while simultaneously opening a beautiful view of the large trees in the square.

On the top floor, there is a social room positioned over the front garden. This space opens with folding wooden panels, painted red, onto a deck where you can once again see the tree tops: a pleasant space for meetings on sunny days.

The material used internally displays an industrial aesthetic, appropriate for the intensive use of a photography studio that needs to constantly transform itself, depending on the situation.

The floor of the large opening is of white resin which also becomes the endless back and the wall. On the other floors, the wooden floor warms the ambient. Externally, the metal doors join the exposed concrete and the different colored wooden panels.

Project: Studio R
Location: São Paulo, Brazil
Project: February 2008
Completion: September 2012
Site area: 338,15sqm
Built area: 373,00sqm

Architecture: Studio MK27
Architect: Marcio Kogan
Co-architect: Gabriel Kogan, Oswaldo Pessano
Customized furniture: Gabriel Kogan, Carolina Gastroviejo

Team: Beatriz Meyer, Diana Radomysler, Eduardo Chalabi, Eduardo Glycerio, Eduardo Gurian, Elisa Friedmann, Gabriel Kogan, Lair Reis, Luciana Antunes, Marcio Tanaka, Maria Cristina Motta, Mariana Ruzante, Mariana Simas, Renata Furlanetto, Samanta Cafardo, Suzana Glogowski
Collaborators: Fernando Falcon, Fabiana Cyon

Landscape architect: Passe_ar Verde, João Fausto Maule Filho
Structure engineer: Leão e Associados, eng. João Rubens Leão
General contractor: Lock Engenharia, eng. Marcelo Ribeiro
Air conditioning: Grau Engenharia
Installations: Grau Engenharia
Gates: S. Naldi

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Studio MK27 appeared first on Dezeen.

An entrance concealed behind a ceramic mural leads down into a sunken living room and courtyard at this house in São Paulo by Brazilian architects Terra e Tuma.

Designed for architect and studio director Danilo Terra and his family, the three-storey Maracanã House was constructed on a tiered site in the city suburbs, where the lowest level of the ground is a storey below the street.

Terra e Tuma constructed the house using concrete and left chunky block walls exposed around both interior and exterior spaces.

The ceramic mural hovers just in front of the entrance and is a piece that artist Alexandre Mancini created especially for the house.

The tiles display a maze of angular lines and shapes, interspersed with the occasional red dot. “I worked with a particular shape, a red dot,” explained Mancini. “I believe it points to and emphasises the rhythm of the composition.”

Once inside, this entrance is revealed to be on a mezzanine middle floor, where concrete staircases lead up to first floor bedooms or down into the open-plan living and dining room.

Large glass doors open the living room out to the courtyard garden beyond, while a second sunken courtyard is positioned at the front of the house beside a tall window stretching all the way up to the roof.

Other recently completed houses in São Paulo include one clothed in golden aluminium and one with concrete upper storeys perched above a living room without walls. See more architecture in Brazil.

Photography is by Pedro Kok.

Here’s a project description written by architect Daniel Corsi, translated into English by Monika Sönksen:

São Paulo. In this city, which contemporaneity is able to perform the most extraordinary urban contrasts for us, living can reveal an encouraging condition.

In search of a place where this could be experienced, the idea of an elementary residence acquires the character of a happening. Thus, as this house decided to silently place itself at the westerly metropolitan meanders, is how it is presented at Maracanã Street.

The plans which define the geometry – opaque in grayish materiality, clear in glass surfaces or vibrant on the access mural – shows its presence like a new event around the bucolic surroundings, where curious people wonder this new construction. Its discordant geometry in relation to the traditional houses of the neighborhood surprises upon the moment when it conceals any territorial definition, admitting as an element and as a public event, takes possession of the street which allows to be perceived. Through its whole property’s occupation as it is available, it shares its limits as if internalizes the surrounding and though arises its unique place.

More than a space, its levels gradually form a path through which outside and inside merge in a proper and continuous shape. The house discovers new possibilities to the limitations of the scanty plot, whose complexity exceeds horizontal and vertical routes which invariably leads to a new spacial experience, capable to elucidate singularities of the district’s geography.

Being in the house of Maracanã Street is being in Lapa; is to live together with its peculiarities, stamped in the expectation to discover until where its spaces can conduct us and the possibility it offers the contemplation of neighbours reddish roof constructions and the church facade which crowns the district, while the sunset at São Paulo’s horizon gets unveiled.

Entering the house doesn’t mean to set apart the city, which leads us to it or to close off a disconnected universe. Its access has to be discovered from behind the ceramics mural painted in black, white and red compositions. Entering the house means, simply to transpose a succession of spaces, now narrow, now lightened, now shady, which leads us always to new experiences.

Above: lower floor plan – click above for larger image

The house’s arrival happens from the emptiness, which is a viewpoint to the living space and also an identification area of its functional sections: social and services below, intimate above. Like the city streets, the lights between their spaces enlightens every directions, through big glass openings which sets against the solidity of the concrete materiality which it is built.

Above: middle floor plan – click above for larger image

Which way some arrives, which way some passes, which way some goes? Through the space, through the emptiness. Going around or staying, that’s how its extension is discovered. We can find ourselves immersed in its lower pavement, defined by concrete plans, by the gardens and by the backyard which shape the ambiance, or we can go through vertically until the gliding plan of the roof unveils the sky in a special instant leaving us as observers of the city whose point of view is this house’s roof top.

Above: upper floor plan – click above for larger image

The house is a living infrastructure. The pavements which configures a succession of perspectives is subtle protected by the presence of big glass frames. The handling of the technique and the use of minimum materials, as if it where stones over stones in its essence, confirm that Architecture can undress the present temporary superficialities and elevate only the spacial essence.

Above: roof plan – click above for larger image

The shelter, the protection to the fundamental, comprehend the nature into what the house is destinated and the sense it assumes, for those who are witnesses. Nothing more is needed for the contemporaneus city living. Here is the fundamental residence, unique and revealed.

Above: long section from courtyard to street – click above for larger image

Above: cross section through living room

Above: cross section through mezzanine

Above: cross section through staircase

Above: front elevation

Above: side elevation

Above: rear elevation

Above: side elevation

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by Terra e Tuma appeared first on Dezeen.

Inside the colorful cardboard boxes by Martins Cafe, you’d expect to find retro wind-up toys. However, once you tear off a flap from the robot-printed package you’re hit with the rich smell of ground coffee instead. The unexpected element marks the idea behind the playful presentation of Brazil’s Martins…

Continue Reading…

Slideshow feature: following the news that Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer has died aged 104, here’s a look back at some of his best-known projects from around São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, documented by Brazilian photographer Pedro Kok.

See a series of movies by Pedro Kok on Dezeen, including one about Niemeyer’s Marquise do Parque do Ibirapuera pathway, or see more photography by Kok on his website.

See more projects by Oscar Niemeyer on Dezeen »

The post Key projects by Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil
photographed by Pedro Kok appeared first on Dezeen.

Movie: Brazilian architect Marcio Kogan of Studio MK27 used cinematic techniques he picked up in his early career as a movie director to film one of his latest projects through the eyes of the client’s pet cat.

Toblerone House is a two-storey residence in São Paulo comprising a glazed ground floor and a timber-clad upper floor, which are separated from one another by an overhanging concrete slab.

The movie shows the cat taking a walk along the protruding edges of this slab, as well as through each of the rooms and around the garden.

Explaining the decision to film the house in this way, Studio MK27 architect Suzana Glogowski told Dezeen how the team enjoyed making a series of movies for this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale to show “the day by day life of one of our houses, where the architecture is not important” and decided to make another for this house.

Studio MK47 also recently unveiled a collection of furniture made by construction workers, as part of the London Design Festival – find out more here.

See all our stories about Studio MK27 »

Photography is by Nelson Kon.

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through the eyes of a cat appeared first on Dezeen.