cultural

Time Transitions is a public installation developed for the second edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, "Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability," curated by architect Tosin Oshinowo.

Located at the entrance of the old Al Jubail Vegetable Market in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, the 18-meter-high installation serves as an observatory to restore the view from the old market to the waterfront. Despite being considered a specimen of modern architecture in Sharjah, the old market, built in 1980, was deactivated and faced imminent demolition. The construction of its successor on the opposite side of the street involved a significant intervention, including the landfilling of part of the waterfront and the consequent distancing from its decades-old predecessor.

While the old market was designed based on passive thermal conditioning principles, the architecture of the new market results from the use of artificial climate control as a starting point. Face to face, the two architectures evoke reflections on the spatial transformations that have shaped Sharjah in recent decades.

The installation's formal reference is the ancient wind towers—a vernacular architectural technology for cooling buildings—symbolizing a breath of fresh air for the recently abandoned and now reoccupied market. The vertical element in a region with lower-rise buildings serves to highlight the presence of the old market in the urban landscape.

The decision to use a scaffolding system was made due to its quick assembly/disassembly and the almost endless possibility of reuse after the Triennial's conclusion, avoiding the generation of waste common to major architectural events. Demolition waste blocks were incorporated into the structure as counterweights. At night, these blocks stand out due to the lighting, provocatively elevating them to the status of archaeological artifacts from a non-linear time. The structure is partially covered by a shading screen, suggesting an architecture still in (and constantly in) construction. The screen overlays the landscape perceived by the visitor while traversing the installation, ensuring greater thermal comfort during the day.

"Time Transitions" explores impermanence and the need for adaptation but also invites reflection on the meaning of a regenerative architecture that values cultural traditions and promotes policies for the reintegration of abandoned urban spaces into the city fabric. Through these reflections, alternative epistemologies for architecture are envisioned, based on the idea that material and immaterial ruins play a fundamental role in rethinking possible futures in a dystopian present.


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Time Transitions

When designing a space, infinite others are designed in parallel – from extraction and manufacturing to disposal, the processes involved in construction and their places of origin and destination are countless and in most cases absolutely dissociated.

The installation “Virgínia in suspension” seeks to highlight the elements belonging to and found in the Virgínia Building and present them as artifacts fundamentally constitutive of this space/time.

Walking among these material fragments - urban ruins - is an invitation to understand what is intangible about their presence, and how a large part of humanity has approached their way of producing spaces in recent centuries.

What reflections can we make when time and matter are suspended?


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Virginia in Suspension - Design Week 2023

furniture

With a design developed by RUÍNA, the Família TRE furniture is made up of three modular units made from reuse and zero material waste.
The leftover laminate resulting from the furniture industry has a long useful life but is conventionally discarded, generating costs for the producer and final consumer, in addition to worsening environmental liabilities. TRE reverses the logic, making any leftovers an activity with financial returns for the producer, while contributing to a more intelligent and environmentally responsible production chain.

TRE modules can be used together or separately, enabling different uses and appropriations.


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TRE Family

residential

Seeking to renovate some rooms in the apartment, the project consists of specific interventions in the bathroom and office areas. Storage and permanence spaces were optimized through the reconfiguration and creation of furniture.

The office space gained a work desk with drawers, a shelf and a hanging cabinet, as well as an L-shaped bench with built-in movable drawers.

In the bathrooms, new countertops along with upper and lower cabinets provide greater organization of spaces. The elements also contributed to the environments gaining greater amplitude and natural lighting.

Together, the 3 intervention environments make up a unit in terms of materiality, language and space occupation strategy.

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Vila Mariana's Apartament

The integration of the kitchen and social area and the expansion of the living room were the primary intervention premises. A concealed inverted beam in the wall between the living room and bedroom became apparent during the demolition and required a strategy to connect these two spaces separated by the structural element above the floor. It was decided to use the support beam for a piece of furniture facing both sides, dividing the areas without visually separating them and allowing for different types of use.

The need for two suites required rethinking the service area, which no longer had a small poorly ventilated and poorly lit bathroom. Instead, a bathroom was built with access from the main suite, and a guest toilet was added facing the corridor for common use. The wall dividing the kitchen from the service area was enclosed with sliding windows made of wood and glass, extending up to the ceiling, providing visual permeability from end to end and allowing natural light and ventilation to flow.

Throughout the project, a strategy was devised for the reuse of existing materials. With the help of a small-scale crusher, a variety of aggregates were produced on-site for reuse in subfloors, plastering mortar, rendering, countertops, and floors, as well as coverings and finishes. During the process, we developed our own material for the execution of floors and countertops called "entulhite," which utilizes crushed debris as an aggregate and resembles the well-known terrazzo. Solid bricks from wall openings were reused to construct the structures of the kitchen and service area countertops. Old tiles that covered the bathrooms were used as flooring and wall coverings in the balconies, applied in fragments.


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Paraíso's Apartament 

Furniture project developed with a single sheet of raw plywood and PET laminate and sucupira wood drawer insert. 

In order to meet a variety of uses and mainly suit different environments, the furniture can be used 270 degrees. The initial demand was for a piece of furniture that would fill the void between the stove and the sink counter, as support and storage, but could be easily moved and used in other environments.

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270º FURNITURE

Entering and visiting the exhibition space must be like being in a city built based on androcentric logic. The expographic elements, in addition to supporting the works, symbolize and reinforce, through physical experience, the contrasts explored as a narrative in the photographs and the tensions generated from them – light and dark, masculine and feminine, public and private. These elements are part of the infraordinary universe, they are banal, everyday, common: the bars and fences that separate places and bodies; the concrete and stone blocks that build cities and – sculpted – monuments.

The supports of the photographs bring linearity and verticality. The possible routes between the supports – on the contrary – are multiple, unpredictable and “indomesticable”. They break with the imposition of the exhibition space by detaching themselves from the walls to create, themselves, other planes of observation of the photographs, between and through.

The implementation of these elements in the exhibition space, as it approaches modernist planning – and therefore strongly influenced by the gender perspective – proposes an inverse movement to the linear, Cartesian and progressive one: to reach the end of the exhibition it is necessary to return through the same path. the way you came. The return presents another perspective, suggesting the dissolution of hegemonic historical-cultural constructions based on the idea of past, death and memory: cemetery of beliefs.



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Gross Structure

Intervention in a semi-detached house built in the 1960s.

The project aimed to create a multipurpose space in the residence from an underused area that originally housed a service area and backyard.

The new space should house a large program including a living and dining room, guest bedroom, bathroom and a small laundry room. The backyard should be renovated and integrated into the interior space from a balcony.

Carrying out structural reinforcements with metal pillars and beams made it possible to remove a large part of the internal walls, expanding and integrating the needs program in the same environment. Using a section of soil excavated under the house, it was possible to expand the useful area of ​​the intervention.

With independent access from the rest of the residence, the project configures a small apartment with an integrated area, large spaces with generous lighting and ventilation.


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House 30

commercial

The project was developed based on the premise of translating the brand's identity into spatial experience. The experience is divided into three moments: the administrative, financial, inventory and exhibition space. In addition to the concept, the space also had to meet a very pragmatic demand: being able to house — at different times — four types of program: store, showroom, inventory and dining room. The diversity of uses required us to think of elements as devices that enable the expansion and contraction of space. A movable bench that fits into the joinery furniture, racks that move up and down according to your needs, in such a way that several scenarios materialize in the same environment.

The racks should bring subtlety and dynamics to the space, and to this end, the brushed steel pieces were curved, configuring elements of greater organicity and giving movement to the displayed clothing items. With the aim of reducing costs — but still being able to work with higher-cost materials — stones discarded by a local marble factory were used to compose the base, handles for the racks and support surface for a mobile bench.

The larger blocks of yellow sandstone were drilled so that the vertical supports of the macaws could be fitted and fixed - in such a way that the weight of the block acts as a foundation and anchor. Smaller blocks were carved, sanded and drilled, serving as handles for the mobile racks. The marble sheet used was completely irregular and was therefore cut within the intact perimeter of the piece, and then fixed onto the structure of the store's mobile bench.
