Apartment Building in Curitiba

The description of this project should start five years before the designing process, when the basis of a reliable relationship was created that would produce a later invitation to design this small apartment building. It was 2015, when CRON invited us to Curitiba by the suggestion of a young student of architecture who was an enthusiastic of our work and member of a partner office of our host company. Then we could know their work and the principles and values they had been imprinting to their company since its foundation in 1993. In a time in which construction market was depressed by economic situation in Brazil and the mainstream for companies in that sector used to be to refrain their investments in construction, they, were doing right the opposite: being aware about how much construction had decreased in their city and predicting a future lack of new buildings supply, they assumed that time as the best moment to invest. Their growth in the following five years could be taken as an evidence of how much they made the right choice. In addition, while construction companies were trying to outsource workers or subcontract to third parties, they used to present their workers immensely proud of how carefully they had been trained and for how long each one was part of their team. In the occasion, I can remember very well that I listened from one of the partners: “our people are our greatest capital”. That culture, although it makes a lot of sense, is oddly not spread in the Brazilian context. Finally, I thought, there is a contractor whose ideas seem to be aligned with my concepts and assumptions while designing a building. For these reasons that visit made a strong impact on me.
Five years later, in 2020, in a new arrangement associated with other local company called L’Espace, they agreed about inviting us to design one of their works, this small apartment building located at Ivo Zanlorenzi street, Mossungue neighborhood, exactly at the same plot that we had visited five years before. It is an irregular polygon, basically 30m wide by 60m long and quite steep going up 10m diagonally from the lowest point on the street to the highest one on the back.
It is a seven story building, four apartments in each floor plus four garden apartments on the ground level. Its core is linear and open. Two concrete walls, identical and parallel, displaced 2.80m from each other, besides their structural role, protect the egress stairs from any opening closer than 8m. The elevators were placed on both edges of this space, with a panoramic hall looking out through a glass that closes the elevator’s shafts without blocking the view and, to the other side, looking through the open egress stairs. Although with four apartments by floor, this arrangement allows to have just two apartments for each lift. The fire safety requirements are fulfilled to make this open core possible by using fire resistant doors for the apartments’ entrance.
The structural system uses beamless slabs 24cm thick and four more columns in each side of the building, being just two of them in each apartment. The façade was designed to be produced specially for this building combining metal and woodwork. The windows recover a system that used to be very spread in Brazil in the 60’s with a double panel of guillotine, like a sash window, counterweighting each other. There will be a double layer, glass and louvers, to provide different combinations of light, shading and ventilation.
We took this small apartment building as an opportunity to demonstrate how architecture, taken in our way of designing a building, could be aligned with those same principles that guide CRON and L’Espace.