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Architects: RUÍNA
- Area: 17 m²
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Lauro Rocha
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Manufacturers: AutoDesk, Adobe, Delidecor Cortinas e Persianas, Espaleti Serralheria Artística, Manoel Messias - WMS Marcenaria, Office, Pedras Bellas Artes, R&A Pinturas, Robson Soares, Trimble
Text description provided by the architects. Carol Arbex’s exhibition space and store renovation project was developed based on the premise of translating the brand's identity into a spatial experience. Elements and materialities were selected to suggest a subtle path and provide a personal and subjective narrative — built by the user's encounter with space.
Within a space of 17m2, the experience is divided into three moments: when entering through the main access, the furniture in carpentry — which includes the administrative, financial, and stock program — then, followed by the clothes rack that displays the collection’s clothes. In the end, a large mirror sets up a sculptural element of contemplation where the user, clothing, and space are reflected.
Beyond the concept, space should still answer a very pragmatic demand: to be able to accommodate, at different times, four types of programs: store, showroom, stock, and dining room. This diversity of uses required us to think of elements as devices that enable the expansion and contraction of space — a mobile countertop that fits the furniture in carpentry, clothes rack that go up and down according to their needs, materializing multiple scenarios in the same room.
The furniture in carpentry has two opening configurations: folding door with built-in rail and built-in mat — allowing that during the use, all doors open fully and enter the furniture, preventing them from occupying projection space in the environment. The design of the furniture was designed in such a way as to avoid a monolithic effect and guarantee softness and lightness from its elements — the corrugated glass door that encloses the office area, as well as the void that supports the mirror, shelf, and mobile countertop.
The clothes racks were supposed to bring subtlety and dynamics to space, and for that, the brushed steel pieces were curved in a manual calendar machine, configuring elements of greater organicity and giving movement to the displayed pieces of clothing. In order to reduce costs — but to still be able to work with exquisite materials — stones discarded by a local marble company were used to compose the foundation, handles of the clothes racks, and support surface for a mobile countertop.
The larger blocks of yellow sandstone were drilled deep enough for the vertical supports of the clothes racks (Ø38mm tubular profile) to be fitted and fixed — in a way that the weight of the block acts as an anchorage for them. Smaller blocks were sculpted, sanded, and drilled, serving as handles for the mobile clothes racks — whose system works with fixed pulleys and counterweights. The marble crema ivory plate that was used was totally irregular and for this reason, it was cut inside the intact perimeter of the piece, and then fixed on the structure of the mobile countertop of the store.
During the design and execution process, we understand that the production and disposal chain for marble — whose recycling of waste is only possible for certain types of stone and under processes of intense machining — presents other ways of reuse in architecture, with diverse scales and uses from small manufactures, technically more accessible.
