Staircases made of wood can offer a unique character to each project, thanks not only to the different configurations they can occupy in a space, but also to the variations in color and texture provided by different wood species and cuts, as well as the various ways of arranging the treads.

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Partner and founder of the firm Metro Arquitetos Associados, Martin Corullon is the ninth guest of Studio Casa, an interview series produced by Casa da Arquitectura - Portuguese Center for Architecture. Since 1994, Corullon has frequently collaborated with architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, with whom he has completed several projects on a wide range of scales.

Between 2008 and 2009, he worked at Foster+Partners in London. He has been a professor at Escola da Cidade since 2014 and was elected a member of CAU/SP for the 2018–2020 term. The interview is conducted by architect and curator Francesco Perrotta-Bosch.

Today, building humanized cities is predicated on full public participation, as outlined by national public policies institutionalized in Brazil's City Statute. However, it is clear that these mechanisms are largely geared toward adults, leaving children and youth on the margins of the participation and decision-making process.

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The landscape of Brazilian cities shifts between two striking realities. On one hand lies the formal city, where the rule of law prevails, the right to the city is exercised, and high-quality infrastructure and public and private investments are concentrated. This is also the reality used as the baseline for formulating laws and urban planning guidelines, and where the presence of the state is most visible.

On the other hand, there is the informal city—occupying the peripheries and favelas, with an identity marked by exposed clay bricks and excessive density. Here, self-built housing dominates, regardless of land ownership, alongside informal occupation and a chronic absence of public policies and basic infrastructure. Leisure spaces, cultural venues, and green areas are deeply lacking.

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Guilherme Wisnik talks with Bruno Dunley, a visual artist, teacher, and co-creator and member of the project ali: arte livre itinerante, a nomadic art school that bridges centers and peripheries, operating in the district of Cidade Tiradentes on the far east side of São Paulo.

Today is World Bicycle Day, celebrated for the diverse social, economic, and environmental benefits that this mode of transport and recreation offers. By establishing this day, the UN recognizes the contribution of cycling to the Sustainable Development Goals, including the creation of more sustainable cities and communities. This perspective gains even greater relevance during and after the pandemic. When exploring healthy ways to move around the city, active mobility stands out as a highly feasible, short-term alternative—one that goes beyond bike lanes to encompass the well-being of the citizen as a whole.

The National Archives Wiki-Contest is an editing competition on the Portuguese Wikipedia that aims to improve articles related to Brasília. It is part of a series of activities throughout 2020 conducted in collaboration by the Wiki Movimento Brasil User Group and the National Archives. The Wiki-Contest aims to encourage the Wikipedia editing community to improve entries related to the National Archives' Inter-wiki WikiProject initiative, which has been active since 2017.

Currently, the most common materials used in high-rise construction—steel and concrete—are non-renewable and energy-intensive to produce. In this context, wood represents a more sustainable alternative for tall building structures, offering well-known benefits such as renewability, carbon sequestration, low embodied energy during extraction, and rapid construction times. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, mass timber can perform exceptionally well in terms of fire resistance, as discussed in a previous article.

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Nearly two years after the collapse of the Córrego do Feijão mine dam in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, the city's residents will receive a monument to honor the victims. The Brumadinho Memorial was designed by the firm GPA&A, founded by architect Gustavo Penna, and will serve to remind all Brazilians of one of the worst environmental tragedies in the country's history.

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Victoria is a Canadian city famous for its flower gardens. Its climate favors the cultivation of different types of flowers, earning the city the reputation of Canada's flower capital, or the "Garden City." However, the coronavirus pandemic has slightly changed this landscape. The city's gardening team has prioritized planting vegetable seedlings to be distributed free of charge, as public interest in growing one's own food has grown considerably during this period.

Amid the pandemic, it is estimated that 900 million people are or have been under home quarantine during the first half of 2020. Quarantine, imposed by the need for physical distancing, demanded a reorganization of routines, work relations, and, consequently, the spaces that previously accommodated these dynamics. Working from home is nothing new in many professions, including for some architects accustomed to independent design practice or research. However, the unprecedented nature of the pandemic has brought a series of challenges to performing different functions that must now take place in the same location, at the same time, and often by different family members (parents, children, grandparents).

Since 1992, following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, World Oceans Day has been celebrated on June 8 as a tribute to the sea and everything it offers, from raw resources to its powerful presence as a landscape landmark. In architecture, projects that engage with this infinite expanse of water have the opportunity to dialogue directly with one of nature's most powerful and expressive elements.

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Pé na Estrada is an outreach project of the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Brasília, active since 2011 as an extracurricular activity. Its primary goal is to organize and promote study trips across Brazilian cities. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project had to adapt to social distancing, launching new heritage education initiatives and encouraging alternative ways of experiencing spaces studied in the classroom to expand the knowledge and creative vocabulary of both students and the community. 

Angelo Bucci, founder and principal of SPBR Arquitetos, is the tenth and final guest of Studio Casa, an interview series produced by Casa da Arquitectura - Portuguese Center for Architecture. For over 25 years, Bucci has divided his time between professional practice and academia. This parallel career has ultimately shaped his approach to design, where professional demands are treated as opportunities to explore new possibilities.

Faced with the current emergency imposed not only by the largest pandemic in modern history but also by the complete lack of governance ruling this country, compounded by structural inequality that causes a veritable genocide of our society's most vulnerable population, we, architects and urban planners representing technical advisory groups in the State of São Paulo—with a historic trajectory of action and housing production guided by the struggle for the right to the city—believe it is essential to take a stand on the importance of effective actions by this body, which represents our profession, aimed at the needs of organized communities living in informal settlements or in situations of social vulnerability:

One of the world's most prestigious architecture-focused film festivals, the Arquiteturas Film Festival is launching a retrospective series of its seven previous editions, held between 2013 and 2019, with online screenings of some of the key films from each year. To kick off the series, the Canadian film Misleading Innocence (2014), directed by Francesco Garutti and Shahab Mihandoust, will be available between June 12 and 19 on the festival's website.

In this week's debate hosted by Escola da Cidade, Guilherme Wisnik speaks with Vladimir Safatle, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo and a visiting professor at the universities of Paris VII, Paris VIII, Toulouse, Louvain, and Stellenbosch. Safatle is one of the coordinators of the Laboratory of Research in Social Theory, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis (Latesfip/USP).

LabCidade at FAUUSP has conducted several studies on methods for mapping COVID-19 across São Paulo.

The rethinking of public and private spaces has been considered by numerous architects and urban planners for the post-pandemic era. The gradual reopening of businesses and the resumption of other activities across the country require owners, employees, users, and customers to change habits and behaviors to ensure everyone's health.

Six commercial spaces frequently used by many people — gyms, beauty salons, offices, corporate offices, reception areas, and classrooms — have received guidelines for proper operation, developed by architects and urban planners Maria Paula Dunel and Ingrid Joyce Almeida de Jesus.

Urban precariousness, social vulnerability, racial exclusion, health crisis, environmental catastrophe, genocidal state. Growing dissatisfaction on the streets, falsification of pandemic data, economic recession. What social and political pacts will be possible to reshape democracy in a shattered country? Guilherme Wisnik speaks with Tainá de Paula, architect and urbanist, urban struggle activist, who holds a master's degree in Urbanism from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, the international “Coronavirus Design Competition,” organized by the platform Go Architect, encourages students and professionals from various fields to think about how to develop products, objects, and equipment that help the population remain physically and mentally healthy in a scenario of so much uncertainty. Brazilian architect Leonardo Dias is competing, alongside more than 100 candidates from around the world, with a proposal for an urban totem that promotes hand sanitization, citizen information, and the humanization of data.

The New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) gained worldwide attention in 2002 with the Blur Building, designed for that year's Swiss Expo. The volume was formed by 35,000 high-pressure nozzles that sprayed water from the lake below, creating a massive artificial cloud. Its shape, boundaries, colors, and translucency shifted with the sun and wind, offering visitors an immersive experience as they entered a fully permeable volume. Ten years later, Carla Juaçaba and Bia Lessa designed Humanidade2012 for the Rio+20 United Nations Conference, where several programmatic volumes were arranged within a massive scaffolding structure. With more voids than solids, its edges dematerialized into the sky, and at night the volumes appeared to float. According to the architects, “the very movement of people through the building turned visitors into exhibits when seen from afar.” Despite differences in scale and context, both temporary projects succeed in working with notions of translucency, lightness, the dissolution of boundaries, and movement.

The Brazilian city is at the center of current debates on quality of life and social justice, driven by the widespread pandemic crisis affecting our urban centers. Not in a long time have both the relevance of urban planning and the value of quality housing design taken center stage as they do today, extending far beyond the social and technical circles where architects operate. It is as if we had forgotten that we are responsible for the cities we inhabit, and that neglect is also a form of design. Now, reality is taking its toll. 

On June 18, the fifth anniversary of the publication of Laudato Si’ – Pope Francis’s encyclical calling for global unity in combating climate change – the Vatican published new guidelines containing more than 200 recommendations for environmental protection.

The document, titled “Journeying Towards Care for Our Common Home: Five Years After Laudato Si’,” suggests practical measures to curb global warming and issues stark warnings about the dangers of environmental degradation. It calls on the world to decarbonize the energy and economic sectors, making renewable energy accessible to all, and advocates for fossil fuel subsidy reform and CO2 emission taxation.