The Rua Harmonia project is located in a neighborhood in São Paulo with a great artistic flow and permeability of creation, where galleries and walls blend together, functioning as a stage for new forms of expression. The alley in front of the building – for example – is covered in paintings and graffiti. This concept of experimentation spills over from the street into the work.

Like a living organism, the building breathes, sweats and changes, transcending its inertia. Its walls are thick, covered on the outside by a layer of vegetation that acts as a skin on the building. This dense organic concrete wall has pores from which various plant species sprout, giving the facades a unique appearance.

In this large machine, where rainwater and soil are drained, treated and reused, a complex ecosystem is formed in the location. This ecosystem is a multifunctional universe composed of machines, all connected to each other. It is a zone of multiplicity, where meanings and actions fluctuate among the unsaid, resulting in dynamic interconnected entities.

Its entrails are exposed on its facades, while its interior is well finished with clean, clear surfaces, as if the work were inside out. The piping that serves the entire building – as well as the pumps and the water treatment and reuse system – are visible on the external walls, and surround them like the veins and arteries of a body.

The building is like a neutral, gray, sculpted and deformed base. The aesthetics are a result of the process – the construction is raw and has a primitive elegance – a reflection of the current concern for the environment and the investigation of forms of intervention.

Its volumetry is quite simple, but striking: it consists of two large blocks of vegetation connected by a metal walkway and cut through by concrete and glass windows and terraces. Between the blocks, an internal square opens up like a clearing and serves as a community space for meetings and exchanges.

The terraces are dispersed on each floor, thus creating a play of solids and voids on the exterior, as well as alternating lighting and transparency in the interior spaces. The front block is entirely suspended and levitates on stilts, while the block at the back is solid, complemented by a volume on its roof that resembles a birdhouse.

Again like a body, its windows open to the outside with their concrete lips and terraces cut through the blocks at different points, looking out over the city in different ways, while a large concrete mouth invites cars to be swallowed into the building.

The result of this ensemble is an intriguing building, which proposes a vision of “living architecture”.