AddressAv. Epitácio Pessoa, 3000 - Lagoa, Rio de Janeiro - RJ, 22471-003 Phone US +1 (617) 852-2328 Phone BR +55 (21) 9 9326-7553 Info and Press info@polesstudio.com
Award
Jorge Paulo Lemann Fellowship
GK awarded the Jorge Paulo Lemann Fellowship for Research in Brazil
Award
DRCLAS Research Grant
GK awarded the DRCLAS Summer Research Travel Grant
Award
Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative
GK awarded the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative's Research Grant
Award
Doctoral Research Funding
GK awarded the GSD Dean’s Doctoral Research Funding
Milestone
New Headquarters
POLES moves to new office
Nomination
19th Venice Architecture Biennale
GK joins the Curatorial Team for the Venice Biennale 2025
Nomination
Director
GK to direct the initiative CORA: Corações da Amazônia
Partnership
Tomorrow Anew + DRCLAS
TomorrowAnew partners with Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Award
XV Bienal Española de Arquitectura y Urbanism
The World as an Architectural Project awarded in the category "Muestra de Investigación"
Honorable Mention
National Competition
Redesign of the Charitas Waterfront
Shortlisted
FAD Awards
The World as an Architectural Project shortlisted for category "Pensamiento y Critica"
Appointment
Board Member
Young Professionals Board of BrazilFoundation
Award
Claudio Haddad Family Fellowship Fund
PhD Fellowship at Harvard University
Assistant Curator
17th Venice Architecture Biennale
Exhibit "How Will We Live Together?"
Curator
Brazilian Pavilion at the16th Venice Architecture Biennale
Exhibit "Walls of Air"
Finalist
Fellowship Líderes Estudar 2020
Among the 50 finalists out of 42.359 entries
Curator
3rd Biennial Exhibit of the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism
Exhibit "Housing+" at MIT Media Lab
Selected Proposal
Sandbox Innovation Fund
W-all selected to receive funding from the MIT Sandbox Program
Finalist
Roddenberry Fellowship
W-all was finalist in the last round of the Roddenberry Fellowship out of 3000 entries
Selected Proposal
Buckminster Fuller Institute's Catalyst Program
W-all selected for the Catalyst Program
Awarded
MIT-Brazil TVML Seed Fund
Partnership between MIT SA+P, Insper and Hospital Albert Einstein
Awarded
Program of Cultural Sponsorship - Council of Architecture and Urbanism RJ
Collective ENTRE: Collateral
Selected Proposal
Hult Prize Regional Round
WaGo as the best proposal to represent MIT at the Regional Round of the Hult Prize
2nd Prize
Invited International Competition
MIT Team | Shanghai Railway Station Area Competition
Finalist
SOM Research and Travel Grant
1 of the 6 finalists among students of 38 US schools.
Fellowship
Development Teaching Fellowship
MIT School of Architecture and Planning
Awarded
Prize for best SMArchS’15 Thesis
Framing Dispersal: Urban Strategies for Mexico City’s Sprawl
Finalist
$1M Drones for Good Awards, Dubai
Project leader: Senseable City Lab’s Waterfly
1st Prize
MIT Enabling Society Tech Competition
Project leader: Senseable City Lab’s Waterfly
Travel Fellowship
MIT International Science & Technology Initiatives: Mexico
Thesis at Mexico City
Travel Fellowship
MIT International Science & Technology Initiatives: Italy
Researcher for the American Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale
Honorable Mention
National Competition
Commander Ferraz Antarctic Station
Study Grant
Department of Architecture Graduate Fellowship
MIT Architecture 2013-2015
Nomination
Archiprix 2013 Moscow
BArch Thesis selected as the best graduation project of PUC-Rio
3rd Prize
Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction
Category “Next Generation”
Honorable Mention
International Ideas Competition
Rome Vertical Spa
Honorable Mention
International Student Competition
Athens Olympic Museum
Research Grant
Scientific Initiation Grant
CNPq. research area: Non-Conventional Materials and Technology
The simple differentiation between “inside” and “outside” has politically configured the world as we see it today.
Increasingly, architectural thinking has addressed large-scale systems, such as those of cities, landscapes, regions, and even the world. With this increase in scale, the distinctions between architecture and geography get blurred and many aspects of those disciplines become interchangeable. However, although architecture claims agency in addressing geographical questions, there seems to be little understanding of one of the most fundamental aspects of large-scale spatial systems, the concept of “territory.”
To discuss “territory” is to move away from an apparent ordinary neutrality of the term to incorporate all the complexities inherent in the relation between place and power. What is usually taken for granted, imagined as natural, is in fact a highly articulated, historically defined social construct. Far from being an object, “territory” is a political technology (Elden, 2013), an apparatus of control we have gotten used to.
The course proposes that investigating the ways in which territory is produced, maintained and strategized, and generates conflicts, establishes divisions and build identities can lead to a more critical understanding of architecture’s role in society. Architecture, especially because it is always political – even in a rudimentary level it expresses ideological positions by limiting and separating one part from another – can be seen as a form of reproducing territorial logics into a smaller scale context. The overlap between architecture and “territory” are many, from concerns with the way the interplay of social and political forces gets spatialized, to more general issues such as struggles over land division, property rules, private vs. public realms, dominance vs. resistance, definition of borders, and the reification of power as space.
The course is designed to expand the student’s literacy in the concept of territory and its relation to the architecture realm. The course is structured as a seminar with a research component to be developed throughout the semester. Students will be asked to engage in a research project to explore territorial relations at a specific scale of their interest, e.g. a scale of a country, a neighborhood, a building, etc. Each project will investigate one specific case, either directly related to architecture or not, in which territorial logic is implemented. Drawing on the fact that the advent of “territory” was dependent on innovations on cartographic and mapping techniques, the research projects are expected to incorporate a strong graphical component to make these territorial logics visible.
Instructor: Gabriel Kozlowski
Students: Clarence Yi-Hsien Lee, Collyn S Chan, Cristina Grace Clow, Jaehun Woo, Maia Sophie Woluchem, Marissa Elisabeth Reilly, Nitzan Zilberman, Robert Alva Cain, Yeal Nidam
The workshop has two goals. First, to discuss the process of curating a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale through the case study of the Brazilian contribution for this upcoming edition of the event. Second, to engage students in the production of part of the content that will be exhibited at the Brazilian Pavilion in Venice 2018. This content will take the form of cartographic exercises to generate the maps that can potentially be displayed in the exhibit. During IAP, students will choose to collaborate in the following tasks based on their skills and interest:
1) Conceptualization: Elaborate on the arguments and content of the exhibition. Refine and/or challenge the curators’ initial assumptions regarding the content of the maps and the way information and data should be represented. The group will work in close collaboration with Brazilian teams based in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
2) Research: Idealize and generate the information that can be displayed on each map;
3) Mapping: Design the actual maps by drawing, coding and visually treating the content gathered in the previous steps;
4) Fabrication: Prototype and envision the potential techniques to materially produce these maps. Among them: large-sized prints, laser engraving in wood + milling, acid etching/engraving in steel and silk screen/printing in concrete.
São Paulo Housing Workshop
International Workshop
MIT, Boston + FAU-USP, São Paulo. 2017
MIT SA+P: Adele Santos, Gabriel Kozlowski
FAU-USP: Angelo Bucci, Luiz Antonio Jorge, Marina Grinover, Shundi Iwamizu
Partners: Arq.Futuro
MIT Students: Alexander Spitzer, Anne Marie Graziano, Bumsuk Cho, Diana Ang, Giovanni Bellotti, Justin Lim, Tyler Swingle and Yi Liu
São Paulo: Redefining High Density, Inner-City Affordable Housing
The LCAU will undertake a workshop in São Paulo in July 2017, that will explore the complexities of building affordable housing within a dense urban setting. The workshop will design within the constraints of the local conditions, reflecting the current political and socio-economic frameworks that are in place. The workshop aims to provide a “successful” model of inner-city affordable housing within a dense urban setting. In order to reflect the local conditions, the CAU will collaborate with local actors including: SECOVI, FAU-USP, INSPER, ARQ.FUTURO, and the Institute for Urbanism and Studies for the Metropolis (URBEM). These collaborators bring a wealth of on-the-ground knowledge of the real estate market, legal frameworks, and tacit knowledge of São Paulo that will be invaluable to this workshop.
The workshop will begin with the housing program Casa Paulista, a competition launched by the State of São Paulo in April 2012 as a public call to promote the provision of housing units in six sectors of the city’s expanded downtown area. URBEM won the call for all six sectors and the state government is now contracting Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) to redevelop the area in accordance with the urban and economic models proposed by URBEM. Currently, the first sector of the Casa Paulista is under construction, aiming for the construction of 3,700 housing units. This workshop will examine a similar number of units in the second, and next sector, for development as part of Casa Paulista. This workshop will explore the potential application of new technologies, alongside the development of new typologies for affordable housing. Research will look beyond the single building, and seek solutions at the scale of a neighborhood block; it is at this scale that community building can be explored. The resulting urban strategy will reflect notions of phasing and incremental growth to maintain and take advantage of the actual dynamics of the place. The July workshop will be developed over three weeks in Brazil and two weeks at MIT. After this period, the workshop material will be further refined and will potentially be included within the CAU Housing+ biennial exhibition in May, 2018.
Studio offered with Angelo Bucci
Here, work sample by: Andrea Baena, Bumsuk Cho, Dijana Milenov, Du Boliang, Manuela Uribe, Milap Dixit, So Yeon Lim, Tyler Swingle and Yi Liu
The goal of this studio is to explore design strategies for Affordable Housing in São Paulo downtown. In São Paulo downtown, infrastructure abundance contrasts with scarcity of housing, whereas on the city's outskirts the situation is exactly the opposite. Thus, in order to overcome this discrepancy, diminish social inequality and better balance citizen's rights, the city's urban investment and planning efforts should move in two directions: [1] housing projects should be brought to downtown, and [2] infrastructure and public facilities should spread out into the periphery. Our studio challenge is the former.
Studio offered with Angelo Bucci
Here, work sample by: Jessica Yung Jorge, Kaining Peng, Kristina Eldrenkamp, Mary Lynch-LloydLiang Liu, Maxwell Jarosz, Maya Shopova and Meng Sun
Introductory photos by Ciro Miguel
This studio will focus on a specific area in Sao Paulo downtown that was severely affected by a top down urban intervention: a 2.7km viaduct, the Minhocão, which ripped off a preexistent and consolidated zone, causing building degradation and urban disaggregation. Lately, as a result of the population’s persistent appeal, car traffic time was limited to working days and hours. During idle times, it is appropriated by people as a linear park.
Assuming this alternation of activities as a duality to inform the design process, our goal is to redefine the Minhocão’s front as an updated and meaningful architecture.
The project site is not the viaduct itself but its borders.
This dual meaning and seasonality of the Minhocão has never been considered systematically as a design challenge for proposing buildings along its both sides that specifically respond to this condition. Although people has appropriated this duality, the existing buildings along it were not informed by the existence of an upper and a lower ground level; they didn’t consider the resulting thick ground as a new possibility for configuration and proposition, mostly for public programs.
This studio aims to explore new possibilities of designing buildings along the Minhocão to properly redefine its architectural front according to its current new paradigm.
Studio offered with Julien DeSmedt
Here, work sample by: Alice Kao, Blanca Abramek, Jessica Pace, Sam Ghantous and Maxwell Jorosz
In the discipline of Information Technology, “architecture” – the space inhabited by users – and “infrastructure” – the systems that enable use – are increasingly being thought of as a single idea. However, in the more tangibly and ideologically entrenched disciplines of architecture, urbanism, and civil engineering, “infrastructure” and “architecture” remain two separate concerns. Just as the information revolution that accompanied the development of the Internet has created new dispersed networks of exchange, collaboration, and efficiency, an emerging energy revolution calls for dispersed networks of self-sufficient energy collection networked together to maximize efficiency. This is one of the most compelling opportunities for addressing the environmental crisis, and re-conceptualizing architecture as infrastructure, to design buildings and cities as integrated systems for collecting and distributing energy.
Chicago finds itself in a strategic moment where three major initiatives that will shape the future of the city have just been launched.
Firstly, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has publicly announced that Chicago aspires to the greenest city in the world. In 2013 the City was nominated the “Earth Hour Climate Leader,” and started collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund to develop innovative technology and open data programs to engage its citizens on climate issues. With this year’s launch of the “2015 Sustainable Chicago Action Agenda,” which sets the key policies and goals for its sustainable development in the coming years, the City reinforces this position, building a solid and fertile ground to achieve its environmental goals.
Secondly, Chicago is the first American city to set up a metropolitan infrastructure bank, the Chicago Infrastructure Trust. The Trust is Chicago’s response to Washington’s bureaucracy, and intents to give the City autonomy and funds to pursue large-scale infrastructure undertakings by pairing investors with projects.
And finally, the City has recently released a five-year housing plan (2014-2018), Bouncing Back, which dedicates $1.3 billion investment to construct or preserve 41,000 affordable homes.
These measures will have a tremendous impact on the City and its environmental status. However, if not properly planned, all this effort can generate negative outcomes, and this unique opportunity to imagine a new future for the city will have been wasted. This will entirely depend on how development happens.
We will envision a series of projects for Chicago where architecture joins forces with its infrastructural needs to create urban hybrids.
With the premise to address large-scale urban issues with a pragmatic and environmental mind, we will develop research and projects that aim to combine infrastructural needs and architectural outcomes. We will study and design new ways to connect the tremendous efforts and expenses made in the infrastructural sector with the building sector in an attempt to redefine urban development. If infrastructure can literally set the foundation for architecture to occur, we will join the two efforts, and explore ways to densify the urban geography to reach higher levels of efficiency for society. By combining architecture and infrastructure we aim to speculate on new ways the City of Chicago can address its current and future environmental concerns.
Forest Bungalows
Prefabrication
Rio de Janeiro, 2024
Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Carina Lima, Pedro Brito, Isabella Simões
The project stems from the recognition of a growing — yet largely unmet — demand for sustainable, prefabricated buildings that are more affordable, efficient, and safe than those currently available on the market. In response to this scenario, modular units were developed that operate with great flexibility: either as autonomous, self-sufficient structures or as components of a larger system capable of expanding into varied configurations, resulting in more spacious dwellings or interconnected networks of multiple volumes.
The adoption of an elevated structural system on stilts allows these units to be deployed on sites with highly diverse topographic and geological conditions, without the need for project-specific adaptations — except for variations in the length of the supporting columns and access stairs. This strategy also eliminates the need for earthworks or conventional foundations, significantly reducing both environmental impact and construction costs.
Formally, the system is organized as a dilapidated cube, in which the interior spaces are arranged around an infrastructural core embedded into one of the walls. This core is clad with millwork panels that conceal the service areas — kitchenette, bathroom, and storage — creating a clear distinction between the servant spaces and the main suite area, which includes a bed and a workspace. The full kitchen, conceived as an independent half-volume module, shares the same structural and façade components as the main suite block and can function as a connecting element between two modules.
The entire construction system is composed of prefabricated elements designed for fast and dry assembly, with no need for additional finishing on site. The very components of the structure — roofs, walls, and floors — simultaneously serve structural, enclosure, and finishing functions. All plumbing, electrical, and sanitary systems come embedded in the components directly from the factory, along with integrated thermal and acoustic insulation layers. This ensures high technical performance, construction precision, and environmental comfort with minimal site disruption.
Two primary layout solutions were developed for the basic module: one with a triangular service core and the other with a rectangular one, both occupying roughly a quarter of the internal space. These variations allow for different occupation strategies and spatial arrangements. Based on this system, several additional configurations were designed through the combination of two or more modules, enabling the creation of dwellings with multiple suites, integrated verandas, workspaces, expanded kitchens, or interconnected units linked by walkways and internal courtyards.
More than a replicable modular architectural solution, the project proposes a new model of sustainable construction — one that is accessible, adaptable, and responsive to different geographic, social, and economic contexts. Its flexible and efficient nature makes it suitable for a range of applications, from emergency response and temporary housing to permanent dwellings in remote or environmentally protected areas.
https://poles.studio/bangalos-na-floresta/62
Wind Cabin
Commission
Itaipava, 2021
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Isabella Simões, Pedro Brito
The Wind Cabin is part of a minimal lodging initiative in the midst of nature.
The structure is raised from the ground both to provide views above the canopy of the trees into the Valley and to make the impact of the architecture on the ground as gentle as possible, with only three slender pillars touching the ground.
The raised volume is defined by a sequence of equidistant glued laminated timber porticoes that revolve around a linear pivotal axis, generating a double curvature roof surface. Through a single formal operation; the rotation of the porticoes, the project assumes a form at the same time simple and complex, which changes according to the point of view from which it is observed.
All of the infrastructure is concentrated within the counter on the first floor, which gathers the sanitary fixtures on one side and the kitchen fixtures on the other, while the bedroom on the mezzanine is accessed through a ladder.
https://poles.studio/cabine-ao-vento/43
Cross Cabin
Commission
Secretário, 2021
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Isabella Simões, Pedro Brito
The minimal living project proposes the raising of the house off the ground through massive pigmented concrete walls, on top of which the house rests. The formwork of these walls is made with bamboo extracted from the site itself, and whose negative gives the surfaces a rougher texture, in contrast to the sober and slender metallic volume above.
The internal cross-shaped layout, in which each leg houses a different room —bedroom, living room, bathroom and kitchen—, establishes a non-hierarchical relationship with the landscape and gives each room a different view. Sliding wood panels parallel to the facades freely reconfigure the interior, in a gradient that can vary between the total closure or opening of the rooms.
The fireplace is located in the central quadrant in order to heat all rooms homogeneously, as well as, in a more symbolic sense, allude to the gathering around a bonfire. Its extrusion defines a prismatic volume that intersects with the cabin and becomes the chimney and water tower on top, and an outdoor shower and jacuzzi on the ground floor.
https://poles.studio/cabine-em-cruz/44
Yoga Temple - New -
Commission
– Under Construction –
Itaipava, 2024
Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Thiago Engers
-Description Soon-
https://poles.studio/templo-de-yoga/64
Prefab in 4 Planes
Commission
Teresópolis, 2021
Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Isabella Simões, Pedro Brito, Eduarda Volschan
The design for the prefab cabin started with the intention of producing an architecture that could be mass-produced and that could adapt to different topographical conditions. Therefore, all the elements that make up the structure were developed so that they could be easily produced in a factory, transported, and assembled on site.
The mixed structure, concrete on the foundation and floor and steel profiles on the walls and roof, defines a tubular volume in which the four surfaces are detached from each other and are articulated as independent planes, thus facilitating ventilation and natural lighting within the cabin. As a way of ensuring its implementation in any topographical conditions and solar orientations, the project is raised from the ground by concrete pillars of variable heights, and the roof eaves around the entire perimeter, protecting the interior from direct sunlight.
The internal organization revolves around an infrastructural block that houses the bathroom on one side and, on the other, the kitchen. Sliding OSB panels run along the walls and, when closed, ensure privacy in the bedroom and bathroom, when open, allow the integration between the bedroom and living room. Located at the ends of the pavilion, the bedroom and living room open to the outside through large floor-to-ceiling glass doors.
https://poles.studio/prefab-em-4-planos/45
Retreat inbetween Curves
Commission
– Under Construction –
São Bento do Sapucaí, 2022
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Isabella Simões, Pedro Brito, Eduarda Volschan
The Retreat inbetween Curves is the first in a series of projects in the Mantiqueira Mountain Range, which will house another five pavilions, three single-family houses, shared amenities and outdoor activities. All residential activities were arranged along an urbanization arc, which in turn forms a reforestation perimeter that connects the existing green areas.
The building’s defining element is the set of 3 sinuous stone walls that define the entrance plateau and both bedrooms, and their interstices are occupied by the living room, kitchen, and bathroom. The orientation of the walls, which extend beyond the perimeter of the roof, directs the sightlines to different parts of the site and guarantees privacy to the bathroom and bedrooms when looked at from the outside. The horizontal planes of the roof and floor slabs are mounted on the stone walls without ever touching the ground, and therefore don’t require any additional support, ensuring a seamless connection between inside and outside without any other structural elements.
Both the access stairs and the external hot tub plateau are made of cast-in-place concrete, thus reinforcing the project’s topographical condition in which the stone walls are embedded into the slope. The house, which is defined internally by the space between curves, is also defined by them from the outside in, being inserted among the topographical curves of the landscape.
https://poles.studio/abrigo-entre-curvas/50
Inscribed House
Commission
– Under Construction –
Secretário, 2022
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Isabella Simões, Pedro Brito, Eduarda Volschan
“Life has to do with walls; we're continuously going in and out, back and forth, and through them. A wall is the quickest, the thinnest, the element we're always transgressing… The wall heightens the sense of passage, and by the same token, its thinness heightens the sense of being just a momentary condition…what I call the moment of the “present.” John Hejduk
The Inscribed House takes advantage of the solidity of a massive concrete wall rooted into the ground that intersects the project, onto which the metal pavilion is hung from and gently floats a few inches above the ground.
Like John Hejduk in his seminal Wall House II (1973), the project is structured by the central concrete wall that runs through the house. However, the Inscribed House does not assume the wall as the circulation between the different rooms, but rather as their defining element. Instead of the momentary condition given its thinness, the wall of the Inscribed House is dilated as a way to affirm its permanence. The concrete wall is hollowed out so that the niches concentrate all the fixtures, appliances, cabinets, and sometimes become enclosed rooms themselves such as toilet, shower, and access hall. In doing so, the wall becomes a protagonist instead of merely a support structure.
The intersected raised volume, freed of all technical constraints, has its perimeter completely open to the landscape and has a free floorplan, so that the user has the freedom to move the furniture as they see fit. Its plan forms a perfect 9-meter square, establishing a non-hierarchical condition with the landscape, and is divided in half by the wall; the social side with the living room and kitchen facing the access road, and the private side with the bedroom and bathroom facing the river.
https://poles.studio/casa-inscrita/46
Rodrigues' Gato Felix
Renovation
– Built –
Itaipava, 2023
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski and Miguel Darcy
Sérgio Rodrigues is one of the exponents of the post-modern movement in Brazilian architecture and design. Contrary to the masters that preceded him, with their austere architecture and structures that defied the law of gravity, Sergio Rodrigues developed throughout his career projects that were strongly inspired by Brazilian vernacular architecture. His houses were not justified by the form-function dichotomy; it was the comfort of the inhabitant that guided all design decisions. Instead of white surfaces or exposed concrete, Rodrigues was unashamed to use a wide range of bright colors in his projects, which resulted in houses with a playful character, just like their creator's humor.
However, paradoxically, Sérgio Rodrigues was also one of the first architects to carry out one of the most fundamental precepts of modernism in architecture, and one that has not yet been consolidated in the Brazilian construction industry: building with prefabricated components. Taking advantage of the industry created for the manufacture of his furniture, Sérgio Rodrigues developed the SR2 system, which consisted of a kit of structural and paneling elements made exclusively of wood, and which could be adapted and recombined freely to originate an infinite number of schemes with diverse configurations. Hundreds of houses were produced using the system in different regions of Brazil, despite the bias against wood construction.
Among these houses, the Gato Felix House is one of the most emblematic ones. Built in 1993 on a site adjacent to the Xikilin House, Sérgio Rodrigues' own residence and laboratory for several projects, the house underwent an expansion that disfigured it of its original characteristics soon after its construction. The two-story volume, which previously touched the ground gently on stilts, now sits on a basement built of masonry instead of wood to house a study, compromising the slenderness of the project. Moreover, the project, initially designed to have bright colors on the facade, was executed with dark and muted ones, making the house disappear in the landscape.
The remodeling project sought to overcome 4 challenges: to provide accessibility to the lower floor and turn it into a master bedroom, to visually elevate the house from the ground in order to re-establish the weightlessness of the project compromised by the addition of the basement, to renew all the electrical and plumbing fixtures, already outdated, and to give more life to the house with the use of bright colors on the facades. The first two were solved by extending the porch, which develops into a walkway and a sheltered staircase, which gives access to the master bedroom and to the new deck. The new porch and wooden deck, built using the SR2 system, both divide the volume in two, the original above and addition below, and detach the block from the ground. The entire facade of the master bathroom floor was painted dark green, to mimic the garden as much as possible, while the upper floors were painted in light, strong colors. Finally, on the upper floors, apart from the balcony extension, the only interventions were the renovation of the bathrooms, cleaning and maintenance of the roofs, and treatment of the original wooden components.
https://poles.studio/renovacao-da-gato-felix/57
Grounded House
Commission
– Under Construction –
Sapucaí Mirim, 2023
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Isabella Simões, Pedro Brito, Eduarda Volschan
The Grounded House, located on a high plateau overlooking the vegetated valley of the site, is organized linearly in the interstice between two massive rammed earth walls. The linear spatial system allows all rooms and the living area to face the view, while also enabling the house to expand laterally without compromising the formal integrity of the design.
The backbone of the project is the corridor that connects all spaces. It is marked by a lowered concrete slab that houses all the infrastructure for electrical systems, plumbing, and air conditioning. The corridor also organizes the house between served areas, such as the living room and bedrooms, on the North facade, and service areas, such as bathrooms, kitchen, office, and laundry, on the South facade.
The internal pathway alternates between enclosed spaces and winter gardens. Each of these gardens is given a distinct character: main access, swimming pool, dense forest, and gazebo. In addition to enhancing the natural lighting and ventilation of the project, these gardens create a seamless interpenetration of the interior and exterior spaces, further emphasized by the full opening of the living room facade to the veranda. The living room itself features a higher ceiling and is topped with a lightweight metal roof with an irregular bamboo lining harvested from the site.
https://poles.studio/casa-enraizada/52
Three Walls, Two Beams
Commission
– Built –
Indaiatuba, 2021
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski and Miguel Darcy
The initial parameter that guided the design of this residence was the condition of the plots’ subdivision wherein it is located. Although the condominium is still under development, the occupation pattern is clear. With houses placed side by side, the boundary walls—albeit never properly explored—play a critical role of spatial structuring. This project takes its perimeter walls as central design elements: three concrete walls define the articulation between structure, internal spaces and central garden.
Each of these walls takes on a specific function. On one side, the wall is treated as multifunctional surface that receives all the installations and furniture of the living room and garden; on the opposite side, it guides the main circulation axis of the house. At the back, the third wall is detached from the plot’s limit to conform a service area, en suite bathroom and closet, while negotiating the relationship between the house and the retaining wall of the neighboring lot.
A pair of beams, at times traditional, at times inverted, structure the spam that connects the two pavilions of the living room and bedrooms. The rooms are oriented transversally to the longitudinal pavilion, and masonry walls are position in-between them, in a single direction. Such orientation provides a clear structural logic for the support of the slab that houses the raised terrace, and simultaneously reinforces a connection between the internal spaces and the garden.
The facade panels are composed of a metallic frame and a translucent polycarbonate sheet, filled with gravel on both sides. The use of gravel, the same material used as thermal insulation on the terrace, filters light during the day and, conversely, allows the façade to be lit from the inside out at night.
https://poles.studio/tres-paredes-duas-vigas/40
Veil of Snow
Commission
– Under Construction –
Geneva, 2023
Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Pedro Brito, Isabella Simões, Eduarda Volschan
The renovation and expansion of the house in Geneva involved reorganizing the ground floor layout and building a second floor to increase the number of bedrooms and enhance the quality of the living spaces on the ground floor.
The upper volume, marked by a metal curtain that surround its entire perimeter, rests on the ground floor and creates a contrast between the existing volume, with white plastered walls, and the new one, with metallic materials. The curtain, in turn, can be opened or closed as needed, providing privacy for the bedrooms located on the second floor.
The kitchen was relocated to where the master suite was originally situated, making way for the living room, whose double-height ceiling connects with the upstairs library.
The spatial organization of the bedroom floor is based on a wooden cross that runs across the entire length of the volume, dividing the space into four quadrants: library, guest suite, son's suite, and master suite.
https://poles.studio/veu-de-neve/61
Grids in Stone
Commission
– Under Construction –
Itaipava, 2023
Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Pedro Brito, Isabella Simões, Carina Lima, Camilla Rocha
The project is composed of two distinct grids, one open and another closed, arranged perpendicularly on top of each other. These are the results of the process of sculpting and working the stone in different ways, giving each a unique but complementary identity.
In the open grid, concrete is poured and sculpted to resemble stone, giving rise to subtracted spaces that house the pool, jacuzzi, fire pit, and mediate the interior of the house with the landscape. The sauna, also resulting from the work done on the stone, emerges as a closed and sustaining element, rising to meet the closed grid.
It is in the second grid, arranged perpendicularly over the first, that the spaces intended for rest are located. With well-defined lines, the closed grid contrasts with the solidity of the lower grid. In it, the concrete is worked with greater precision, hovering lightly over the topography with its two cantilevers, like an elevated stone.
The living room emerges as a direct manifestation of the terrain's topography, where the floor is raised to shelter the living spaces. The service volume, whose shape suffers an inflection as it adapts to the topography, is located behind floor-to-ceiling joinery doors, allowing it to open and close in relation to the living room. The roof of these spaces becomes a garden terrace, as if the natural topography of the land itself was elevated and relocated on the upper floor.
Through the duality expressed in the treatment of the stone—rough and polished, open and closed, rooted and elevated—the project articulates the coexistence of opposites. The stone, in its essence, assumes distinct manifestations, sometimes emerging in its rough form, sometimes elevated and polished.
https://poles.studio/grides-em-pedra/55
Sail Over Sea - New -
Commission
Arraial Do Cabo, 2024
Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Thiago Engers, Isadora Martins
Sail Over Sea is an expansion project of an existing residence in Pontal do Atalaia. It’s design stems from the idea of minimizing its impact on the terrain - both from a construction and environmental standpoint.
The existing house, small and inadequate for its new intended use, is located on a plot of permanent environmental protection and consists of a solid stone plinth with a lightweight wooden volume on top. The expansion proposal sought to build upon this strategy by preserving the stone base and replacing the upper volume with a sequence of cross-laminated timber porticoes, in which only the columns touch the ground. This approach allows the existing vegetation to continue growing underneath the house while drastically reducing construction time and site impact, as it employs dry construction methods.
The ground floor is configured as a large open span that integrates common areas — living rooms, kitchen, and veranda — with unobstructed views of the surrounding landscape. The independent bedroom block was inserted at this level, with windows inflected to face the sea. The master suite, in turn, was placed on the upper floor so it can be locked while the house is rented seasonally.
A large continuous roof sits over the entire project, starting as a flat surface above the main entrance and culminating in a gable shape over the master suite, oriented toward the sea. This gesture, though simple in concept, results in a complex double-curved surface made possible by the use of taubilha, a local type of shingle tile, over molded OSB panels. The taubilha, also used in the original construction, is repurposed here, reinforcing both the intention to preserve local materials and building knowledge, and the desire to offer a natural cladding solution with high thermal and acoustic performance — one that blends seamlessly with its surroundings.
https://poles.studio/vela-sobre-mar/63
Varanda over Valley
Commission
Sapucaí Mirim, 2023
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Isabella Simões, Pedro Brito, Eduarda Volschan, Iara Carneiro
Varanda over Valley is a project distinguished by the combination of two distinct structural systems. In the central area of the house, which accommodates the living room, kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry room, the load-bearing structure of exposed ceramic masonry confers solidity to the space. Niches are carved into the walls and floor, creating functional elements such as sofas, countertops, and bookcases that blend with the very structure of the house. This integration, where every component unfurls and interweaves with the others, reinforces the notion of the center's unity and continuity.
The fenestration in this central space is composed of pivoting brick panels, affording control over the influx of light and ventilation, and creating a dynamic interplay of light and shadow within the interior space. When opened, the panels provide a seamless merging with its environment and the surrounding natural landscape. The peripheral structural system is a combination of wood and metal elements, which enfold the central volume of the house, accommodating the bedrooms and veranda.
With the veranda serving its role as a mediator, internal and external spaced interweave into a buffer zone. This intermediary area transforms into a site of fluid connection between the residence and the encompassing natural environment, a bond that is further accentuated by the glass enclosures' permeability. As the boundaries between the indoor and outdoor spaces dissolve into a cohesive union, the distinction between the architecture and the natural landscape becomes indistinguishable, resulting in a fusion with the surrounding environment.
The integration of these two systems enables the creation of diverse ambiences within the house, generating contrasts that culminate in distinct sensations of homeliness and expansiveness, as well as intimacy and expansion.
https://poles.studio/varanda-sobre-vale/53
Orbiting Cubes - New -
Commission
-Under Construction-
Brasília, 2024
Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Vinicius Aleixo, Bruno Bins, Carina Lima
-Description Soon-
https://poles.studio/cubos-orbitais/65
Shipping Co. Headquarters
Commission
- Built -
Rio de Janeiro, 2020
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Tripper Arquitetura and Benefice Construtora
Upon their relocation to a new city, this Shipping Company conglomerate required a site where they could handle and store their containers, as well as two new buildings: a warehouse for the maintenance and cleaning of their equipment, and a main building to house their headquarters. The masterplan plan we devised took advantage of the sloping topography of the surrounding streets to place the container yard’s access leveled with the highest point of the East street so no earth work would be required. At the same time this allowed for an uninterrupted back-of-house truck access to the back to the buildings, it also placed these buildings facing the most valuable site views.
The headquarters’ building was designed as simple, mono-material boxes where office, learning and gathering spaces are concentrated. Two volumes intersect at different angles to create a generous central plaza that houses the company’s social functions, including reception, bar, cafeteria, private meeting pods, leisure and resting areas. The volume conforming the front façade is elevated from the ground and cantilevered over the sloping terrain to take maximum advantage of the surrounding landscape. This elevation provides an outdoor terrace that is then connected to the ground level through an auditorium facing this inner, triple-height space of the central plaza.
The plaza, in turn, revolves around a tree-like wooden structure that supports a wide roof under which social activities can develop. The structure helps create a warmer atmosphere that contrasts with the general industrial feel to the building, while at the same facilitating the circulation and distribution of flows by incorporating the stairs and the bridge that connect the different levels and office blocks. As it touches the ground, the structure opens space for a small carp lake that spills over to the outside space where a garden mediates the relation between the two buildings.
https://poles.studio/sede-cia-transportadora/38
Brazilian Pavilion Expo 2020
National Competition
Brazil, 2018
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Gringo Cardia, Bárbara Graeff, Tripper Arquitetura
Our pavilion is inspired by one of the greatest technological achievements of Brazil: the improvement of the Direct Planting System over straw. This agricultural technique protects the soil and maintains the ideal thermal conditions for cultivation. The pavilion conceptually mimics this scheme through its layered arrangement - soil, entanglement of protection, productivity - presenting itself as both a building and a symbolic image of one of our progresses.
Historically, the pavilion is mirrored in the rich Brazilian tradition at International Expos, subtly borrowing from the masterpieces of Paulo Mendes da Rocha at Osaka 1970 and from Sérgio Bernardes at Brussels 1958.
The pavilion’s design decisions were based on technological advances in sustainability, both of construction and of performance. The building explores the plastic potential of laminated timber as a structure - renewable material that sequesters carbon rather than releasing it - and of the rammed earth mixed with reinforced concrete - which lowers its energy of production and the absorption of heat. The pavilion produces its own energy, recycles its own water, and makes the use of air conditioning unnecessary by combining the constant flow of air through an open façade, with the humidity of running water and of the vegetation under shadow.
The ground floor is free and opens up under the protection of an inverted topography that floats above it. This continuous entrance pavement hosts the exhibition Together for Nature,which is organized around 6 walls, representing the 6 main Brazilian biomes. The walls are combined with the soils of each biome and surrounded by totems containing the seeds of their native species, narrating a tactile history of the foundations of our country through colors and textures.
The ascent to the upper exhibitions takes place under an oculus that connects the ground floor directly to the sky. Inside a tangle of tree branches, visitors find the Together for Peopleexhibit. Displayed on the inner facades, it showcases our ethnic diversity with the faces of our people and the sounds of our indigenous villages. The center of this space, in turn, houses the exhibition Together for Tomorrowthat embraces the great theme of Biotechnology from water-related advancements in the areas of Desalination, Aquaculture and Biofuel from algae.
After experiencing the textures of the seeds, the roughness of branches on the façade and the coldness of water, after diving into the sounds of our oldest villages, observing our faces, and learning about the future of how we relate to water, our visitors enjoy a viewing space and restaurant that crown the rooftop of the pavilion. Space of rest and conversation.
In this pavilion there is no distinction between outside and inside, between building and exhibition, between sustainability and technology, all together form a single sensory-cognitive experience that describes the richness and progress of our country.
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Gabriel Duarte, Miguel Darcy, Luisa Schettino
The project’s design decision was to dialogue with Brasilia, and try to extract an essence of what this city-giant means for our profession.
The peripheral occupation of the lot by a stepped volume, framed by two elevated blocks, creates a succession of intermediate environments – passages and transitions – that translate into form the current moment of consolidation experienced by the two Institutions it hosts, the Institute of Architects of Brazil and the Council for Architecture and Urbanism. This porous volume surrounds and gives access to different civic and meeting spaces from the cascading entrance square, through the large central courtyard, to the terraces of working spaces. Visually connected to each other, all these environments invite its users to participation and dialogue, values that underpin the role played by the institutions they represent.
The stepped volumes, where most of the service and working areas are concentrated, are structured by simple concrete supports and steel-deck slabs with conservative spans. Its rigidly controlled modulation avoids structural transition components, allowing all the building’s installations and vertical and horizontal access to be concentrated in four cores. Exceptions strategically and symbolically occur in the spaces designed for the for public and civic use programs. The auditorium and a plenary occupy large metal trusses, rising on sturdy and simple supports at both ends of the building, thus creating large porticoes that connect the interior spaces to the city and the landscape.
At the same time the project dialogues with the horizon line, it opens the center of the site to the amplitude of Brasilia’s plateau sky. It rises to impose itself, competing with the monumentality of the city, but becomes intimate in its central superblock. It defines a clear mark for the two poles of the territory through the articulation of the core program, underneath of which topographic manipulations structure the project, granting space for the unfolding of the landscaping in symbolic conversation with the Niemeyer buildings of the city. The materials are raw for quick construction but also because the building of nothing more needs.
Black and white and represented by a one-point perspective, the project quietly reveres the city where it is inserted, choosing to let its architectural qualities surface crude and slowly to the eyes of the observer.
https://poles.studio/sede-do-cau-iab/2
Brazil Antarctic Station
National Competition
- Honorable Mention -
Antarctic, 2013
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Luciano Alvares, Vera Hazan, Fernando Betim
In an extreme natural environment and without the constraints of an urban context, there is no relationship to be established by the architecture, but it with itself, which culminates in an introverted quest for self-sufficiency. Understanding this, design efforts were directed to the two main logistic systems of the station. One relative to its functioning and performance, a rigid and closed system, and another to its construction, an open and flexible one.
To enable the station to be ready for use in a single summer, all the construction processes were shifted to Brazil, through the adoption of a prefabricated constructive serial system, lightweight and of easy assembly and transportation. On site, ready components are simply grouped and combined into a single body. The station is organized by the combination of modules and cores. The core hosts all infrastructural systems - water storage and heating; air renovation and heating; waste storage, processing and recycling; power generation; logistics; antechambers; vertical circulation; and load bearing structure – and on the other hand the modules serve as hollow frames, supplied by the cores, capable of receiving any functions. This two-tier system gives maximum flexibility and autonomy for each sector of the station, allowing future expansion or contraction without interference on the other ongoing processes and spaces in use.
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Isabella Simões, Pedro Brito, Iara Carneiro
An area of 145,000 square meters, located on the border between the states of Minas Gerais and São Paulo, was acquired by two couples of friends with a twofold purpose: to build two single-family homes and share both the land and its various possibilities.
A distinctive feature of the land is the presence of a stream that runs through its lower part, naturally marking the separation between the individual plots. This stream is accompanied by two small waterfalls and a large stone strategically located in its center. The land use strategy is based on the circular shape of the river, thus influencing the distribution of the elements.
The central approach adopted is based on a radial arrangement, taking advantage of the intrinsic topographical characteristics. The program is organized along four distinct axes: Residence, Production, Leisure, and Services. They all converge at the meeting point between the river and the stone - a point that also coincides with the geometric center of the land.
In response to this strategy, the residences were placed at opposite ends, in order to protect privacy and optimize the layout of the main houses. This not only emphasizes the individuality of each residence but also maximizes the views and integration with the surrounding nature.
To address the challenges posed by the varied topography, paths were designed that incorporate ramps and staircases, connecting not only the residential areas but also the shared spaces that enrich the experience on site. These pedestrian paths intersect with vehicular access routes and various trails that surround the land. They all converge toward the stone, around which a ring has been formed, housing amenities shared by the couples: a chicken coop, areas for yoga practice, facilities for the caretaker, a multifunctional building, and a sauna. Each element has been strategically placed along the paths, fostering a sense of community and encouraging social interaction.
Due to the specific interest of the owners in landscaping and the cultivation of species, the landscaping project was designed to enable the reforestation of a portion of the land with native vegetation. This planning allows for interactions between the existing and newly introduced species, along with soil movements and necessary slope containment measures for the new road layout.
https://poles.studio/fluxos-radiais/58
Shanghai Urban Framework
International Closed Competition
- 2nd Prize -
Shanghai, 2015
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, David Birge, Difei Xu, Barry Beagan
A recurring problem in many mature cities is their inevitable engulfing of large logistical infrastructures originally intended for the urban periphery. This process often leads to compromises in both operations and the quality of the urban space. Within this larger category, the competition poses the question of how to properly engage and profitably redevelop the area around Shanghai railyard as the city’s dense core expands outwards, while also resolving the existing issues of spatial connectivity and architectural typological heterogeneity. We understand that the solution is to somehow work with and around the railyard, finding a realistic and feasible solution that could leave the operations intact while re-qualifying the urban space and increasing the area’s development potential.
We theoretically approached the urban design task by subsuming normative terms of urban design – such as the parcel, the street section, and zoning regulations – within a larger, more abstract, and more flexible spatial construct we term the “urban framework”. Operatively, the “framework” lies somewhere between the parcel and the special development zone, the former being too restrictive, the latter too ambiguous and capitalistic. We conceptualize the urban framework as a new form of projective control over development, allowing differing levels of regulatory and architectural specificity depending on the needed, while ensuring coherence within itself and the surrounding urban context. It provides moments of extreme specificity and rigidity, to allow an equivalent dose of openness and indeterminacy. Instead of master-planning every variable of the site, individual moments of concentrated control may structure the place to afford an indeterminate future, allowing it to develop in many different possible ways without disrupting the city. The “urban framework” becomes a theoretical tool that enables the pursuing of projective agendas by the envisioning of possible actualizations of latent economic, programmatic, and cultural capacities of the site.
Ultimately, our understanding of the multi-scalar problems of the site led to a set of 4 interrelated solutions: a new block typology towards a continuous fabric; an architecture for bridging the rails and concentrating new activities; a consolidation strategy for the rail services with a free-up of new public spaces for the city; and a unique plinth typology that mediates the relation between the void of the railyards and the city while structuring it for future development.
https://poles.studio/shanghai-armacao-urbana/1
Rio 2016 Olympic Park
International Competition
- Shortlisted -
Rio de Janeiro, 2011
In partnership with Mecanoo Architecten, The Netherlands
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Ana Altberg, Beni Barzellai, Christopher Malheiros, Mariana Menegueti.
As an urban solution for the Olympic Park complex, we chose to start the project by the legacy mode understanding that the length of games is minimal near the future development of that area. The project was developed around a model of city that would meet the deficiencies found in Barra’s urban plan, and at the same time guarantee an infrastructure able to be easily reversed after the games. The site is occupied by programmatic strips that allow the collision of different activities and architectural typologies. The strips provide diversity while two infrastructural axes and the network of public spaces give cohesion and unity to the plan.
The games phase start with the implementation of two perpendicular axes, running north-south and east-west. The first is the visitors access, and condenses the sport’s program in a large route, with strong landscape project, connects the Av Emb. Abelardo Bueno to Jacarepaguá Lagoon, bringing city and nature together. The second acts as a logistic axis for the Games, supplying sports equipment from an underground street. At the intersection of these axes lies a large square, which will be the epicenter of the project, and the entertainment area for visitors.
https://poles.studio/rio-2016-parque-olimpico/5
Agroforestry Center
International Competition
Santiago de Compostela, 2020
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Roi Salgueiro, Luiz Gustavo Zincone
The Center for the Promotion of Agriculture, Forestry and Cattle in Sergude is an ambitious project that seeks to be a model for emerging, sustainable models of agriculture and cattle in Galicia. With that goal, our proposal is structured in the following way.
One. Structuring the territorial scale. The first key measure consists in addressing the territorial and landscape dimension of the intervention. Before addressing the specific design of the architectural pieces, we focus on defining a masterplan that improves the image and use of the existing buildings. These are incorporated in a new complex that is legible at the territorial scale, and that creates new relations between buildings and landscape.
Two.Organizing the program in four areas allowing access to the landscape. We distribute the program in clear, autonomous areas that come together in the center of the existing buildings; which thus becomes a core space to access the different zones. In a new square in front of the historic Pazo (the traditional typology of Galician landlords), converge four different groups of buildings dedicated to Housing and Teaching, Research, Agricultural Promotion, and Cattle. Together, these buildings form a sort of Y aimed at interconnecting the different agroforestry sectors. Each of these groups presents a specific relation to landscape, either with the existing hills and mountains, either with existing or new watercourses and waterbodies.
Three. Facilitating a sustainable territorial metabolism through the building systems. We propose using similar construction systems throughout all the complex, while warranting the formal singularity of each of the pieces. We always use horizontal structures in wood, which give special importance to the formalization of the roofs. The vertical structures alternate wood columns with rammed earth walls. By using biomass, wood is also an energy source. In this way, the Center will become an example of the possible uses of the different types of wood produced in Galicia, and of the benefits of fostering processes of territorial metabolism that link in a sustainable way the production and consumption of wood.
Four. Creating models of sustainable agroforestry linking production and landscape. Our project generates a landscape that interrelates teaching, research, production, and promotion of agricultural goods with the aesthetic and ecologic appreciation of the landscape. With that goal we propose a series of agroforestry systems, water courses, and pedestrian paths, which transform the existing monoculture areas. These agroforestry systems will increase the ecological biodiversity of the area, both in flora and fauna. The result is the emergence of a mosaic of forest types, in line with Richard TT Forman’s models, that we interlink by extending the existing ecological corridors.
https://poles.studio/centro-para-agrofloresta/39
Charitas Waterfront Filter
National Competition
– Honorable Mention –
Rio de Janeiro, 2021
Consortium: POLES + Évora Arquitetos + Burle Marx .
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski (Lead Urban Designer), Pedro Évora (Lead Architect ), Isabela Ono (Landscape Architect), Julio Ono (Landscape Architect), Gustavo Leivas (Landscape Architect), Miguel Darcy (Architect), Isabella Simões (Architect), Pedro Brito (Architect), Barbara Graeff (Landscape Architect), Gabriel Mesquita (Architect).
Consultants: Paulo Cesar Rosman (Coastal and Oceanographic Engineering), Ariel Kozlowski (Environmental Management), Deivisson Sampaio Farias (Sustainability), Maneco Quinderé (Lighting Design), Paula Fernandes Dias (Accessibility), Willian Alberto de Aquino Pereira (Transportation and Mobility Engineer), Carolina Calvente (Heritage), Fabio Arruda (Visual Communication and Signage).
The waterfront is the best cultural representation of the encounter between people and the sea. The sand establishes the harmonic contact between mountains and the ocean, acting as a flat and porous cradle to calm the waves, fix the vegetation and accommodate civilization by the sea. The Circular Charitas proposal announces a new chapter for the Charitas waterfront and its waters, a generous future of conviviality between the city of Niterói and nature.
The proposal understands the demand for a circular economy and the regeneration of ecological dynamics as basic premises that will strengthen the cultural relations with the landscape and enhance the local scenic character. The existing hydrological cycle is the starting point of the intervention - which filters the converging waters on the waterfront coming from the mountains and Guanabara Bay. On land, the proposed green infrastructure is composed of a system of biodigesters, filter gardens, and rain gardens that deliver clean water to the sea and provide biogas to the community. At sea, a future mariculture enclosure absorbs pollution from outside the bay, providing extra income for the fishing economy and improving bathing conditions. Together, these two filtration systems reconnect the users of Charitas with the water, while awakening an ecological consciousness that sees the future of the relationship between humans and nature as an essential symbiosis.
In search of a more open relationship with water, the proposal is organized between two operations: the continuous intervention on the waterfront, and three specific project focuses. The waterfront intervention understands that this space is primarily a place for people, conferring public and democratic meaning to the promenade. It associates the landscape with the full right to the city, and does so gradually by replacing car spaces with pedestrian spaces. The focal points, in turn, consolidate a central infrastructural strip that expands and optimizes the intermodal character of the area, as well as two urban squares at the ends of the waterfront that, in addition to tying together the renewal of Charitas, has in the democratization of the use of water its reasons for existing. Places where sea and stone meet, shaped by the winds and mediated by culture.
https://poles.studio/orla-como-filtro-charitas/41
Floor to the Sky
Commission
– Em Construção –
Angra, 2023
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Miguel Darcy, Carina Lima, Thiago Engers
Floor to the Sky responds to the challenge of designing a minimal dwelling that accommodates the basic conditions of human life while disappearing into the landscape, allowing nature to become the main protagonist.
A glass enclosure — transparent or reflective depending on the angle — houses an infrastructural floor where the essential functions for daily living are embedded and revealed as needed. This strategy frees the view from any obstructions, fostering uninterrupted contemplation both inside and out.
The materiality of the glass is combined with a polished stainless steel structure, further extending the visual continuity of the landscape. The wooden infrastructural floor, on the other hand, adds warmth and comfort to the interior. The structure is enveloped by a double layer of insulated glass with UV protection and argon-filled chambers — a solution that mitigates the impact of solar radiation and enhances thermal comfort throughout the day. Two large operable windows positioned on the longer façades ensure cross-ventilation, while also providing access to an exterior table and cooking counter.
The project was designed for quick and simple execution, requiring no excavation and relying on the assembly of prefabricated components. The plumbing and electrical systems distributionis highly rationalized: electrical equipments are concentrated along a single strip adjacent to the façade, while the wet infrastructure is laid out along a perpendicular axis.
When all functions are concealed within the built-in millwork base, the utilitarian elements typically associated with a house disappear, leaving only the elegant glass shell resting atop a wooden floor. This minimal presence allows the surrounding nature to take precedence over the built space: the proper hierarchy of things is thus established.
https://poles.studio/chao-para-o-ceu/56
Foldable Shelter
Research on Non-Conventional Materials and Technology
A temporary universal shelter designed mainly to assist unsettled areas after disasters. Its construction intended to use minimal skilled labour possible; it would be ready for use soon after its construction and assembly at the factory. The shelter is designed with the minimum dimensions for a better relationship between the use of materials, the living space and its visual impact. It is temporary, nomadic - released foundations - and always keeps the possibility of being folded. This is a project that combines two super-efficient but non-conventional components - the Tensegrity as a structural system and bamboo as the material - in order to create a lightweight, flexible, resistant, resilient, bendable, low environmental impact and material saving structure.
https://poles.studio/abrigo-dobravel/16
W-All v.02
Product Development
Boston, 2018
Team: David Birge, Solan Megerssa and Waishan Qiu
Public Good: Our cities and the environment are over-stressed
In a time of limited resources, we believe that personal accountability of each one’s individual footprint in the world in inevitable if we are to change the direction of and begin to revert our collective environmental impact.
Our cities are overburdened. The infrastructure in many older cities is obsolete, inefficient, and operating close to or beyond capacity. Buildings play a key role here as they mirror our sense of individualism, taking from the public system while hardly giving anything back. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Buildings can function as autonomous micro-systems working for - rather than against - society and the environment.
In the same way, cities can shift from serving the private interest to serving the collective, in favor of the public good. W-All was designed to allow houses to significantly reduce their demands on city water and sewer infrastructure, allowing cities to divert resources to solve other critical issues for their citizens.
Challenge: Everyone should be able to access safe and affordable water. It is a human right.
Clean water is becoming increasingly scarce and costly around the world. Reliable access to safe water will be one of the major challenges for society in the coming decades. In developing countries, 3.4 million people die each year from easily preventable, water-borne illnesses, while in developed countries, the combined cost of water and sanitation has increased by 130% in the last 10 years alone.
In the United States, for example, a typical four-person family pays roughly US$1,600 a year for water and sewer services combined, with costs as high as $2,500 in some cities. These costs are escalating quickly. In the next 5-10 years rates are expected to grow an additional 25%, at which point over 40 million American households (35%) will fall below the EPA’s water affordability benchmark.
It is clear that the future of equitable access to clean water is in danger. We believe solutions could come in a decentralized manner, from within our households, without burdening the public system.
Opportunity: Closing the loop for minimum waste
We drink less than 5% of the water we use while the rest goes down the drain, wasted in the process.
What if we could close the loop by removing the impurities present in a household’s water and re-use it over and over again?
As a new household water system, W-All combines multiple, individually proven technologies to provide water that meets or exceeds EPA public-water standards in a footprint of only a few square meters. Our system allows households to achieve over 80% water savings. Instead of sending 280 gallons to the sewer each day, families instead only send 60.
In regions with high precipitation, buildings could even go off-the-grid. This would alleviate the city’s overloaded supply infrastructure, reduce a household’s electricity bill, and benefit the environment.
The Solution: An Integrated, Intelligent System
W-All approaches water use holistically at the household scale, providing affordable and safe water while contributing to the conservation of this important natural resource.
W-All is a house’s motherboard for water management. It integrates all water-related functions in a single wall by capturing, storing, filtering, treating and recycling water.
Our software uses data collected from households to predict, optimize, and reduce future water demand based on user behavior and the weather forecast. The system minimizes withdrawals from the city grid by intelligently managing the stock of rain- and greywater available.
Financial Value:Household Perspective
W-All has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about water-use in multiple ways.
W-All automatically monitors water quality and uses multiple redundant filtration processes to remove over 99.99% of the pathogens and chemicals present in greywater, producing water at or better than EPA standards for municipal potable sources.
Families can rest assured that all of the water they use in their house is safe, regardless of source. W-All reads and provides the data to prove it from each house’s water stream, with a few key indicators measured in real-time. And in addition to providing safe water, W-All allows families to radically conserve water without changing their lifestyle.
Finally, W-All provides these benefits while saving families hundreds of dollars a year in utility costs. In long-term contracts can guarantee customers that water prices won’t grow in real terms. It ensures stable water prices below that of 75% of utilities in the US as of 2018, and up to 90% of utilities by 2025-2030. What they pay today is what they will pay in 10, 20, 40 years from now.
W-All proves it is possible to take care of our waters while bettering the lives of our people, family after family, house after house.
https://poles.studio/w-all-v-02/49
W-All v.01
Product Development
- Selected for the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s Catalyst Program -
- Finalist for the Roddenberry Fellowship -
W-all is a unit in which all the mechanical-ecological functions of a house are concentrated.
W-all was conceived as a response to the current pace and scale of world urbanization in respect to its environmental impact. At the same time the building sector was recognized as the major source of climate change, with elevated energy consumption and co2 emissions levels, the largest share of construction continues to be driven by economic purposes only, without proper or any commitment to design standards and sustainable ways of living. Architects, romantically regretting their exclusion from this setting, have mostly avoided diving into this continuum of inglorious, market-oriented architecture. As Rem Koolhaas once put, it’s time to swim into the sea that has swept our sand castles away.
To disrupt the business-as-usual of the construction sector, we realized that instead of producing whole buildings, we can strip architecture of all its parts to focus on one single component. If we control one little piece, this can be the lever to change the whole system. One piece that is treated as a product for environmental integration. A product that any house can acquire and any new development can incorporate without having to change all the parameters they already work with.
Last century, Buckminster Fuller took the challenge to re-conceptualize the roof in the context of the post-war restructuring. At the current moment, we intend to re-conceptualize the wall for a path towards a post-carbon society.
W-all is like a motherboard, the operations hub for the sustainable management of a house’s resources. It is a hardware for which any product developer can build a software. W-all concentrates all the mechanical equipment necessary for the normal functioning of a house but also all the new sustainable add-ons necessary to drop the building operations’ environmental impact to close to zero. This include energy usage, water consumption, co2 emissions and waste generation. Furthermore, the unit not only performs from inside out – integrating the house with the environment – but also from outside in – bringing health and social improvements for the inhabitants’ lives, such as pure drinkable water, elevated air quality through the exchange of the interior’s stale air for the exterior’s fresh air, humidity control, environment and safety sensors, products and food production.
W-all helps building a path towards a circular economy, and possibly an off-the-grid living, in which every citizen can play a role in it starting from their own household. It addresses both the existing built world and the future one to come.
https://poles.studio/w-all-v-01/23
Trees, Vines and Palms
Installation
– 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2023 –
Venice, 2023
Project and directing: Paulo Tavares
Production, 3D modeling, physical model, and video: POLES / Gabriel Kozlowski (coord.), Miguel Darcy, Isabella Simões, Thiago Engers and Eduarda Volschan.
‘Trees, Vines, Palms, and Other Architectural Monuments’ presents an archaeology of ancient Xavante settlements forcibly displaced by the Brazilian dictatorship in the 1960s.
Through the forensic identification of botanical remains, the project asks if forest compositions are equivalent to architectural ruins. ‘Can trees, vines, and palms be interpreted as historic monuments?’
Along with its complementary project ‘An Architectural Botany’, ‘Trees, Vines, Palms, and Other Architectural Monuments’ establishes a dialogue between theory and practice, knowledge and ground, visual cultures and design advocacy, weaving a conceptual field in which the forest appears as a radical new form of architecture.
Beyond listing monuments to be dismantled, we need to build new memorial landscapes to care for, land sites that can enable other histories to be told, all the while repairing communities and restoring the environment. Grounded and global, architecture-as-advocacy simultaneously responds to situated land conflicts and the earth-politics of climate change. As Ursula K. Le Guin suggested: “The word for world is forest.”
Friction of Truth - New -
Forensic Research
São Paulo, 2024
A collaboration between POLES + Agência Autónoma
Friction of Truth is a forensic investigation into a police operation in a informal neighborhood of São Paulo, that resulted in the deaths of nine innocent teenagers. To challenge the official narrative, we gathered data from various sources, synchronized media content, and developed a digital model to map the sequence of events. In parallel, we created an interface to compile all the information and facilitate a clearer understanding of the case.
-Further description soon-
Memory of the earth
Research
Brasília, 2022
Leadership: agência autonoma | Paulo Tavares
Digital modeling and motion graphics: POLES | Gabriel Kozlowski (coord), Miguel Darcy, Eduarda Volschan and Iara Carneiro
Complete Team at memoriadaterra.org
Between the 1940s and 1960s, the Xavante people, an indigenous nation located in central Brazil, was subjected to a brutal campaign of land expropriation and forced evictions. This campaign was part of a territorial colonization strategy, labeled by the Brazilian state as an effort to “occupy the country’s demographic voids.”
Developed in partnership and led by agência autônoma, the research consists of the documentation of archaeological sites of the ancient settlements of the A’uwe-Xavante, Marãiwatsédé Territory. Analyzing historical photographs, which were one of the few existing records of these ancient settlements, we digitally reconstructed the architecture of the old villages by studying their unique spatial typology.
Through the archaeological reconstruction of the vestiges of the A’uwe people, design, modeling, and mapping are used as a tool for advocacy. Based on the outcome, an application was sent to the Brazilian National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) with the objective of obtaining the recognition of the archaeological sites of the Xavante people as heritage assets and thus worthy of protection and preservation.
How Will We Live Together?
Exhibition
– 17th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia –
Venice, 2021
Curator: Hashim Sarkis
Assistant Curators: Gabriel Kozlowski and Roi Salgueiro
Managing Editor: Ala Tannir
Research Associate: Xhulio Binjaku
Graphic Identity: Omnivore Inc.
This edition of the Venice Biennale addressed our current context of pressing global challenges and nationalistic drives by asking the question How Will We Live Together? We approached this question through five consecutive scales, ranging from the body to the planet at large: 1) How Will We Live Together… Among Different Beings; 2) As New Households; 3) As Emerging Communities; 4) Across Borders; and 5) As One Planet. This trans-scalar ambition aimed portraying the multiplicity of realms where design practices can contribute to create a future of better coexistence. Thus, the exhibition claimed that spatial action can precede, and help shaping, political action. Beyond architectural installations, the exhibition was complemented by two new books, research stations, a lecture series and digital events
Photos credits: La Biennale di Venezia
Walls of Air: Venice Biennale 2018
Exhibition
- Brazilian Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition -
Venice, 2018
Curators: Gabriel Kozlowski, Laura Gonzaléz Fierro, Marcelo Maia Rosa, Sol Camacho
Walls of Air explores the ways in which to read, challenge and transgress the material and immaterial boundaries of Brazil and its architecture.
As it investigates the different types of walls that have constructed the country, it reflects on the borders of architecture itself in relation to other disciplines.
The first room presents 17 architectural and urban projects selected from a public open call. Chosen for articulating ingenious solutions to transform their environment into one that is more fluid, connected and inclusive, the projects reveal architecture’s ability to break down walls and build a more generous and collective public sphere.
The second room houses 10 large cartographic drawings. Specifically crafted for this event, the maps intend to make visible the forms of spatial and social separations that have resulted from Brazil’s urbanization processes. In hope to shed light on issues often overlooked due to their nature or scale, these cartographies redraw the Brazilian map in unfamiliar ways to reveal the alternative facets of the country.
This research involved more than 200 collaborators – from the most diverse disciplines such as geography, medicine, anthropology, social sciences, arts, law and politics – and culminated in a book to expand the conversation beyond the limits of this singular exhibition moment, thus building a broader dialogue over Brazil’s Freespace.
- The Americas Society: Cartographies from the Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018 -
New York, 2019
Guest curators: Gabriel Kozlowski, Sol Camacho, Laura González Fierro, and Marcelo Maia Rosa
ASCOA curator: Gabriela Rangel
ASCOA assistant curator: Diana Flatto
Walls of Air examines the nature of the visible and invisible walls that both constitute and enclose modern-day Brazil, and explores what may have caused the country’s social and environmental fragmentation. Responding to the theme of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale—FREESPACE—the curators of the Brazilian Pavilion asked how spatial and social restrictions have prevented Brazil from establishing a more egalitarian and democratic public sphere. The resulting exhibition suggests that, if a free Brazil is to be built, its current problems must be understood from all vantages and by all citizens.
To address this challenge, the curators developed ten large-format cartographies that promote critical awareness of the spatial and conceptual separations that have resulted from Brazil’s urbanization processes and make visible the effects these processes have had on the natural and urban environments. The maps range in scale from a single city to the entire Brazilian territory and its relation not only to Latin America but to the rest of the world. This use of multiple scales suggested to the curators that the first wall to be torn down is the wall that separates architecture from other disciplines. Walls of Air is the result of collaborative research with more than two hundred professionals from ten disciplines, including anthropology, the arts, geography, law, medicine, politics, and the social sciences, which complement each other and help build common knowledge.
From the way capital is distributed in the Brazilian territory to the way deforestation in the north of the country impacts life in the south, each map foregrounds a pressing theme while emphasizing the need to conceive of architecture as a means of rethinking the boundaries within our cities. The result of visualizing extended data sets from both national and international institutions, including the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, the Federal Police of Brazil, NASA, and the Global Forest Watch, Walls of Air proposes some first steps toward challenging—and transgressing—these boundaries.
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For the occasion of the event, three of the territorial maps we produced to depict Brazil are extruded vertically according to topographic data, in collaboration with Longitude.One
Walls of Air (Projects) - Roma, Beirut, Mexico City
Exhibition
- Brazilian Embassy in Roma -
- Brazil-Lebanon Cultural Center -
- MEXTROPOLI Festival de Arquitectura y Ciudad -
Rome, Beirut, Mexico City, 2019-2023
Curators: Gabriel Kozlowski, Sol Camacho, Laura González Fierro, and Marcelo Maia Rosa
This exhibition approaches the theme Walls of Air from the scale of the architectural and urban interventions. It attempts to measure the ability of Brazil’s recent architectural production in mediating conflicting relationships between public and private domains.
As opposed to the cartographic approach, which maps the multiple types of barriers that build the Brazilian territory, this section presents architectural objects that encourage the transposition of walls present in our cities. The selected proposals share the drive to investigate new ways of dealing with the limits, divisions and ruptures within urban fabrics. At the same time, they raise to surface the pressing need to use design as a way to transform conditions of exclusion into possibilities of bringing people together.
The projects were selected through an open public call—an unprecedented initiative for a Brazilian pavilion in the Venice Biennale—with the clear goal of widening and democratizing the dialogue about contemporary Brazilian architecture. Widely publicized throughout Brazil, the call invited architects to submit projects through the website www.murosdear.org.br, which hosted a series of sections for public participation in the Walls of Air research.
The open call considered any project within the Brazilian territory eligible for submission, regardless of the nationality of the architect. Either built or unbuilt, projects were accepted for selection as long as they were grounded in reality, meaning it had to have a real client or be part of a competition—academic projects or ideas proposals were not accepted. The submission period opened on December 19th, 2017, and closed on January 19th, 2018, with 289 proposals received from more than 60 cities in the country.
The submitted projects confirmed the high concentration of architectural firms in the southeast region of the country, the rare presence of foreign firms building in Brazil (especially if compared to regions like North America, Asia or Europe) and, lastly, the hardship of turning proposals into real buildings, demonstrated by the high number of unbuilt projects. Nevertheless, they also represent the high quality of the contemporary architectural scene in this country.
Seventeen projects were chosen for their inspiring and tangible ideas, sharing the clear desire to transform their environment into one that is more fluid and inclusive. These projects, displayed in the first room of the Brazilian Pavilion at the Giardini in Venice, aims to show a plurality of solutions that engage—through different lenses—with the concept of Walls of Air.
The projects address issues such as: how to bring people together to fight for a common cause against forces of pure financial land speculation; how to rethink our technological limitations; how a community can learn by building collectively; how to merge industrialized construction processes with vernacular techniques; how to disrupt legal frameworks through the proposition of innovative architectural and urban forms; how to make use of punctual strategies to generate a network for fostering urban renewal; how to use the void as a way to stitch two sides of an informal community; how to bridge large infrastructure corridors; how to densify uses as a means of bringing a community together; and how to rethink preserved areas as carefully calibrated public spaces, among other strategies.
Finally, the presentation of the 17 projects was developed in a collaboration between the curatorial team with each architecture firm. The choice of a graphic representation with few but impactful line drawings, each specifically crafted to establish a dialogue with all other projects, aims at highlighting not only the nuances of design with its variations in scale, but also to focus on the actions that connect them with the broader exhibition theme. The actions of fostering, seeding, revealing, interpreting, stitching, repurposing, framing, interconnecting, articulating, comprehending, bridging, densifying, converting, and learning, ultimately reveal each projects’ ability to break down walls and build a more generous and collectively Freespace.
Housing+: MIT LCAU Biennial
Exhibition
- 3rd Biennial Exhibit of the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism -
Boston, 2018
Exhibition + Conference: Adèle Naudé Santos
Exhibition Curator: Gabriel Kozlowski
Conference Curator: Laura Wainer
Art Director: Paul Montie
Graphic Design: Siena Scarff Design
Map Production: Waishan Qiu
Model Fabrication: Joey Jacobson
The provision of affordable housing is a challenge with an urgent need for new solutions. Attempts at comprehensive, affordable housing solutions have been ongoing by governments, private enterprises, and non-governmental organizations alike. Even though there are examples of progress made in the fields of social science, policy, and humanities, it continues to remain a challenge. Design is typically not an approach that comes to mind when one refers to housing affordability, whether at the scale of the house, neighborhood, or city. There is a dearth of affordable housing design that is inspiring, sustainable, inclusive, or substantial enough to satisfy the full spectrum of human rights and aspirations at a meaningful scale.
In its third biennial theme, "Housing+", the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism explores this global phenomenon through the lens of multi-scalar design. The “+” acts as a harbinger of innovative responses to the challenge of affordable housing design that confront conventional associations and commentaries.
The Housing+ exhibition is the culmination of two years of design and research inquiry involving faculty, students, and practitioners from around the globe. It includes nine new architecture and urban design models from faculty-led workshops, in Brazil, Colombia, Guyana, India, Peru, and Rwanda. Each workshop collaborated with real communities and organizations to test multi-scalar solutions and prototypical models tackling issues of affordable housing. Interviews establish the challenges faced by each team in their local contexts and are complemented with aerial footage and maps showing the global condition of affordable housing settlements.
Photos: Justin Knight
Terrestrial Tales
Exhibited Work
– ETH Zurich: Terrestrial Tales –
Zurich, 2019
Team: Hashim Sarkis, Gabriel Kozlowski and Roi Salgueiro Barrio
Exhibition curated by: Marc Angelil and Ciro Miguel
Terrestrial Tales is an exhibition curated by Marc Angelil and Miguel Ciro Andriussi at ETH Zurich investigating the role planetary representations plays in articulating global consciousness. Our contribution to the show builds upon our work The World According to Architecture. Employing evidence, as well as signs and symbols, the architecture of the world is attained through references and referents that connect architecture (or some aspect of it) to the world (or some part of it). The examples here vary in strategy depending upon the scale of intervention, cultural context, and forms and imagery employed. To explain these strategies, we have divided projects that have conceived of the world as a scale of architectural intervention into five synthetic categories: Microcosm, Partial Worlds, Parallel Worlds, Making Visible, and Making Invisible. Although more than one strategy may apply to a single project, each is presented separately in order to highlight differences and similarities.
The exhibition includes works by students of “Constructing Vision. The Eye, Architecture, the World” at MIT: Benjamin Albrecht, Mary Patricia Lynch-Lloyd, Djana Milenov, Sean Philips, Andre Malan, Joshua Reynolds, Dana Shaikh, and Dalia Munezon.
Micro, Partial, Parallel, (In)Visible
Exhibited Work
– Lisbon Triennale 2016: The World in Our Eyes –
Lisbon, 2016
Authors: Hashim Sarkis, Gabriel Kozlowski and Roi Salgueiro Barrio
Exhibition curated by: Fig Projects
Our contribution to the 2016 Lisbon Triennale extends our research The World According to Architecture. We complement our analysis of 25 projects addressing the world scale with a series of design propositions developed by some of our students at MIT. Their propositions start analyzing the architectural properties of our previous conceptualization of micro, partial, parallel, visible, and invisible worlds, and follow with possible scenarios which translate those properties to speculative global spatial structures.
The exhibition includes works by students of “Constructing Vision. The Eye, Architecture, the World” at MIT: Benjamin Albrecht, Mary Patricia Lynch-Lloyd, Djana Milenov, Sean Philips, Andre Malan, Joshua Reynolds, Dana Shaikh, and Dalia Munezon.
The World According to Architecture
Exhibition
- Yale Architecture Gallery: The City of 7 Billion -
- FAU-USP, São Paulo -
- Lisbon Architecture Triennale: The Form of Form -
- Book Published by MIT Press -
New Haven, 2014; Lisbon, 2016; São Paulo, 2016
Authors: Hashim Sarkis, Gabriel Kozlowski and Roi Salgueiro Barrio
Many architects have conceived of the world as a project before the advent of globalization. These ecumenal aspirations may not resemble what globalization has produced in terms of physical environment. They do however stress the spatiality of the world and the need for a formal imagination to make it legible. Today, we hear that globalization manifests itself in cities, not in the world. Even if the emerging settlement patterns across the world supersede the metropolitan model, we still persist in describing the inhabited world based on categories that no longer correspond to the conditions at hand. This exhibition shows how the world has been a rich domain for the modern architectural imaginary. It is also an invitation to reclaim the scale and challenges of the city world, not the world city, as a vital architectural project.
The showcased piece consists of providing a new perspective on 25 proposals, over a spam of 100 years that addressed the whole world as an architecture project. The projects were translated into sections, creating a common language to show how each of them propose different methods and scales of creating an inscription in the world. By placing them on a continuous horizontal line we were able to extract the strategies they use to modify the surface of the world, as well as to understand that these strategies happen through four horizontal lines instead of one. The interweaving of these lines defines the thickness to the inhabited layer of the world, while providing the viewer an understanding of his/her condition as inhabitants of this layer.
With the collaboration of Melina Philippou, and the students of “Constructing Vision. The Eye, architecture, the world” at MIT: Benjamin Simon Albrech, Mary Patricia Lynch-Lloyd, Andre De Merindol Malan, Dijana Milenov, Dalia Munezon, Joshua Robert Paul Eager, Sean Phillips, and Dana Shaikh.
Watermelon Landscape
Installation
- Amman Design Week 2016 -
Jordan, 2016
In partnership with Hashim Sarkis
Through collaboration with watermelon vendors, the common practice of stacking watermelons is turned into a landscape that elevates the everyday into an aesthetic experience.
Rujm al Batteekh (“The Seven Hills of Batteekh”), Amman Design Week.
Every summer, Amman is filled with pyramids of watermelons (‘batteekh’ in Arabic). Every grocer becomes a pharaoh, and every grocery store becomes a Giza. No fruit lends itself to such architectural use as the watermelon. The pyramids have become so common in our everyday landscape that we forget how ingeniously they store and display melons. Much of the engineering of watermelons is about improving their structural qualities and their ability to stack and to withhold pressure, but the structural solution for their display was long ago settled on the pyramid and it has not changed much over time.
This landscape installation celebrated the nutritional, engineering, and aesthetic attributes of watermelons by expanding on possible forms of stacking. Composed of seven rujm-like hills, the project brings the watermelons home, closer to the landscape and history of Amman. It refers to what designers really do: take already developed solutions, improve on them, and elevate them into an aesthetic expression of their function.
Credits for images 8 to 11: Roland Halbe
OfficeUS
Research for the American Pavilion
- 14th Venice Architecture Biennale -
Venice, 2014
Curators: Eva Franch i Gilabert, Ana Miljacki, Ashley Schafer
“OfficeUS, the U.S. Pavilion for the 14th International Architecture Exhibition -- la Biennale di Venezia, responds to the theme of Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014 by focusing on the ways in which the space, structures, and protocols of the U.S. architectural office have participated in the construction of Modernity. OfficeUS is simultaneously a repository and a laboratory of ideas and criticism in the form of an alternative architecture office. OfficeUS reframes these histories through two interrelated constructs: The Office and The Repository.
The Repository documents 1000 projects from the last 100 years, designed by U.S. offices working abroad and 200 architecture offices that have been key in the making of this legacy. Collectively these projects tell multiple, imbricated stories of U.S. firms, typologies, and technologies, as well as a broader narrative of modernization and its global reach. The Office engages a selection of these projects by remaking them over the course of the Biennale. It functions as a laboratory staffed by a diverse cast of individuals including resident design fellows collaborating with outpost offices and an ever-changing cast of expert critic-consultants. Together, these two halves of OfficeUS create both a historical record of the U.S. contribution to global architectural thought, and a petri dish in which the legacy of that contribution can be evaluated today.” – OfficeUS
My contribution consisted in scripting and designing all the maps, diagrams and animations that accompanied the OfficeUS research and books published. I worked in close collaboration with Pentagram, who would review and adjust visually the material I produced to fit the overall visual language of the project.
Tomorrow Anew
Campaign + Book
– US$ 30,000 raised
– Book published
– 200 participants
2020 - 2022
Team: Gabriel Kozlowski, Luisa Schettino, Monica Vieira Eisenberg, Eduarda Volschan
200 participants I 22 countries I 8 interviews I 10 photographers I 4 NGOs I 2020-202
Amidst the Covid-19 crisis, a wide range of people from multiple backgrounds, genders, races, ethnicities, and nationalities were invited to reflect on our common future. Responding to the question "What will be different tomorrow?", professionals from the arts, architecture, literature, journalism, cinema, sociology, psychology, health, economics, law, politics, climate activism, and much more shared their thoughts on the post-pandemic future. Some reflected on the future they deemed necessary, others on the future they wanted, and still others on the future they thought inevitable. Their responses became this book.
Through reflections, memories, dreams, conversations, and photographs, the book portrays thoughts compiled between 2020 and 2022, thus constructing a panorama of the ways we dealt with the crisis. An artifact of a particular moment in human history, Tomorrow Anew is a memory; both tales of what we imagined and reassessments of what could have been different.
Tomorrow Anew is an initiative to inspire a collective contemplation of our future while providing aid to those affected by the pandemic and the economic crisis. Through partnerships with four stellar NGOs that were actively responding to the COVID-19 crisis, we built a collective fundraising campaign to counter the most harmful effects of the pandemic, especially those concerning the indigenous people of Brazil. Now with the book, we are inaugurating a new phase of the project through which all the author profits from the sales will be directed to the indigenous people of Xingu, via the Associação Terra Indígena do Xingu (ATIX).
Collective ENTRE
Research Group
- 3 Books Published -
- Exhibited at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale -
- Exhibited at the X São Paulo Architecture Biennale -
- Awarded in the Program of Cultural Sponsorship from Council of Architecture and Urbanism of Rio de Janeiro -
- Successful crowdfunding campaign -
Rio de Janeiro, 2009 - present
Leadership: Gabriel Kozlowski, Ana Altberg and Mariana Meneguetti
For complete team list check website
The Entre collective reflects on the interdisciplinary space of architecture based on its multiple relationships, whether with anthropology, art, philosophy, among others, turning the margins of knowledge into a space of encounter, a condition of being together.
Started in 2006, the group today forms an independent research body with over 60 interviews and 4 published books, highlighting "8 Reactions for Afterwards" - an investigation into the suspension of time in urban transformations in Rio de Janeiro - and "Tomorrow ANew" - a collective reflection on the post-pandemic future. This production has been exhibited in national and international shows - including the Venice Architecture Biennale and the São Paulo Architecture Biennale - as well as in exhibitions and events in Brazil, the United States, Italy, England, Lebanon, and Peru.
The interview is understood as a living space through which various forms of dialogue can be pursued and inquiries constructed.
Sometimes representing conversations between two people, sometimes discussions among many. They can be intimate dialogues, other times public events. They can be punctual exchanges, reflecting a unique moment, or extended over time, like a conversation that didn't want to end. Preference is given to presence, but they also serve to experiment with other media, such as email, podcasts, and video. They tend to be planned, but it is not strange for them to occur spontaneously and improvisationally. There are projects where interviewees receive a map of questions in advance, while in others, this map is discovered during the conversation. The common point is the transition between orality and writing. The text is an invitation to a more prolonged, conscious, and critical engagement; a resistance to the ways information is currently consumed.
We make a point not only for the conversations to be read but also to be made available for free. Thus, regardless of whether they exist in books or commercially available compilations, they can all be downloaded free of charge on the website.
If you want to contribute to research and interviews, the space is always open and in continuous recreation.
POLES is a studio for Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Boston, US.
Foundations
The name is an acronym for Political Ecology of Space.
Our work’s foundations lie in the intersection between politics, ecology and space, as a way to problematize the shifting notions of “nature,” “urbanization” and “the environment” in relation to the socio-economic processes that structure them.
The word POLES, simultaneously, refers to opposite points on a surface, or of an argument, which allows us to see Architecture as a practice to tension or bridge disparate forces or opposing conditions. Less intentionally perhaps, POLES are also structural elements, bringing back the other more conceptual meaning to our disciplinary home.
In Brazilian Portuguese, or more precisely in Rio de Janeiro, where we come from, the word POLES is naturally pronounced as POLIS, the birthplace of the city and democracy: a subtle connection and homage that we feel fortunate to have embedded in our name.
Urbanization
POLES’s interest does not lie solely in cities, or metropolises, or the countryside. In fact, we align our practice with views that understand the limitations of such concepts when discussing our current living conditions. We prefer to address urbanization in its broader sense.
Urbanization is not only measured by the development and growth of cities, but also by the dissemination of urbanization values to society. It is understood as a spatially-continuous process of the subordination of the agrarian to the urban, or, better yet, the natural to the urban. The term stands for the spatial imprints of society in any environment. It not only refers to the physical built form, but also concerns the different ways in which modernization processes are reflected onto space, including the territorializing forces that reconfigure locations from afar; the commodification of land and its natural resources; and the networks of communication and the transient patterns of occupation that cross these locations.
Within the framework of urbanization, our studio sets itself to articulate a more precise understanding around the notion of urbanization of nature. This implies a break with the distinctions between the inside and the outside of the urban towards a more interconnected relation between the socio-spatial processes of transforming environments for the use of humans, regardless if they take place in cities, in the hinterlands, or elsewhere. It aligns with ideas that, under capitalism, nature is reframed as an economic asset and transformed, simplified and put to work for social and cultural purposes in order to sustain urbanization. The urbanization of nature, as a concept, can be further explored as a form of metabolism whereby politico-economic projects become inseparable from the material constituencies of the built environment they are prone to modify. This way, it is increasingly hard to maintain the binary urban–natural, as the two are no longer distinct entities but complementary instances within a broader socio-spatial reproduction process. As David Harvey had already suggested:
“[A]ll ecological projects (and arguments) are simultaneously political-economic projects (and arguments) and vice versa. Ecological arguments are never socially neutral any more than socio-political arguments are ecologically neutral. Looking more closely at the way ecology and politics interrelate, then becomes imperative if we are to get a better handle on how to approach environmental / ecological questions.” (David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 1996)
The question is then, on the one hand, to understand how nature is socially mobilized, commodified and forced into a process of transformation with the purpose to structure and enable urbanization. And on the other, how urbanization in itself creates specific modes of ingraining socio-economic orders (capitalism, for example) in time and space that modifies the material conditions of nature. These two sides of the relation between urbanization and ecology become for us ways to inquire into our current modes of inhabiting space, as well as to articulate where these practices are taking us.
Political Ecology
The relations just described lead us to political ecology as an arena of practice. Political ecology can be seen as a way to re-center the political question within the environmental and spatial discourses. Thus, the political within political ecology orients actions, environmental or otherwise, toward a program of social justice and emancipation where nature and culture are considered the two sides of the same coin, rather than detached entities in a hierarchical relation. It is the means through which to recognize the conflicting nature of socio-political positions vis-à-vis ecology and the ways we occupy space.
In this sense, political ecology draws from poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and feminist geography, bringing back the political question within environmental discourses. The engagement with socio-ecologic questions is put in practice to dismantle the economism of environmental management and erect in its place a dialectic relation of co-production between nature and capital. It allows one to confront the apolitical nature of insular environmentalism that fails to integrate questions of economy systems, power structures, political conflicts, social struggles, labor reproduction, and more, on their analytical frameworks.
Political ecology, within our practice, equally seeks alternatives to the overreliance on the notion of “adaptation” insofar it represents a technological determinism and a managerial solution as a way guarantee the maintenance of hegemonic systems as societies adapted to ecological crises. In such a view, the degree of social and economic resilience would be directly proportional to the capacity of the prevailing systems to maintain in place their basic functioning and structures after a crisis. This means that “adaptation” to human-induced environmental problems would be a way to preserve the very structures that led these problems to occur in the first place, without the need to change them: adaptation as a path to continue creating more of the same. At POLES we try to break free from this thought pattern. We need to devise new solutions beyond adaptation.
In the end, design matters to the extent it is political and have real impact in the world. This is a positioning that allows us to not lose sight of the interrelation between our actions—regardless the scale—and the larger ecosystems they are inserted in. It opens a path to place the social, environmental and spatial struggles pertaining to specific locations under intervention critically within the broader umbrella of global systems, such as the evolution of global political economies and geopolitical disputes over natural resources, as well as the flows of people and capital. Above all, it allows us to engage with the multi-scalar processes of urbanization, both locally and globally, in their dialogue with nature. Now, let’s see how much we can contribute!
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“We have no choice: politics does not fall neatly on one side of a divide and nature on the other. From the time the term “politics” was invented, every type of politics has been defined by its relation to nature, whose every feature, property, and function depends on the polemical will to limit, reform, establish, short-circuit, or enlighten public life. As a result, we cannot choose whether to engage in political ecology or not; but we can choose whether to engage in it surreptitiously, by distinguishing between questions of nature and questions of politics, or explicitly, by treating those two sets of questions as a single issue that arises for all collectives.”
To the famous question “What Is to Be Done?” there is only one answer: “Political ecology!”
— Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature.
Gabriel Kozlowski, MSc MIT
Principal
Gabriel Kozlowski, MSc MIT
Principal
Gabriel Kozlowski is a Brazilian architect and curator. In 2021 he was assistant curator for How Will We Live Together?, the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Past curated exhibitions include Walls of Air (the Brazilian Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale) and Housing+ (the 3rd Biennial Exhibit of the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism).
Gabriel’s recent books are The World as an Architectural Project (MIT Press, 2020); 8 Reactions for Afterwards (RioBooks, 2019); and Walls of Air: Brazilian Pavilion 2018 (Bienal de São Paulo, 2018). At MIT, Gabriel held teaching and research positions at the School of Architecture and Planning; the Center for Advanced Urbanism; and the SENSEable City Lab. He is currently pursuing his PhD at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is principal at architectural firm POLES – Political Ecology of Space.
Miguel Darcy, MArch II Yale
Partner
Miguel Darcy, MArch II Yale
Partner
Miguel Darcy Brazilian architect and and 3D artist.
He graduated with a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from PUC-Rio and obtained his Master’s degree from the Yale School of Architecture, where he was twice awarded the Chair Merit Scholarship.
Miguel was an Associate Researcher for the Brazilian Pavilion at the 16th Venice Biennale with the exhibition Walls of Air in 2018 and a Teaching Fellow for the Master’s program in Architecture at Yale in 2020.
Miguel has worked for the Brazilian Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, OMA New York, Mecanoo, G.RUA Arquitetos and Campo AUD, and is currently a partner at the architectural firm POLES – Political Ecology of Space.
Camilla Rocha, BArch PUC - Rio
Architect
Camilla Rocha, BArch PUC - Rio
Architect
Camilla Rocha is an architect from Rio de Janeiro with a Professional Degree from PUC-Rio. Her B.Arch thesis research proposed an anchor infrastructure that envisions a new sustainable and resilient urban pattern for the Amazon Delta region and was awarded at the 39th Prize Arquiteto do Amanhã (IAB RJ). Camilla was a member of the LabAH and ACNUR-ONU teams and organized the Ser Urbano 2020 event.
She has previously worked for the architecture offices EMAU at PUC-Rio, CITÉ Arquitetura, and Sérgio Conde Caldas Arquitetura.
Thiago Engers, BArch Uniritter
Architect
Thiago Engers, BArch Uniritter
Architect
Thiago Engers is an architect from Porto Alegre with an architectural degree from Centro Universitário Ritter dos Reis and an MBA degree from IMED / Responsive Cities Institute, focusing on urbanism and technology. As one of the founders of ELA - Escola Livre de Arquitetura, he has been in contact with numerous architectural practices in Latin America and has developed educational projects related to urbanism and technology at the Responsive Cities Institute.
His MBA final project explores possibilities for improving the waste management system through the application of urban data science and composting techniques.
Carina Lima, BArch PUC - Rio
Architect
Carina Lima, BArch PUC - Rio
Architect
Carina Lima is an architect from Rio de Janeiro who graduated from PUC-Rio with a scholarship for academic performance. Throughout her academic career, she explored interdisciplinary projects at both the architectural and urban scales, such as the development of the socio-environmental enterprise FavelaInteligente (IG, PUC-Rio), which resulted in the exhibition "Habitar o Mapa" (MHC-Rio), as well as the exhibition "Arquitetura Humanitária" (IAB-RJ).
Her B.Arch thesis project, "Econecrópole: Regeneration of the Infrastructural Landscape of São João Batista Cemetery," received an honorable mention in the national competition of the Brazilian Association of Landscape Architects (ABAP) and was published on ArchDaily as part of the international competition for best graduation projects. She has previously worked for EMAU (PUC-Rio) and CITÉ Arquitetura.
Vinicius Aleixo, BArch UFF
Architect
Vinicius Aleixo, BArch UFF
Architect
Vinicius Aleixo is an architect from Rio de Janeiro with a Professional Degree from UFF.
Over his academic life, he has participated in research and academic tutoring projects in the areas of architectural design, environmental design and urbanism.
His B.Arch Thesis is a product of his last years of graduation with a main focus in environmental and architectural design, where he proposed an experiment following the design methods from Peter Zumthor and RCR Arquitectes, in order to establish a way of thinking and create a project rooted in the dialogue between architecture and its surroundings.
Vinicius has previously worked at OPY Soluções Urbanas, where he participated in the winning team for the concession and revitalization of the Jardim de Alah Park in Rio de Janeiro.
Isadora Martins, BArch Carnegie Mellon
Architect
Isadora Martins, BArch Carnegie Mellon
Architect
Isadora Martins is an architect from Rio de Janeiro with a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University. She is interested in exploring the dynamic relationship between architectural practice and research and is actively pursuing licensure in California.
Isadora has developed significant expertise in commercial, high-end residential, and mixed-use development projects both in Brazil and internationally while working at Bernardes Arquitetura, KPF New York, WRNS Studio and Standard Architecture in Los Angeles.
Ricardo Bayão, BArch PUC - Rio
Architect
Ricardo Bayão, BArch PUC - Rio
Architect
Ricardo Bayão is an architect from Rio de Janeiro who graduated from PUC-Rio. During his studies, he developed skills in both small and large-scale architectural projects. In 2020, he was a third-place finalist in "PUCHack 2020 - PUC Against Covid-19." His B.Arch thesis project, The Urban Liminality, proposes the study of the phenomenon of liminal spaces (places that are located "inside and outside of time" within a given urban fabric) applied to a case study of the Rio de Janeiro Sambadrome. This resulted in the development of a platform that explores the relationships and intersections between the city’s space and memory.
He has previously worked for Cerne Engenharia, EMAU (PUC-Rio), and Estúdio Figueira Arquitetura.
Enzo Barboza, BArch - UFRJ
Intern
Enzo Barboza, BArch - UFRJ
Intern
Currently a student of architecture and urbanism at FAU-UFRJ, he was actively involved with the Floresta Cidade collective for three years. This group focuses on teaching, research, and outreach, aiming to challenge the dominant narratives of architecture and urban development by engaging with Amerindian and Afrodiasporic counter-narratives. During his studies, he attended an exchange program for one semester at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is now working on his B.Arch Thesis, titled Cidade-rio, which explores alternative approaches to resilience and climate adaptation for the long term future of 21st-century Rio de Janeiro, drawing inspiration from the city’s waterways memory and advocating for a sensitive integration of its rivers with its urban streets.
Oscar Darcy,
HR & Emotional Support
Oscar Darcy,
HR & Emotional Support
Oscar Darcy is responsible for Human Resources and Emotional Support at the firm.
Oscar is self-taught, having developed his interpersonal and emotional support skills through daily interaction with the team. With a career dedicated to well-being and fostering a collaborative environment, Oscar stands out for his sensitivity in welcoming both the team and visitors. His talent for recognizing emotions and offering support makes him an essential part of the firm’s day-to-day operations.
A constant presence in meetings and advocate for strategic breaks, Oscar is the balancing force that promotes harmony and strengthens team bonds.
Former Collaborators
+ more
Eduarda Volschan
Pedro Brito
Isabella Simões
Barbara Graeff
Ana Luisa Liesegang
Carlos Eboli
Henrique Neves
Iara Carneiro
Julia Frenk
Matheus Burity
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