Renovation in Prudência Building
It is inevitable the search to build continuities when it comes to a reform in a Heritage of Modern Architecture of the City of São Paulo.
We only had two months left to renovate the apartment in the Prudence Building, designed by São Paulo architect Rino Levi in the 1940s. The apartment had undergone some renovations and now it was necessary to open a room to the living room and build three bathrooms where before there were only one.
One of the features of the original design is the compartmentalization of functions in generously scaled environments. Over time the ways of living change and, therefore, many of the renovations that this and other apartments have gone through have been to open these environments due to the reduction of functions.
The demand to open one of the bedrooms to the living room, follows this sense of transformation and seemed timely for us to expand the ventilation and natural light to the corridor that gives access to the bedrooms and the kitchen. But we realize that when opening environments of generous scale we have to be careful that generosity does not get out of control and the human scale escapes.
Informed by the yellow locks on the facade of the building, we decided to continue them inside the apartment in order to recompose the new environments. It is through this insertion of a linear architectural element that calibrates the scale, access, intimacy and functions of the built environments that the renovation project is carried out.
