1500 Babilônia Art Gallery

Alex found the ruins of an unfinished one pavement house on the hill and decided to build there his headquarters in Rio. The house had a downstairs room filled with dirt over a rock, and a second floor, which would likely be located the rooms of the house, with walls built in frank decay by half.

When we visited the place, since the prospect of deploying the Gallery 1500 and his office in there. I had the perception that the project should make use of the existing building, its solid structures, your slab and the existing materials. Build on top of a high hill, with no access besides the stairs and narrow allays is no easy task, so the construction technique had to be the same used by the community and the form, the space and process could bring some difference. Thus was born the core concept of the Project; interpretation of the condition for its upcicling.

After releasing the ground for support areas, we dismantled the existing walls of the second floor to conform the space to the art gallery and, starting from an existing step, we chose to embrace the volume with the circulation to access the third floor and its roof. Over the new slab ceiling of the gallery, made with inverted concrete beams, built the deck of the terrace and the volume that protrudes into the landscape and into the woods, framing them with their windows.

As a way to visually connect the floors, opened up a gap between the gallery and the office, treat the closure of the entire circulation with maçaranduba wood, commonly used as support anchors for concrete slabs and painted the whole set with light gray ink.

Text published on local magazine AU, by Roberto Boettger 

From a corner at Leme, wealthy neighborhood of Rio’s shore, climbed on the back of a motorcycle taxi- common public transport in such áreas- which speeds up the slope toward the community of Morro da Babylon. Quickly the streets gets narrow, the buildings become more organic, and the neighborhood is densified beside the forest uphill. The destination is the Gallery in 1500, authored by architects Pedro Évora and Pedro Rivera, Office Rua (Street ) Architects. A project exploring its pioneering – the first art gallery erected in a slum – to make up the function works to expose customers
and at the same time, talk with an immediate urban condition of the city.

The founder, Alex Bueno de Moraes, has strong ties to the community. The best friend of her mother was a Brazilian Lourdes de Oliveira, who played at Mira Black Orpheus (1959), directed by Marcel Camus production. The film, which took the hill of Babylon as a backdrop, always populated the memory of Alex. Then, when I wanted to transfer its 1500 Gallery, founded in 2010 in Chelsea, Manhattan, to focus on the Brazilian market for contemporary photography, no more desired place. On the issue of accessibility to the business, Alex explains that in New York, learned that 70% of sales were made at fairs and 20% online.

The implementation was guided by inherited features of the context. Have had on the lot, the penultimate of the hill, a ruin of two floors broken geometry. After cleaning and finding the land, has been validated the robustness of the foundation stone. The party was to maintain the structure of reinforced concrete and tearing down the walls of siding and masonry. “The challenge,” says Pedro Évora, “was to create an interesting composition for interpreting the ways suggested by the data elements.” The new pillars and beams continued the existing system of concrete in situ. The bricks were reused for the ruin walls. And slabs panel type were modulated to reticular geometry with a triangular shape.

If you bet on a combination of experts brought in from outside the community, such as calculating, the master works with labor and local technology. “We had to design everything with one identical to the slum constructive vocabulary,” says Peter, referring to the executive possibilities available. The greatest difficulty, however, “was climbing the hill with the materials and the time it took.” The small block of three floors, filled by a program of 123 m² – gallery exhibition, office and service dependencies – took two years to build.

Access to iconic environments is handled by external circulation – preexisting part, elongated part to rid habitable areas such function. Like a snake curls up on the block from top to bottom, this set of stairs and corridors act as articulating element. The first stop is the ground, where they deposit, kitchen and toilet, occupying an area of 30 m² covered in marble and ventilated by Cobogó. This movement, with the balance of 1,2 m is supported on beams that have their profiles underscores the facade. Vertical louvers maçaranduba fixed in the slab as a “3”leg”, eliminate the need for guardrails. The atmospheric path gains wealth by changing permeability of natural and targeted elements. It is also envisaged that this staircase is mirrored in the slab above, creating dual circulation linking the gallery coverage.

On the first floor we did the exhibition gallery. The neutrality attributed to shades of burnt cement floors, gray walls and ceiling in apparent slab give the environment sobriety contrasts with the bustle of the outside lanes: quality welcome which demand attention be directed. The luminaires on tape, that give a diffuse light by the environment, align the sides of the walls and reinforce the irregular geometry of the space of 43 m². In the background, a hole in the ceiling, which in turn is smooth by the use of inverted beams, allows the entry of natural light and connects with the volume ceiling height of 3.30 m above the floor in the office.

The second floor is reserved for desktops. A generous terrace-viewpoint of 27 m², coated ipe deck houses a multipurpose space. In another portion of the pavement,  settlements -If a box of 3.70 mx 8.70 mx 3.25 m with the axis directed to the Atlantic, where three or four people make their offices. The gaps of the extremities, detailed with pivoting glass and mahogany frames, capturing the most notable attribute of the land: the view. Will see later by the green mantle of the native forest. The front will, by moving between barrels and poles with extended clothes, we see from the Forte
Copacabana to Leme.

Urban planning, design encaixa- -If the current phenomenon of integration that occurs in communities of South Zone of Rio de Janeiro. Since 2008, security has been increased due to the installation of Pacifying Police Units (UPP). Increasingly rise slums in hostels, night clubs and meeting places. There is a general change in mentality in which the slum is no longer seen as a problem and begins to be considered livable space and more affordable. In political circles, there is talk about the difficulty of applying the law to this case. The most striking, however, has been the discovery of public spaces with a difficult vitality to be found elsewhere in the city.

Gallery 1500 opens the way for a sustainable way to enable an enterprise in the slum without impairing its function or decontextualise up. By engaging in local operations, the project won both tectonic and conceptually. On the one hand, irregular paging structural and geometric spaces surprises generate high perceptual residual value. On the other, the business benefits from the almost hedonistic account of their way of exhibiting art. Perhaps the greatest merit of the filmmakers, however, has been the willingness to mediate seemingly contradictory dynamics.