Residential Building Casamirador Savassi / Gisele Borges Arquitetura
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Text description provided by the architects. Completed in 2021, the CASAMIRADOR Savassi residential building is located in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and features bold architecture that stands out in the local landscape. The building has 14 lofts and 24 studios and is spread over nine floors under construction and located on a narrow plot, with a width of 12.7 meters. The challenge of his volumetric mathematics, to respect distances, was one of the factors that influenced non-obvious decisions, resulting in an architecture with its own identity.
The interdependence between the structure of the building and the architectural project allowed for great creative freedom, culminating in the most prominent element: a second skin that ‘wears’ the building like a garment, giving it unique characteristics. The material used was aluminum, painted in an earthy reddish sepia tone that refers to the abundance in Minas Gerais of raw ore.
In order to obtain lightness and transparency, the aluminum sheets were given perforations in different sizes and were made in an asymmetrical, yet harmonious way. That process makes it possible to see through it from the inside, illuminating cityscapes through the skin. Looking in from the outside, however, it is not possible to see the interior, thus guaranteeing the resident’s privacy. This element also made it possible to explore a rich range of effects, from hiding smaller, functional windows to tearing the skin to expose the large spans. These windows are conceived as generous openings and allow the city to become an extension of the house, with plenty of light and ventilation. The concrete frames of the openings contrast with the predominant oxidized color.
The skin covering the building also provides thermal comfort for the units. Away from the masonry, it provides shade for the fences and good ventilation through a renewable air mattress. From that perspective, sustainability was decisive for a large part of the project’s choices. Due to the limited dimensions of the land and the minimum space on the roof for installing equipment or photovoltaic panels, it was necessary to find a solution that would avoid the ingress of heat, at the expense of an air conditioning project.
The pyramidal shape of the building, which is the result of staggering, also allowed to allocate technical spaces to the outside of the masonry, as well as to the inside of the skin, guaranteeing a clean and unadorned plastic.
Another highlight of the project is the challenge of placing the pyramid on the ground and touching the land lightly at one point. Influenced by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, a “V”-shaped pillar was created, which is widely used in his works.
Finally, to make the facades flat, the plates were bent on all four sides, increasing their rigidity. Although the plates were perforated randomly, the joints were aligned and the volume was harmonious, several investigations were performed until the final fixing model yielded an alignment of the plates and the center of each floor. The study optimized the secondary structure for fixing the slabs: there are only three horizontal profiles per floor, and the upper and lower profiles were also combined to fix the slabs of the adjacent floors.
The final plastic is the result of a marriage between cover plates, frames and structure. There are three elements that alternate on the facades with more or less relevance to the skin, resulting in a clean and unadorned plastic.