Costa do Ipê base project

We finally finished the intermediary part of the Costa do Ipê project, which is used to submit the project to authorities for approval, and will also be used by other designers involved in the project to do their work. All the work was done by a 3-person team (myself, Maíra and our friend Dani, and I am pleased to say a good 60% of it was done on linux platforms. The software used (surely some will ask ) was mainly Blender, FreeCAD and Draftsight.

We are very happy with the result, it represented a lot of work, and is going very much in the direction we wished, thanks principally to the excellent relationship and mutual understanding we have with the owners and masterminds of the project, Sílvia and Marc. The project itself is getting more and more stripped down to its bare function of "life support", which reduces the overall cost (no expensive material, no unnecessary elements) and widens the possibilities of adaptation and evolution (all the vegetation design and the "shading plan" has been left for posterior phases and those are now totally independent of the building structure).

All the project is thought as a low-impact intervention, at economical, social, environmental and urban levels. It relies a lot on pedestrian and public transport transit, offers a large public space, has reduced physical footprint on the terrain, is planned to have a very low energy consumption, reuse most of its water, and to evolve and adapt itself to whatever the socioeconomic situation will require in the next decades... But best of all, and this was thought right from the start by Sílvia and Marc, it is a public space first, before being a shopping mall... There is little doubt that it will be quite successful given the current local socioeconomic situation, but the priorities are in the inverse order as you usually see in similar projects, and it is really thrilling to see happening what might be a completely new way to think and do such projects...

3D images and a video of the projects are available, as well as more information about the design itself.