COPACABANA ROOFTOP
Brasil,2025
In 2024, we were commissioned for the retrofit of a 400m2 penthouse in Copacabana, located a few meters from Avenida Atlântica in Rio de Janeiro. The building was built 80 years ago and the original project enjoyed an architectural dignity that successive renovations, with tumor-like growths of rooms, had ruined. The current adulterated state offered an obsolete distribution of spaces for our times and for the client's needs.
We like to think that intervening in a building of a neighborhood with the history of Copacabana is to design with Time and with the emotional density of the place. It is to summon past inhabitants to reformulate and preserve the vestiges of an era whose spirit one wishes to evoke—a bit like in that Woody Allen movie where the protagonists travel in time from the present to the Belle Epoque years of Paris where they meet writers and musicians like Hemingway, Picasso, Scott Fitzgerald ,Josephine Baker….
With that intention, we demolished an important part of the existing divisions to open diaphanous spaces to the original exterior corridor. We returned to the successful original distribution of the building , where social spaces looked out onto a covered corridor, now transformed into an Italian loggia overlooking the beautiful views of Copacabana.
The Details:
Floors: Original tropical wood pieces are relocated as wall cladding, placed vertically like a pictorial canvas of former inhabitants footprints.
Kitchen: The old tiles, difficult to remove intact, are repurposed as a new cladding made with broken pieces from the demolition, in the style of trencadis.
Structure: A new vertical grid created by a colonnade dialogues with the modernist deco architecture, allowing for automated solar control and climate regulation .A narrow interior staircase is enlarged to activate a new social space on the roof. The original wooden constructions were maintained and renovated in a deco style.
Together with the references of naval circular windows and the famous Burle Marx pavement of Copa, they crown the urban skyline with our poetic intention to invoke the ghosts of time and revive the golden spirit of the neighborhood—from the 1930s Deco era to the glorious Bossa Nova years of the 50s—filling our apartment with that inner life.
With that intention, we demolished an important part of the existing divisions to open diaphanous spaces to the original exterior corridor. We returned to the successful original distribution of the building , where social spaces looked out onto a covered corridor, now transformed into an Italian loggia overlooking the beautiful views of Copacabana.
