Casa Oficina

Brasilian studio Pax-Arq conceived a special building in São Paulo where a private residence dialogues with its offices and technical workshops.

The workshop-house project conceived by Paula Sertório and Victor Paixão from Pax-Arq was designed to host a residence, a high-performance mechanical workshop and classrooms in a 260 sqm terrain, commissioned by Tecnomec and located in the Pinheiros neighborhood, São Paulo.

The programmatic activities were distributed in a specific way in order to balance funcional and burocratic issues. The result is a developement in three levels. The ground-floor hosts the mechanical workshop activities, revisions, repairs, part-washing and a dynamometer room for vehicle testing. The first floor is designed for the classrooms, the study rooms and the bathrooms, while the second floor is the residence area. All the activities are administered only by one person who breaks down his daily schedule along the different spaces, each one with particular features meant to interact as a whole.

The whole project is defined by a concrete inclined slab that gathers a major role among the whole composition as capable of offering diverse solutions. It embodies the visual limit between the public and private realms, while it shelters the upper domains from noise pollution and the mechanical equipment on the ground-floor. Simultaneously, it enhances natural ventilation and illumination for the workshop and classrooms, while facilitating rain water capturing for reuse. The relationship between the building and the city sees a composition that draws back voluntarily from the terrain’s limits and frees the urban corner favoring a place for gatherings and urban encounters along its surroundings.