5 Featured Architects from Brazil

# 5 Featured Architects from Brazil *By TropMod Editorial* Brazilian architecture possesses a depth of talent that extends far beyond the household names. The five practitioners profiled here represent distinct positions within the contemporary field: some are internationally established, others are rising voices whose work deserves a wider audience. What unites them is a shared commitment to an architecture rooted in the Brazilian condition — its climate, its materials, its social complexity — and a conviction that modernism, far from being a historical period, remains a vital, evolving language. --- ## Marcio Kogan — Studio MK27, São Paulo Marcio Kogan (b. 1952, São Paulo) trained at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at Mackenzie Presbyterian University, graduating in 1976. He founded his eponymous practice in 1978, later rebranding it as Studio MK27 at the turn of the century — a change that signalled the studio's maturation into a collaborative practice of some forty architects and designers, with Diana Radomysler as interior design director. Kogan's architecture is characterised by formal simplicity and an almost obsessive attention to detail and materiality. His language draws simultaneously from Brazilian modernist tradition — the extended horizontal planes, the blurring of interior and exterior — and from a broader cinematic sensibility. Kogan has spoken of his buildings in terms of screenplays: sequences of spaces that unfold through light, shadow, compression, and release. The comparison is not merely metaphorical; Kogan studied film before architecture, and the influence persists. His signature elements include extensive use of Brazilian hardwoods (*cumaru*, *ipe*, *freijó*), exposed concrete left with board-formed textures, and a distinctive system of timber brise-soleil that functions simultaneously as sun screen, privacy filter, and compositional device. The *muxarabi* screen — inherited from Brazil's Moorish-Portuguese colonial architecture — recurs throughout his work, reinterpreted at varying scales and densities. Three projects define his recent output. The **Canopy House** (2024, Guarujá) suspends a 785-square-metre weekend residence on slender pilotis above the Atlantic Forest floor, preserving the existing vegetation and creating the sensation of inhabiting the tree canopy. The **Azul House** (2020, Serra do Guararu) inverts the typical relationship between building and landscape: a monolithic concrete volume opens onto a lush internal courtyard, the architecture framing nature rather than competing with it. The **Jungle House** (2015, Paulista Coast) places a rigorous geometric pavilion within dense tropical vegetation, the contrast between architectural order and botanical exuberance heightening the qualities of both. Kogan's contribution to tropical modernism lies in his demonstration that rigour and sensuality are not opposites. His buildings are meticulously controlled yet never feel sterile; they are serious without being solemn. The 2024 Rizzoli monograph *The Architecture of Studio MK27* cements his position as the most internationally visible Brazilian architect of his generation. --- ## Arthur Casas — Studio Arthur Casas, São Paulo, New York, Lisbon Arthur Casas (b. 1961, São Paulo) graduated from Mackenzie Presbyterian University in 1983 and established Studio Arthur Casas in 1990. Today the practice operates from three cities across three continents, with a portfolio spanning residential, hospitality, commercial, and product design. Casas's output has been described as an ongoing conversation between Brazilian modernism's structural expressiveness and a more internationally inflected minimalism. Casas's design philosophy centres on what he terms "the horizon line" — the extension of interior space into the landscape through careful manipulation of level changes, transparency, and material continuity. His architecture gives primacy to the site: every project begins with an extended study of topography, vegetation, views, and solar orientation. The building is then developed as a frame for the landscape, rather than an object placed within it. His material palette favours natural stone, exposed concrete, timber, and extensive glazing. Where Kogan often wraps his buildings in timber screens, Casas is more likely to leave the structure exposed, using the mass of concrete and stone for thermal performance. The *mashrabiya* appears in his work as well — notably in the Angra House — but tends to be deployed as a singular dramatic gesture rather than an all-over skin. Notable projects include the **Angra House** (2024, Angra dos Reis), a coastal residence that combines massive stone walls with delicate timber *mashrabiyas* and cantilevered planes that appear to float above the rocky shoreline. The composition is simultaneously rooted and weightless. The **RS House** (2018, São Paulo) demonstrates his skill at urban density: a family home on a narrow lot that achieves spatial generosity through vertical organisation and the manipulation of sectional complexity. The **Casa HS** (2012, São Paulo interior) set an early benchmark for his weekend house typology: a low-slung pavilion wrapped in sliding timber panels that allow the entire volume to open or close in response to climate and occupation. Casas's contribution lies in his refusal to choose between the tectonic and the atmospheric. His buildings possess the structural legibility of the Paulista School while achieving the lightness and transparency more often associated with the Carioca tradition. This synthesis — structural honesty married to spatial fluidity — represents one of the most productive directions in contemporary Brazilian practice. --- ## Carla Juaçaba — Rio de Janeiro Carla Juaçaba (b. 1976, Rio de Janeiro) represents one of the most intellectually compelling voices of the post-Mendes da Rocha generation. Trained at the Universidade Santa Úrsula in Rio, Juaçaba established her independent practice in 2005 and has since built a body of work distinguished by its economy of means, its sensitivity to context, and its willingness to question architecture's conventional boundaries. Juaçaba's architecture is deliberately restrained. She works with modest budgets, simple materials, and a formal vocabulary stripped to essentials. Her buildings do not announce themselves; they settle into their sites with a quiet confidence that recalls Bo Bardi's "poor architecture" — not architecture of deprivation, but architecture that finds sufficiency in the minimum necessary. Her early work included the **Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale** (2018), commissioned for the Holy See Pavilion and titled "Vatican Chapels." Juaçaba designed a simple steel bench in a forest clearing — a gesture so minimal it verged on conceptual art — yet the installation generated precisely the contemplative atmosphere the commission required. It was a statement about the architect's scope: sometimes the most powerful intervention is the lightest. In Minas Gerais, Juaçaba has been developing a long-term project in a coffee-growing region where collectives resist extractive industrial agriculture. The project, documented by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in their 2025 film *With an Acre*, involves the construction of small pavilions and agricultural structures that support land regeneration efforts. This work extends architecture's remit into ecology and land stewardship, positioning the architect as a collaborator in broader systems of production and conservation. Her built work includes the **House in Santa Teresa** (Rio de Janeiro), a renovation that preserved the essential character of an existing structure while introducing precise contemporary interventions, and a series of private residences that demonstrate her ability to work across scales without losing the sense of intimate calibration that defines her practice. Juaçaba's contribution to tropical modernism is conceptual as much as practical. She reminds the discipline that modernism's progressive project was never only about formal innovation — it was about social and environmental responsibility. Her work suggests that the most urgent task for Brazilian architecture is not the production of more iconic objects but the cultivation of more intelligent relationships with land, climate, and community. --- ## Isay Weinfeld — São Paulo Isay Weinfeld (b. 1952, São Paulo) occupies a somewhat singular position in Brazilian architecture: a modernist by conviction whose work consistently achieves a warmth and material richness that eludes many of his contemporaries. Trained at FAU-USP during the intellectually charged years of the 1970s, Weinfeld absorbed the Paulista School's commitment to spatial generosity and structural clarity while developing a distinctive interest in texture, colour, and atmosphere. Weinfeld's architecture is difficult to categorise, which is precisely its strength. His buildings — predominantly residential and hospitality — deploy the full modernist vocabulary of pilotis, free plans, and horizontal windows, yet they never feel doctrinaire. His use of materials — brick, timber, stone, coloured render — introduces a chromatic and tactile dimension that connects his work to Brazilian vernacular traditions without lapsing into the picturesque. His most celebrated project is the **Fasano Hotel** (2003, São Paulo), a restrained brick facade on a quiet Jardins street that gives way to interiors of extraordinary warmth: dark wood panelling, leather upholstery, and precisely controlled lighting create an atmosphere of understated luxury. The building has become a reference for hospitality design across Latin America and beyond. The **Fasano Boa Vista** (2014, Porto Feliz) extends his architectural language to a rural setting. The hotel and its associated villas are organised as a series of low horizontal pavilions that sit lightly on the landscape, their facades alternating between solid planes of local brick and fully glazed openings that erase the boundary between interior and the rolling São Paulo countryside. Among his residential works, the **Casa Cubo** (2015, São Paulo) demonstrates his mastery of the urban house typology: a compact cubic volume containing generous, light-filled spaces organised around a central courtyard, the plan achieving privacy and openness simultaneously. Weinfeld's contribution is perhaps best understood as a civilising influence. In a context where modernist rigour can tip into severity, Weinfeld insists that architecture must give pleasure — that light, texture, and material sensation are not decorative afterthoughts but fundamental architectural concerns. His work argues, quietly but persuasively, that modernism's humanist promise remains viable. --- ## TETRO Arquitetura — Belo Horizonte TETRO Arquitetura, founded by Carlos Maia, Débora Mendes, and Igor Macedo, represents the vitality of the Belo Horizonte architectural scene, which has produced some of Brazil's most interesting work of the past decade. Operating from the capital of Minas Gerais, a state whose mountainous topography and colonial heritage distinguish it from the coastal urban centres, TETRO has developed an architectural language that responds to the specific conditions of its region while engaging the broader currents of contemporary practice. The firm's work is characterised by a tension between geometric rigour and contextual responsiveness. Their buildings tend to read as assemblages of distinct volumes — often rotated, shifted, or cantilevered relative to one another — that engage the topography through deliberate spatial relationships rather than through mimicry. The result is an architecture that acknowledges its artifice while remaining deeply attentive to site. The **Ponte House** (2024, Florianópolis) demonstrates their skill at negotiating dramatic sites. Located where crystal-clear waters meet a rugged mountainous backdrop, the house is organised as a sequence of pavilions linked by bridges and decks, the architecture mediating between water, rock, and vegetation. The project's name — "Ponte" means bridge — signals the practice's conceptual preoccupation with connection and transition. The **Tangram House** (2025, Lagoa Santa), situated on a gently sloping lakeside plot, deploys five distinct volumes arranged in a composition that recalls the Chinese puzzle from which it takes its name. Each volume contains a specific programme, and the spaces between them — courtyards, covered walkways, terraces — are as carefully composed as the built elements themselves. The house opens fully to the lake while maintaining a sheltered, introspective character on the landward side. The **House of Light** (2023, Nova Lima) applies the same principles to a steeply sloping site in the mountains above Belo Horizonte. A long, narrow volume cantilevers dramatically over the hillside, its fully glazed facade capturing panoramic views while deep overhangs provide the shade essential in the tropical highlands. TETRO's contribution lies in their demonstration that the modernist tradition remains capable of producing architecture of genuine originality without resorting to novelty for its own sake. Their work is recognisably within the Brazilian lineage — the exposed concrete, the extended cantilevers, the generous relationship with landscape — yet it feels entirely contemporary. They represent a generation for whom modernism is not a style to be replicated but a set of principles to be extended and reinterpreted. In this, they are among the most promising practitioners working in Brazil today.