Firm： BIRI

Type： Residential › Apartment

STATUS： Built

YEAR： 2023

The housing complex Governador Juscelino Kubitschek, designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1951, it's composed of a commercial area on the ground floor and two large residential towers that stand out in the landscape of Belo Horizonte and have 1086 apartments. The JK building was listed by the deliberative council of cultural heritage of the municipality of Belo Horizonte in 2022.

Among the 13 different typologies of JK apartments, the project the project we worked on consisted of the intervention of the semi-duplex of block B, this typology was, in advance, developed by Niemeyer for the hotel Quitandinha in Petrópolis and later built in the capital of Minas Gerais.

Used since the 19th century, the organization of environments with alternating plans using the design technique of 'section planning' promotes the reduction of collective circulation, improvements in terms of privacy, thermal control and cross ventilation.

The renovation proposes an enhancement of the east facade of the apartment as a

balcony/garden while replacing a section of the natural wooden parquet floor with hydraulic tiles to allow for better care and management of the plants. For similar humidity-related reasons, we proposed replacing the kitchen floor.

The intervention was arranged next to the hydraulic plumbing and reinforces the horizontality of the space through the design of a piece of furniture that sometimes acts as a shelf, archive and office, sometimes as a cabinet, wet bench, oven, pantry and wine cellar (with unity in its materiality and proportions).

In order to integrate the existing rooms, we proposed to fenestrate the dividing wall of the stairs through an oval shape, finished in weathering steel.

On the upper half-level, we proposed a headboard/gallery in marine plywood and renovation of the existing joinery, as well as the act of exposing the existing concrete structure in contrast to the thickness and tones of the masonry. This decision was also taken at other times in the apartment, in order to highlight the exploration of the support infrastructure that we thought it would be good to leave them on display.