Interview about Out Of Sight Sustainable Social Building, winner of the A' Sustainable Products, Projects and Green Design Award 2021
The aim of this project is geared towards the local residents of Friars Island, in Brazil, paying attention to their needs and considering the bucolic environment and lack of public resources, in order to ensure basic services to the citizens. With the support of local political movements, it is proposed the insertion of forty two containers to attend two local necessities: a dance school, which used to operate in adjacent spaces to the neighboring church, and three emergency social housings, keeping in mind the need for a quick and accessible construction inserted on the location.
View detailed images, specifications, and award details on A' Design Award & Competition website.
View Design DetailsThe dual-purpose concept emerged from a moment of contradiction observed on Friars Island. On one hand, families were facing housing precarity due to climate events and infrastructure fragility. On the other, the local dance school was one of the few remaining collective institutions actively transmitting culture, discipline, and belonging across generations. Rather than prioritizing one need over the other, the project reframed both as interdependent. Emergency housing without social infrastructure often becomes isolating and stigmatizing, while cultural spaces without housing security risk disappearing entirely. By integrating both programs, the building creates daily overlap between stability and expression, ensuring that emergency conditions do not suspend cultural life. This approach was informed by community conversations, informal site observations, and the understanding that resilience on the island is as much cultural and social as it is physical.
The decision to use shipping containers was driven by a combination of logistical realism and architectural intent. Friars Island has limited access, constrained construction windows, and high vulnerability to material delays. Containers offered a globally standardized system that could be transported, stacked, and assembled quickly with predictable performance. Beyond pragmatics, their industrial origin allowed the project to deliberately contrast fragility and strength. The containers act as a protective shell for vulnerable populations, while their modular repetition establishes order and clarity. The choice was also ethical: using existing containers reduced material extraction and embodied carbon while enabling a level of structural efficiency that traditional construction methods on the island could not match within the same timeframe or budget.
Preserving the bucolic environment of Friars Island required resisting the temptation to overbuild or aestheticize the landscape. The project responds by concentrating volume rather than dispersing it, maintaining large portions of open ground and existing vegetation untouched. The linear configuration reduces fragmentation of the site and allows natural drainage, wind paths, and views to remain intact. Height and massing were carefully calibrated to sit below dominant natural and historical landmarks. Rather than mimicking rural forms, the building adopts a restrained, infrastructural presence that avoids romanticization while remaining respectful. This approach ensures that the island’s character is not diluted by development but supported by discreet, essential architecture.
Thermal insulation was approached as a long-term social investment rather than a technical add-on. For emergency housing, thermal stability directly affects health, dignity, and recovery. For the dance school, it impacts physical performance, injury prevention, and acoustic quality. Different insulation strategies were layered to respond to each program, combining passive ventilation, thermal mass optimization, and envelope performance. The goal was to reduce reliance on mechanical systems, knowing that maintenance resources on the island are limited. This balance between sustainability and practicality ensures the building remains functional under fluctuating climatic conditions while minimizing operational costs and environmental impact over its full life cycle.
Achieving rapid deployment without compromising design integrity required treating time as a design parameter from the outset. The six-month conception phase was highly disciplined, focusing on decisive structural logic, repeatable details, and early coordination with engineers and suppliers. The four-month execution phase relied on parallel processes: while foundations and site preparation occurred, containers were modified off-site. This overlap eliminated downtime. Equally critical was resisting late-stage formal experimentation. Every design choice was tested against speed, clarity, and necessity. The result was not a rushed project, but a precise one, where efficiency became an architectural value rather than a constraint.
The alignment with the 18th-century church was not symbolic but spatially strategic. The church has long structured collective life on the island, acting as an orienting element rather than merely a religious one. By positioning the building parallel to it, the project reinforces an existing spatial hierarchy and respects inherited patterns of movement and gathering. This decision avoids visual competition and instead establishes a dialogue between permanence and adaptability. The new building acknowledges history without imitation, allowing contemporary social needs to be addressed while reinforcing a sense of continuity and respect for local heritage.
The Silver A' Design Award elevates the visibility of social and emergency architecture within a field often dominated by iconic or commercial projects. In Brazil, this recognition helps legitimize fast, modular, and community-centered approaches as serious architectural work. It encourages municipalities, NGOs, and designers to consider replicable systems that prioritize dignity, speed, and sustainability. More importantly, it shifts the narrative from architecture as image-making to architecture as civic infrastructure. The award strengthens the argument that innovation can emerge from constraint and that social impact and design excellence are not mutually exclusive.
Mitigating gentrification was addressed through programmatic commitment rather than stylistic choices. The building does not introduce external commercial uses or aesthetic signals associated with speculative development. Its functions are explicitly tied to local residents, ensuring daily use by families already rooted on the island. The dance school anchors cultural continuity, while the housing component guarantees physical permanence. This combination reinforces the right to stay rather than the pressure to transform. By prioritizing use-value over exchange-value, the project supports ancestral connections and resists the gradual displacement often triggered by well-intentioned but misaligned development.
Designing the dance school required understanding movement as both spatial and cultural practice. Structural spans were designed to allow uninterrupted choreography, while floor systems were reinforced to accommodate repetitive impact. Natural light was prioritized to reduce reliance on artificial lighting and to support circadian rhythms. Acoustics were carefully controlled to balance music clarity and sound containment. Circulation spaces were intentionally generous, functioning as informal learning and social areas. These elements ensure the dance school operates not only as a training facility but as a cultural commons that supports education, identity, and collective expression.
The modular container system was conceived as an open framework rather than a fixed solution. Units can be added, removed, or reconfigured with minimal disruption, allowing the building to respond to demographic shifts, future emergencies, or programmatic changes. This adaptability is critical in contexts of uncertainty, where long-term needs cannot be fully predicted. The structural logic supports horizontal and vertical expansion, while service cores are positioned to accommodate growth. In this sense, the project is less a finished object and more an evolving infrastructure, capable of adapting alongside the community it serves.
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