In order to explore new terrain and transcend the barriers of space, Triptyque Architecture checks in on a journey of spatial occupation with more than 20 carpet models developed in special materials, well-orchestrated designs and harmonious palettes of tones. In addition to the experience of RUGSTER Co., the entire background of our interior design team comes together with projects developed by the firm to unfold the creative process in models that fit like a glove in the places they inhabit.

Flying River

Inspired by the project for the Brazil pavilion at Expo Dubai 2020, the model represents the sinuous curves of Brazilian waters and mangroves in homage to the nature that gives life to the country.

Like the Pompidou Center or the Moma, the Casa de Arquitetura’s mission is to build an ambitious permanent collection in architecture, bringing together various items such as drawings, photographs, models, films, ceramics and documents. After the Colombia and Inhotim projects held at the Pompidou Center, the Arapiraca project also enters the permanent collection of Casa de Arquitetura.

This is a residential complex built on Arapiraca street in Brazil. The building is divided into 8 building blocks marrying the complex contours of a plot located at Vila Madalena in Sao Paulo. Each block has independent access and positioning to ensure the best view and optimization of natural ventilation. A 9th block shelters the elevators, the shafts and the stairs, it concentrates the exits of the metallic footbridges: place of circulation and socialization between the inhabitants.

For the exhibition, Triptyque Architecture carried out Entropical Modernism, a study based on the understanding that the same object, in different contexts, responds in different ways.

Based on this premise, the proposal questions why modernism was accepted differently in the tropical environment than in the northern hemisphere. The quartet of professionals researched the contradictions and similarities in the work of Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier and the way in which architecture interacts with nature in the tropicalist movement.

As a result, they designed an installation on common ground where nature is the agent and architecture the platform for developing a symbolic relationship between the built and the organic.

São Paulo, Brazil, 2018

Among the 37 models on display is a retrospective of Triptyque Architecture’s work since the 2000s, driven by research orientations and conscious technologies, innovations, contemporary urban demands and new ways of thinking about public and private spaces. The exhibition offers a memory to the present.

The idea arose in 2017 at the inauguration of Triptyque Architecture’s new office in the center of São Paulo, a powerful space for new ideas, images, people to unfold, an experience while we explored the lines of the historic building, signed by Oswald Bratke, from the balconies where we could see Copan, and right next door the traditional street of modernist architects, of avant-garde projects in cosmopolitan São Paulo.

Architecture today is experiencing a moment of intense transformation in design strategies brought about by the ease of new digital media, and entering that space where models of utopian and feasible works that have already been built or are in the process of being built coexist, was like a freer means of artistic production.

MIC BR
São Paulo, Brazil, 2018

Brazilian Pavilion – Biennale,
Venice, Italy, 2018.

Paris, France, 2018

How can the public administration of a metropolis raise funds and enhance the urban fabric by encouraging the private sector to innovate?

It was as an answer to this threefold question that Réinventer Paris was born, a competition promoted by the French capital’s city hall based on an ingenious public-private partnership model: the sale of underused municipal properties to entrepreneurs dedicated to projects with new agendas, from complex social arrangements to cutting-edge environmental experiments.

The 12 proposals presented in the competition by the Urbem/Triptyque consortium, a collective made up of architects from six countries – including Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Alejandro Aravena – which mobilized around 200 professionals in a year of intense work, are gathered in the Escola da Cidade gallery.

The consortium was awarded two second places (Andrade Moretin | Ordener and Joly&Loiret | Massena) and, in addition to the prizes, leaves behind provocations and proposals on possible strategies for producing a fairer and more sustainable city.

Colômbia

Centre Pompidou

Project: Fidalga 727
Photo: Fran Parente

KW Institute,
Berlin, Germany, 2011

Pavilion – FRAC Centre
Orleans, France, 2011.

New York, United States, 2011

Architecture for All or Architecture like us?

What if Architecture could incorporate behaviour intelligence of the bodies and the efficiency of living systems? A half living Creature mixed between the made and the born?

What if architecture could be Creature like?

Well it would surely have a few behaviours, it would probably interact to some extent with its surroundings and ecology. To be a Creature would not be easy. Imaginebeing unique, one of a kind, no friends.Learning from Frankenstein and its Creature we found that:

‘We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves…’

To be Creature like would imply exchanges with natural organisms. If our architectural Creatures would react to an environment like Sao Paulo surely theirs skins would have to learn not only to moisturize, but also to inflame and live with the pathologies of the city. From Skin to Pus is an architectural experimentation on skin inflammations, antiseptic process, urban cuts, fluid evacuation and void infill. It is made of raw, investigative and propositional material that as an open cut, let us see inside its organs. Maybe not an architecture for All, but certainly an architecture like us, moisturized and alive.

White Cube

The hut developed expresses the atelier’s wish to work on a project that, under the sign of primitive design, embraces the pure form’s premise. It is a piece that initially does not put on display a powerful cultural element, but dialogues directly to an element of vernacular English architecture — the thatched roof — where materials, forms and traditional structures are explored minutely in the set.

Finally, the straw utilized in the thatched roof manifests the organic spirit that is imparted on those who lay eyes on it. Bearing a resemblance to a hedgehog or a porcupine, the body is covered in straw and then trimmed to achieve the shape of the desired design-less cube. And it’s on it that drips, at a set time and frequency, a white liquid stored in two tanks affixed at the top of the creature.

Thus, as in changing of solid, liquid or gaseous states, the creature offers the transmutation of the thatched roof’s traditional aspect to the creature’s state of intervention, from the growth of the wood structure, the opening of its slot, the budding straw that serves as cover, and the slow flooding of the white liquid on its coat.

Curator: Abraham Thomas

V&A Museum

«Contemplating The Void»

In 2010, the Guggenheim Museum celebrated its 50th anniversary by opening its doors to artists and architects to respond to the Museum’s “eccentric, organic design”, and in particular to the glass rotunda, the Museum’s central space, for an exhibition entitled Contemplating the Void.

We responded to this invitation by creating gigantic, fantastical beings made of organic materials, which we christened Creatures. Breaking free from the confines of the museum, the creatures spread across the vast urban area of the North American metropolis, New York. They all intertwine in a vast array of membranes, becoming a single body that returns to the original building and occupies the edges of the void. As with the history of modern cities, these creatures take on different personalities and draw attention to neighboring sites, linking them with straight lines or curves. Observing the representativeness of these shapes and their connections reveals the organic nature of space and even the movements of human beings who live, work and/or move in the city. In any direction of the proposed model, the energy emanating returns to Guggenheim’s void. Human beings are the active subjects of this experiment, and every creature spread across the model has the force at its core. The intense irradiation then turns into a big party where music, art and conversation end, in the best way, with the meaning of all that energy.

In a utopia of tropicalization within a contemporary city, we have a bold dream: to extend the rendezvous point to other parts of the city, to go beyond the limits of the void, to go beyond the physical limits of the building and take control of the city’s immense territory. As a result, other voids spread across the urban patch, amplifying the noise and radiation of the energy originally coming from the museum’s interspaces.

Curator: Nancy Spector

Installation – LFA,
London, England, 2010.

The french-brazilian architecture practice Triptyque is based on the idea of authorial dissolution, where the different participants mix ideas and debate. The name of the office is a literal translation of triptych (an object which appears in various parts), referring to the idea of a dissolving of the different repertoires and cultures of the participants into a single cohesive work. The project Tropical understands itself as a critic about ecological normatives. It is a reflexion of how far those rules could restrain architecture and how the power of nature could take back its place.

NAJP (Nouveaux Albums des Jeunes Architectes et des Paysagistes) enables young architects to make themselves known to the French market and other countries. This traveling exhibition will give visibility to the competition that selected the participants so that architects from all over the world can come together for this award.

The exhibition arrives in Brazil highlighting the language that the world speaks today, with works created by young architects who won awards in France in 2007 and 2008 and who, before the age of 35, were able to formulate projects that brought together the modernist ethic and some of the principles that guided that current.

CulturesFrance and the French Ministry of Culture and Communication have taken care to produce the exhibition in a special format for traveling (executive production.

Title of the work: Harmonia 57.

Collaborators: Greg Bousquet, Carolina Bueno, Olivier Rafaëlli, Guillaume Sibaud and Tiago Guimarães.

Project year: 2006.

Year of construction: 2008.

Location: São Paulo, SP, Brazil.

Presentation text

Harmonia 57 is located in western São Paulo, where artistic life penetrates easily, galleries and walls are mixed up, functioning as stage for new expressions. Like a living body, building breathes, sweats and modifies itself, transcending its inertia. Walls are thick and covered by vegetal layer that works like the skin of the structure. This dense wall is made of organic concrete that has pores, where plant species grow, giving facades a unique look.

A huge void

“Shenzhen Biennale, China”

For the challenge of projecting engagement between the Chinese cities of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the Triptyque studio has adopted an approach that extends the discussion that arose when its architects were invited by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, to create a fantastic intervention: a void in a Manhattan building.

For the American and Chinese cases, the architects propose an understanding of the contemporary city and the construction of new architectural structures based on the identification of the city as gigantic organic creatures. The fluid form of these beings represents the vital energy of the metropolis and its citizens. It overcomes the force that exists in the conception of purely mineral space, and is the essence of urbanity in harmony with the architectural approach adopted.

As in modern cities, these creatures take on different personalities and continually grow, drawing attention to neighboring sites and connecting with each other through straight lines or curves. Observing these forms and their connections reveals its representativeness, which is the organic nature of space and the movement of human beings who live, work and/or move cities.

It is precisely at the center of this movement that the target of the architects’ project for integration between Shenzhen and Hong Kong lies: an immense void observed geographically in the area surrounding the Ma Chau River, where creaturely energies combine and transmute into membranes that define the single, vast integration zone.

The organic nature of the creatures, their traces and membranes represent, in truth, the forces of the metropolis and its citizens. In every sense of the proposed model, energy returns to the void where an intense radiance is formed, just like a party with music, art and conversation.

In the case of Chinese cities, Triptyque’s imagination extends beyond the Ma Chau River to take the form of a pavilion unfolding in the center of Shenzhen’s civic center. No more than 30 linear kilometers separate this site from the thriving commercial and financial center of neighboring Hong Kong, but the transport of people between the cities only increased after 1999, when political and military control of the former British protectorate returned to China.

Curators: Ou Ning and Wei Wei Shannon

São Paulo, Brazil, 2007.

The idea of the exhibition at Rua Harmonia came through the partnership between the gallery florenceantonio.com and Triptyque. It was born from the desire to explore simultaneously a new form of occupation and new means of expression.

The building is in a neighborhood where the artistic movement is intense and there is incredible sensitivity for cultural events. The building is included in that motion under this new type of exposure.

The exhibition reflects a desire to show that the architecture is seen, lived, experienced and absorbed during its constructive process, by raising new questions about the beauty and also about the relationship between work and design. What is the real need of complement? Can the unfinished building not be beautiful and interesting? The project ends when the work begins?

The place of work is an instigating site that provides new emotions and impressions of the architecture. Circulate by a not completed construction is as unravel mysteries and curiosities – means living the creation of a work, witness the birth of a being.

The exploitation of a differentiated and innovative shape of gallery is another objective of the experiment. From the Bauhaus, through the work of Archigram and Hélio Oiticica, artists and architects have sought to contrast art and architecture, pushing their limits to the maximum in order to change attitudes and find new ways of expression and appreciation of the world artistic / architectural / social / cultural.

The experience done in Harmony considers these ideas, and – through the exploitation of the unfinished, of the raw and bare works – questions the temporality of the place and proposes new ideas about art and architecture.

Instalação – MAM,
Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, 2002.