PORTFOLIO christian f. de oliveira
architecture ufpr & tu darmstadt 2017-2022
CHRISTIAN DE OLIVEIRA full name: Christian Ferreira de Oliveira place of residence: Curitiba, PR, Brazil age: 22 education: 8th period student of Architecture at Universidade Federal do Paraná; exchange student at Technische Universität Darmstadt contact number: +55 41 98704 1152 (Brazil); +49 152 3701 9008 (Germany) e-mail: christian190599@hotmail.com My passion for architecture predates the admission at the university, and I am happy to claim that, in the last few years, between processes of enhancement and deconstruction of notions, I found myself inserted exactly at the universe I want to contribute with. In those years, I developed wide competences, from the increased critical consciousness to a dialectic posture; from the proactivity to research to the domination of processual tools (of representation, manufacture, abstraction etc). Among all of the riches bound to be extracted from the architectural universe - its history, meaning, social dimensions -, the enlightenment that realizes the medium between architectural thought and the given cultural reality might be said as the greatest interest of mine.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1
CAMPUS PORTAL
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CERRO LUAR BUILDING
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SILVER CLOUDS COTTAGE
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SÃO LOURENÇO CHAPEL religious architecture - 2018
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urban renewal proposal - 2019
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1st place - national architecture competition
vertical housing proposal - 2019
residential architecture - 2017
SÃO FRANCISCO COMPLEX
COMPLEMENTARY PRODUCTION research, academic activities, hobbies
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1
CAMPUS PORTAL
1st place - national architecture competition
about the project: author: Christian de Oliveira year: 2021 type: national competition of concepts for learning platform-portal Projetou’s new urban campus program: eight classrooms, library, workshop, meeting room, professor’s room, administrative offices, reception, cafeteria built area: 525 m²
The project arises from a method engaged with ethical questions (what values and narratives can the architectural posture imply?) and the search for a solution that articulates the phenomenological expression of volumes, voids, textures, colors, light, and shadow, attentive to the sensitive dimension of the experience of space. p. 05
1ST PLACE - NATIONAL ARCHITECTURE COMPETITION
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Here, architecture stands as a lesson: since the building is an agent of human interaction, potentially intense in the diverse metropolis, the proposal is a sum of ideological postures designed already from the definition of the program. We sought to attend the largest number of activities without escaping too much from the 470 m² built area recommendation. Seeing the excess that the suggested program represented compared to the area worked on, it was decided to remove functions considered annexed (parking lot, auditorium) in favor of the qualification of the essential educational part. The definitive built area was 525 m². The design will elevate the specific program (educational-administrative) in relation to the street, opening the first floor to an organic contact with the urban landscape and with the disposition of permeable green areas. The cafeteria, considered as a collision point with the public sphere, takes place near the corner to adhere the building to the everyday life of the external community.
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1ST PLACE - NATIONAL ARCHITECTURE COMPETITION
In the southwest corner of the lot, an atrium expands the spatial perception to form the autonomous universe of the architecture, a solemn and picturesque environment to which windows and circulations are turned. A vital feature to the building’s operation, the atrium mediates the calming of the inner spaces by expressing a stability that is antagonistic to the metropolitan frenzy, qualifying the teaching areas with diffused light and constant ventilation (making them independent of artificial conditioning). Greened and open on the first floor, the atrium reaffirms the concept’s civic aspiration. Classrooms are configured in unique ways in layout and morphology, and there are no standard pavement. On the second floor, a raised plaza acts as a socializing space for the student and faculty community, also situating the user towards the building and the city it overlooks. A polycarbonate enclosure makes the set formally cohesive, also being suggestive in its reading dimensions: from the outside, the semi-transparency suggests the nature of the internal uses without delivering objective answers; from the inside, the view of the city agglutinates in an amorphous information, isolating the school in its own dynamics, intensifying its places. Acting as a ventilated façade, the 50 cm gap between enclosure (subject to radiation) and interior becomes a vector for air exhaustion.
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1ST PLACE - NATIONAL ARCHITECTURE COMPETITION
The structural skeleton - floors, pillars, and beams - is made of laminated wood, a material chosen for its sensorial and didactic value: the architecture, thus, asserts itself as an agent of change, using a technology superior to the traditional paradigms of construction, environmentally degrading. With 280 m3 of wood, the structure corresponds to 149 tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere, endowing the building with a regenerative role, and not merely a neutral one.
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1ST PLACE - NATIONAL ARCHITECTURE COMPETITION
In the sum of the design decisions, the concept becomes a catalyst for learning, with the space bending our most intrinsic preconceptions and notions. It is only in this way, by challenging our conscience, that we open ourselves to new perspectives.
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2
CERRO LUAR BUILDING
vertical housing proposal about the project:
authors: Christian de Oliveira, Guilherme Kozoski year: 2019 location: Cuiabá Street, Curitiba, Brazil program: 18 apartment units built area: 3230 m²
Many say that Curitiba resents its bareness of identity, its lack of past narrative to nourish a healthy regional pride that so many other cities carry. Well, in my consciousness, this problem in nothing but a mirage after all, the cultural landscape that I inhabit constitutes my being, and maybe it is only a matter of digging these foundations collectively. In this effort the Cerro Luar Building takes place - a residential project to the city’s suburban neighborhood Cajuru, it turns itself at the direction of the coastal mountain ranges’ peaks to intrinsically assert: this is the land we live in. p. 15
VERTICAL HOUSING PROPOSAL
The building follows a series of reflections. The first and most vital to the concept’s definition is the aforementioned cultural landscape. Staggering towards east, at each pavement that the project offers communitarian terraces from where one can contemplate the mountain ranges at the horizon, thus approximating collective activities around this shared relation with what is local - both the city and its peaks.
One second reflection would be architecture’s generosity with the context. At the ground floor, transitions between public and private are not violent like the prevailing walls found on the majority of the neighborhood constructions - in fact, these transitions are subtle, psychologic, realized through architectural tools (steps, flowerbeds, paving) that, though idealistic, acquire value in its insistence in imagining a worthy future. From these decisions, the proposal tries to intensify the relation among individuals as well as between users and the space itself. p. 16
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VERTICAL HOUSING PROPOSAL
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The building offers four typologies of apartment units ranging from 60 to 85 m² and with traditional programs (living room and dining room, kitchen, bathroom and two-three bedrooms), paying attention to the diverse family constitutions of the neighborhood. The distribution of spaces was thought with the dignity of what is human in mind - we wanted to distance ourselves from the cloistered space that alienates, oppresses. Through that that the apartment’s own configuration is a manifest in itself, one in favor of a vision that puts life as the higher virtue, and not the profit per square meter. The community terraces act as a catalyst to the building’s social life. Privileged spaces for both its formal generosity as well as for its relation with the sublime horizon, its definition with a collective dynamic, non-private, infers that the local dimension (represented by the mountains themselves) indeed constitutes a shared identity.
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VERTICAL HOUSING PROPOSAL
Elevating the built volume in relation to the ground allows a free surface level for activities of appropriation and leasure
Smaller volumes are subtracted to create terraces facing the coastal mountain ranges of the eastern horizonsodales pulvinar dignissim. Ut aliquam orci eget
Breaking the main volume in mismatched parts helps define an object of dinamic interpretation p. 20
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3
SILVER CLOUDS COTTAGE residential architecture
about the project: author: Christian de Oliveira year: 2017 location: Lake St. Mary, Montana, Unites States of America program: living room; kitchen; bathroom; couple’s bedroom and a balcony built area: 31 m²
Silver Clouds Cottage is a weekend retreat located at the forested shores of Lake St. Mary, foothills of United States’ northern Rockies. Its architecture aims at intensifying the emotion that surges from the relation between men and nature, while answering to conditionings like habitability, improved social situations, expression of form and as well as ecological responsibility. p. 23
RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE
With a modest program limited to only 31 m², the plan presumes a radial distribution of spaces (living room, bedroom, bathroom and a kitchen) around the composition’s core, the hearth. Despite the interior occurring as a mostly continuous area, each space stablishes a unique relation with both the other parts of the house and the surroundings through its height, openings, form and floor height, creating a dense variety of possible emotional experiences in a small zone.
The Cottage is at its peak at the living room, where a gentle curve follows the fireplace and kitchen stand, creating a form that conceptually embraces the user. There, the roof rises to west allowing the landscape to fill in through the large windows, thus valuing the social sphere. At the bedroom, the ceiling falls to create a sheltering atmosphere
The access corridor builds a strong transition between the natural and human habitat, with vertical boards at the front façade delimiting the path and partly obstructing the sight from outside in, stimulating curiosity of what’s waiting beyond. The corridor’s roof slope rises to east, creating a striking butterfly shaped structure that defines the Cottage – a shape that, overhanging generously, expand towards the surroundings, softening architecture’s limits. The final expression is powerful in its presence but respectful to the site. p. 25
RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE
The concept finds its viability as a beyond-theoretical idea through the compatibility of form and technique: with a Wood Frame structure, the Cottage is of a complexity far above the original pedagogical proposition (of Studies of Composition, discipline offered prior do Architectural Design)
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To experience the Cottage is to embark on a journey: one that starts from teasing, then to reveal. The elongated access forces you to wait and wonder, and inside, it ends with an unpayable reward – of cozy, expressive architecture and cathedral mountains, where silver clouds cast shadows upon.
RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURE
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The proposal’s development inside the discipline’s didactic program predicted it’s realization as one main product: a 1/25 architectural maquette. Built with different types of wood and materializing the intellectual production of architecture, it was through this model that I could put to test design decisions, in both the formal and structural dimensions. The result, singular in its character, still represents one of the most rewarding experiences I have had at the university.
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4
SÃO LOURENÇO CHAPEL religious architecture
about the project: author: Christian de Oliveira year: 2018 location: São Lourenço Park, Curitiba, Brazil program: catholic chapel (nave, baptistery and sacristy); surrounding open spaces built area: 62 m²
To experience what is holy is to embark on a profoundly human phenomenon, involving not only faith, but also feelings, desires, fears, anxieties and sorrows deeply intimate - thus, all of this is of no easy task to comprehend. If we were to exercise the fond sacred hug, the architectural embrace to the challenge of existing, what would the result be like? São Lourenço Chapel tries to materialize this contact, the medium through which abyssal feelings emerge to find comfort in the light. p. 31
RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE
Here, more than ever that the architecture could not be thought as an object, trinket at the glade - it is a phenomenon, individual and collective, conceived to the limits to promote august, happy, emotional situations. The sacred construction is different because it is to that unknown dimension that I turn myself when in search for orientation; the ordinary risks reducing the experience. Consuming it in phases, each with its own narrative, every step is a suggestion of a new reality. The project is located in the middle of a glade of Park São Lourenço, in a namesake residential neighborhood of northern Curitiba. In higher ground than the surrounding park pathway and lake, the chapel is, in fact, not a construction, but a complex, constituted of two great access branches (ramp and stairs), the atrium and arrival corridor, the sacred space in itself and a patio for outdoor-masses. On its gentle curves and slopes, the access trails teases the conscience about what is waiting beyond the walls. The chapel has a first moment of revelation at the linear corridor past the atrium, at which the symmetric composition of vaulted dome imposes itself on the eyesight. At the end of this process of approximation, one is contemplated with different options. p. 32
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RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE
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Entering the chapel is one of them. Internally, you will find yourself in a dark space - the southern dome -, where lays the baptismal font and St. Lawrence’s niche. Past the partition between the first precinct and the nave, the vital space is revealed: the major dome, that rises from the smaller one towards north and in color white, finished by an enormous stained glass that reflects the colors of creation - the sky’s blue, the forests’ green; the light’s white. The contrast between the brickwork and the shellshaped domes’ white accents the transcendental dimension to which aspires the architecture. At the same time, the brick flooring continued from outside to inside reaffirms: this is still Earth, though soothed by the gentle white vaults.
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RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE
The shell-like shape is an exercise of stimulating bliss. We do not want the absence of emotional reaction - the ethic proclamation that the architecture expresses in its values of form and space are, in fact, to be shared. The construction becomes the human material expression of what it represents and tries to achieve: the superior, beyondhuman.
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RELIGIOUS ARCHITECTURE
The other option offered by the complex is to wander around the perimeter. Following the adjacent pathways, the paving rises and we find ourselves higher than the access atrium’s walls, at the level where the domes touch the water mirror and where the outdoor masses patio lies. Here that the chapel finally reveals its full self, ending the complex’s architectural narratives. p. 38
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5
SÃO FRANCISCO COMPLEX urban renewal proposal
about the project: authors: Christian de Oliveira, Guilherme Kozoski, Thiago Oliva, Victor Alves year: 2019 location: Largo da Ordem, Curitiba, Brazil program: vertical housing; office building; hostel; educational and cultural-theatrical institutions built area: 15171 m²
Curitiba’s Largo da Ordem is a frozen cityscape, subjected to different urban processes that ended up constituting a peculiar cultural phenomenon. From that, we extract a vital condition: the city’s historic center might benefit from a space thought to the situations of today. In line with this compromise as well as with the ethics of an open city, São Francisco Complex is an approach of urban renewal that tries to answer to the complexities of the context. p. 41
URBAN RENEWAL PROPOSAL
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The main goal is to reactivate the area’s social and economic dynamics - after all, today it is stagnated as a quasi-fantastical scenery, tourist based and, to some extent, oppressive. An essential premise was that of overflowing paths of circulation into the block’s interior, which was the only zone of intervention. Starting with the interstitial voids of the original medieval-portuguese block, in recent history degenerated into parking lots that impeded a different programmatic approach to the region, were proposed a series of walkways that distribute themselves through the block’s core - these routes link the new buildings and its activities. The buildings were divided into four macro-functions: housing, comercial, education and culture. Habitation was considered the main program, being it the most capable of realizing the project of resurrecting the urban space’s vitality and, thus, concentrates the most built area - 8,5 thousand square meters, distributed between two big apartment houses at the west sector. Right next to it, an office building ties up the proposal’s verticalized volumetry.
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URBAN RENEWAL PROPOSAL
Functions of education and culture were positioned at the east sector, and they include an elementary school, a cultural and theatrical educational center as well as a new Lala Schneider Theater. Sectors of habitation-work and culture-education both merge at central square, which doubles as an access patio to the existing Zé Maria Theater. The preserved brick chimney of an old industry centralizes the focal points with every route leading to it. This way, the interaction between the historic and the new is consolidated in an organic manner.
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6
COMPLEMENTARY PRODUCTION
research, academic activities, hobbies 2017-2022
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ACADEMIC EXTENSION
GUIDEBOOK FOR WOOD CONSTRUCTION university research project (2018-2019) “Manual de Madeira na Arquitetura Contemporânea - de estudantes para estudantes” is a publication product of the academic extension project Conhecer, Refletir e Inovar na Construção Civil. It consists of a didactic synthesis regarding the main aspects of the construction with glued laminated woods like CLT and GLT, and objective introducing p. 48
students in the process of learning architectural design to the structural and formal possibilities of wooden technology. Finished the research phase, the manual was published in both digital and physical media and was exhibited at CONPEEX, a congress of UFG. Its content is available at the link: https://manualdemadeira. cauufpr.arq.br/
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ACADEMIC VOLUNTEERING
SOLAR DECATHLON DESIGN CHALLENGE 2019 contributor to ufpr’s team
I participated as a collaborator of UFPR’s and architecture office Saboya & Ruiz’s team at the international competition Solar Decathlon Design Challenge. The contribution consisted in the confection of a 1/50 physical model of a school block proposal, which was used at the competition’s last phase presentation at the
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north american state of Colorado. Made of wood, the model had four different blocks that could be shown assembled or disassembled, each representing a different layer of the construction technique conceived by the design team.
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HOBBIES
ARTISTIC DRAWING representation on ink and pencil
Since always that drawing has been a friend of my free hours. In the process of learning architecture, it proved to be an essential tool for both identifying reality and developing comprehension of the proposed architectural product. I believe that this expression mirrors my own raw sight, thus heralding modes of thought - the way that I represent is a window to the consciousness of the architectural design process itself.
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THANK YOU!