The scope of this academic project was to design a product that could act as support for educational purposes at the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo (FAU USP), seeing that one of the major programs that are offered in the building was going through an overhaul, the Projeto Político Pedagógico (PPP). The PPP was a discussion that spanned through several years and its goal was to discuss ways to improve the Design program and its relationship with the building which houses it.
Through the analysis of the discussions that took place at the PPP meetings, we realized that no single product could bridge the infrastructural gap imposed by the state of the building’s conservation and the many arbitrary renovations imposed by the administration through the course of many years that progressively took more and more of the building away from the students.
With that in mind, we planned to design a system that could act as support for several activities and that could be installed in many places inside the building. We decided to tackle several issues that the Design major program faced. Being offered only during nighttime, it was hard to make use of the ateliers and the building itself, which was planned to function properly with just daylight. We needed a support system that could provide the right level of illumination, electricity access to the central areas of the ateliers and good wireless signal coverage.
The final product was more than just that — it was a political statement. Taking into consideration the aesthetic elements of the building, we designed a suspended grid that could dialogue with it. Far-fetched though it was, the project was the amalgamation of many hardships we have faced while studying there, channeled into a desire to see that FAU USP could one day be the magnificent place it certainly deserves to be.
