The winning project of the ‘Architectural Record’s Future Project Award‘ in the category ‘Overall Winner’ is ‘360º Building’ by Isay Weinfeld. To be erected in Sao Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, where currently over 10 million people live spread over 1,525 sq km the building creates an alternative to the typically overcrowded and compact stacked apartments.

Mindful of the urban reality in São Paulo, of the market and of the client brief, Isay Weinfeld with Domingos Pascali as associate architect have strived to introduce ‘360º Building’ as an alternative to the vertical multi-family housing ‘model’, which, in its commonest form, merely stacks up apartment units – ordinary, compact and closed onto themselves.

‘360º Building’, rising on top of the ridge separating the districts of Alto de Pinheiros and Alto da Lapa – a geographic location that will offer privileged sights of the surrounding area and the city, will feature 62 elevated homes with yards: real yards, not balconies, designed as genuine living spaces, wide, airy and bright. It will present 7 types of apartments – either 130, 170 or 250 sq m – combined in sets of 2, 3 or 4 units per floor, in 6 different arrangements.

Judges said what impressed them most about this project was ‘the way in which the architecture of a pinwheel plan arrangement had been combined with a construction proposition to produce an exemplary series of apartment layouts with generous open space in the form of ‘yards’ to each apartment on every floor. The judges felt that the approach taken has useful lessons generally for any architect attempting to design decent homes in tall buildings.’

All projects submitted will be showcased this year at the Cannes MIPIM conference between 10-13 March.

Via: www.worldarchitecturenews.com.