Built · São Paulo, Brazil

The Italian sandwich in São Paulo

Rua Ministro Rocha Azevedo, São Paulo — 2012–2013

Rendering of the main room: the cladding in pale timber boards, the red benches, the tables and the counter at the far end — The main room, in the timber-board version.

Place: Rua Ministro Rocha Azevedo, São Paulo (Brazil)
Year: Design 2012, opened 2013
Studio: Studio Gardino Architettura, Milan
Role: Designed jointly with Alberto Gardino
Scope: Complete rebuilding of a two-storey building for an Italian sandwich bar
Permits: Lovisaro Arquitetura e Design, São Paulo
Builder: AMAC Construtora, São Paulo
Photographs: Matteo Gardino
Status: Built — opened on 28 February 2013

The place is called Brera, it is in Brazil and it sells Italian sandwiches. The name is that of a district of Milan, but the project was not drawn in Milan: my father and I did it in São Paulo, in a space rented for those months.

Before, there was a narrow, deep two-storey building, empty, shut behind railings among the apartment blocks of the Jardins. Two aluga signs hanging on the railing.

Photograph from 2012: the empty building, a dark two-storey box behind railings, with two ALUGA signs hanging on them — March 2012: the place as it was, with the aluga signs.

Site photograph: Matteo Gardino standing on the new stair, still unfinished, with a ladder leaning into the double-height void — That is me, on the new stair, on one of the trips to follow the work. The double-height void is already there.

All the machinery upstairs

A place like this is made of two halves you never see together: the room, and the machine that keeps it running. In a narrow building the temptation is to squeeze both onto the ground floor, and end up with each pressed against the other.

Here we did the opposite. On the ground floor there is only what the customer walks through: an outside terrace, an inside one, the main room and the counter. Everything else is upstairs — a smaller room, the lavatories, the office, the staff rooms, the changing room and the cold store.

The outside terrace, moreover, did not exist before. It was made at the front, where the little yard behind the railings had been: you give up some covered floor area to gain the one thing a place like this really needs, which is to be seen while it is full.

Ground floor plan: the terrace with the tables on the right, the main room, the counter in green turning an L, and the services at the back — Ground floor: terrace, room, counter. Nothing else.

First floor plan: the kitchen in green, the two lavatories, the office, the small room with the long table, and the void over the room below — First floor: the machine, plus one small room. Open the drawings as a PDF

The void and the shelving

The two floors are not two rooms stacked on each other: they are tied together by a double-height void open onto the main room, and through that void runs the piece that holds the whole project together — a two-storey wall of pigeonhole shelving.

It does three things at once. From below it is the backdrop of the room, full of jars and bottles; from above it is the balustrade of the small upper room; and for anyone climbing the stairs it is the wall alongside, with the pigeonholes at eye level. One element, three jobs: it is the way of working that comes back on almost every one of these pages.

Longitudinal section: the two floors, the double-height void with the pigeonhole shelving at the centre, human figures on both levels and the ceiling of hanging threads — The section: the shelving crosses both floors, and the ceiling of the upper room is a curtain of hanging threads.

Rendering of the counter with the pigeonhole shelving behind it, the produce on show and the room beyond — From the counter: the pigeonholes are the store room, on show.

The same place, twice

There are two complete sets of renderings of this project, made in the same week of April 2012: the same viewpoints, the same furniture, the same light — and two different claddings.

One is in timber boards of uneven widths, warm, with red seating: the tavern version. The other is in horizontal battens of white and sea green, with backlit glass and green seating: the pale version, almost an ice-cream parlour.

That is not indecision, it is how you let someone choose. In words, «warm timber» and «pale battens» are two adjectives; drawn in full, from exactly the same position, they are two different places to walk into. The same method as the three kitchens of the Chocolate Factory (in Italian): you draw everything twice, and then you choose by looking.

The room in the timber-board version: warm walls, red benches and chairs — Timber.

The identical viewpoint in the batten version: white and sea-green walls, green seating — Battens. Same viewpoint, same time of day.

The counter seen from the entrance, timber version: the boarded front, the red slicer, the display of produce — The counter, in timber.

The same counter in the version with backlit sea-green battens — And in battens: the place changes, the project does not.

The double-height void from above, timber version: the shelving, the mezzanine room, the main room below — The void, from above.

The same void in the batten version, with the horizontal blades of light — The same void, with the blades of light.

Rendering of the mezzanine room: the ceiling is a dense curtain of hanging golden threads, stools at the balustrade and the window onto the street — The upper room, under the ceiling of threads. In the finished place, that ceiling became a sky of **wicker baskets**.

Timber won

The place opened on 28 February 2013, and of the two versions one went through: the timber boards and the red chairs. As built, the cladding became a metre-high dado of oak boarding, with white metro tiles above it and a red line to close it off. The red line was not in the renderings: it arrived on site, and it is the thing that holds the room together.

Photograph of the finished room: the metre-high oak boarding, the white tiles with the red line, the black and white photographs in white frames, the aluminium lamps and the tables with red chairs — The room, towards the terrace.

Detail of the same room: the high shelf with books and jars, the two framed photographs, the oak cladding and a table with two red chairs — The high shelf runs above everything, as in the section.

Photograph of the finished counter in the evening: the timber top, the bottles and sheaves of wheat on the high shelf, the open kitchen at the back with two staff, and the mezzanine room above right — The counter, in the evening. Above, the upper room: the void of the section, built.

Photograph of the double-height void: the ceiling entirely covered with hanging wicker baskets, the white stair, the timber shelving and the room below seen from above — And the ceiling of threads, as built, became this: **a sky of wicker baskets**. The shelving acts as the balustrade of the stair, just as in the drawing.

Who did what

The project is mine and my father Alberto’s, from the survey of the empty building to the two versions of the cladding. And it was not done from a distance: to do it we rented a space in São Paulo and sat down to draw there.

It sounds like an organisational detail and it is in fact the most expensive decision of the project. A place like this is drawn by looking at the street it stands on — who passes, at what hour, from which direction, and how long they take to decide whether to come in. That street was fourteen hours away by plane: the only way to look at it was to go.

Then the work started, and I followed it going back and forth from Italy. The photograph on the stair, at the top of this page, is from one of those trips: the double-height void is already open and nothing is finished.

The permits were handled locally by Lovisaro Arquitetura e Design; the builder was AMAC Construtora.

Eleven years later, for a flat in Dubai, it went exactly the other way round: no trip at all, four schemes drawn from Milan, and the client on site doing the measuring and the photographing.

The finished outside terrace: the red folding tables on the terracotta paving, the sliding glazing open, the BRERA sign above the entrance and the palm tree — The terrace that was not there before: terracotta, red tables, and the palm that was already there.

Photograph of the finished building from the street: the Brera sign in red letters on the pale render and the large upper window reflecting the sky — The same building as the aluga signs, open.

Somewhere to put right? Send me a couple of lines about what it is and where, and I’ll tell you what I think, and whether it is worth seeing together.

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