unit spread over two floors of a multi-storey modern structure, and sees a renewed collaboration with AIM Architecture which designed the retailers previous stores. A façade of opaque glass blocks warps around both floors, allowing in floods of natural light. Upon entering the store, shoppers find themselves in industrial-inspired space replete with bare concrete walls and pillars, granite tile flooring, suspended utilitarian lighting and sleek modern interventions.
Part of the ceiling has been removed, and not only increases the sense of spaciousness, but also creates a visual unity between the two floors. Taking centre stage is an elongated conveyor belt-inspired loop which serves as a desk slash display to present a section of HARMAY products. Right in the middle, a spiral staircase is situated which leads up to the second floor. Lining the glass façade are bucket seats in a bright green hue. One floor up, shoppers encounter five themed rooms, each offering a different aesthetic and product line.
The intention of the project was to explore a link between Miami’s mid-century modern architecture with the tradition of the Brazilian modern architecture. In the same creative way that the European modern architecture was interpreted in North America, there was an interpretation and recreation of this movement in South America. This connection is reinforced by Miami’s climatic and geographic characteristics – a sunny place and close to the tropical area. We established these bonds through the choice of pure geometric shapes, specially the cylinder and the circle, that are recurrent in both local and Brazilian modern architecture history, and also through the use of a light color palette, close to the white, another feature common to both traditions.
Stem from these images, we decided to create a space that would not have right angles, constructed only by curve plans – cylinder segments – as if the environment was a resulting emptiness of the connection between these pre-existing volumes.The site – Miami Design District – is a relatively new commercial enterprise formed by a set of design stores. Miami city has a strong connection with the Latin American universe, both Spanish and Portuguese speakers, due to the great amount of Brazilian tourists that visit it. That is why it makes sense to us the attempt to connect both cultural worlds through the space and the architecture.
A controlled recreated nature.We avoid using elements that could refer to a home environment, like furniture. We eliminated the maximum number of objects. The products are exposed in recesses in walls and not in shelves; the countertop and the sales counter are from the same material of the floor, as if they were natural outcrops and not independent objects. The illumination is also based in light points in recesses in the gypsum, without exposed equipment. The vegetation arises from holes on the façade, without pots or supports separated from the architecture.
Her career is an example of this successful mediation between the European modernism and its tropical reinterpretation, incorporating the roughness and the rudeness of the artisanal production processes and, at the same time, being connected to the industrial production. Besides being appropriated to the historical and conceptual context, which are references to the project, the chosen armchair is an upholstered semi sphere over a lightweight metallic structure, reinforcing the formal repertoire of the other elements that compose the space and avoid right angles.
