Arquitetos Associados

ARQUITETOS ASSOCIADOS is a collaborative practice dedicated to architecture and urban design based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Each project is treated as a unique and specific work, for what a particular organization of the group is set, allowing the emergence of various design groups inside the studio with eventual external collaborators. This dynamic modus operandi improves the answers to the specific demands of each project and blurs some authoral issues, while allowing a permanent change and reinvention of the group, followed by a continuous improvement of its conceptual basis. The work of each of the five members of the studio’s core takes Brazilian modern architecture as a departure point in different points of view, restating and rethinking some of its concepts to reach adequate and innovative answers to local problems in the realm of architecture and its relation to the city. Developed in parallel to a docent practice, the work deals with a great range of scales and programmes, from individual houses to public buildings and urban design, always committed to rethink programmatic and construction issues beyond its ordinary sense. The permanent research on architecture is allowed by a regular participation in competitions, parallel to the reconsideration of the vernacular construction in some small scale typologies. A contemporary approach focused on the design of the main infrastructural elements recognizes the virtues of indeterminacy and seeks for an open design that could increase the life of buildings while allowing changes in use, transformation and growth. This also allows some radical approaches on real estate market considering flexibility, mutability and change.