Casarão da Inovação Cassina / Cassina Innovation House
TROOST + PESSOA Architects·Manaus, Brazil
Casarão da Inovação Cassina / Cassina Innovation House
- Year
- 2020
- Type
- Educational
- Status
- Built
- Location
- Manaus, Brazil
This digital technology and entrepreneurship center is Manaus Digital District’s inaugural landmark. With 1,586 m2 spread over 4 floors, the Cassina houses spaces to foster coworking and meeting for digital economy makers: multifunctional areas, lounges, meeting rooms, laboratories, training rooms and a restaurant on the top floor with privileged views over the Historic Center and the Rio Negro. Built in 1896 and ruining since 1960, the degraded facades taken over by vegetation had generated a powerful image which was important to deal with. The beauty of the ruin's imperfection raises interest, questions and invites reflection on the past and the action of time and man in the city and on heritage buildings in general. It is not surprising that the imagery of the ruin, with its poetic and plastic potentialities, was explored by countless artists and architects: Piranesi, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Lúcio Costa (Museum of the Missions), Paulo Mendes da Rocha (Pinacoteca de São Paulo and Capela Brennand) and Ernani Freire (Parque das Ruínas), to name a few. In this case, the preservation of the ruin condition also turned the intervention into a manifesto because it is also the last façade with plaster pigmented with red sandstone powder. To let this specificity visible and to paralyze its degradation, meticulous restoration works have been carried out (cleaning, stabilization, consolidation, protection, etc). Also related to the ruins imagery, the Cassina houses an exuberant garden behind the main façade creating its very own microclimate. Whom access the building via the walkway crossing the void over the garden is reminded of Manaus intrinsic reason for being: the Amazon rainforest. This lush tropical garden, associated with glass, transparencies and reflections, mixes Cassina's ruin History with the Future of the Innovation House in a space associated with technology, virtuality and contemporaneity. Thought of as a four-columns-tower built in a empty shell, the prefabricated steel structural concept’s simplicity helped to build the Cassina Innovation House in only 7 months during the pandemic. Not only during the works, the prefabrication system allowed for very few workers on site allowing for social distancing from Covid-19 in hard-hit Manaus, but also the Cassina Innovation House now proposes large, generous, well ventilated, unconventional and de-densified open floor plans adapted to physical distancing requested in a (post-)pandemic society. Summarizing, the Cassina Innovation House, through the insertion of a tropical forest and an industrial steel structure within the consolidated ruins of a heritage house, can be considered as the synthesis of Manaus economic cycles: the rubber era, its decline, the Industrial District era and the new digital economy era. --
This digital technology and entrepreneurship center is Manaus Digital District’s inaugural landmark. With 1,586 m2 spread over 4 floors, the Cassina houses spaces to foster coworking and meeting for digital economy makers: multifunctional areas, lounges, meeting rooms, laboratories, training rooms and a restaurant on the top floor with privileged views over the Historic Center and the Rio Negro. Built in 1896 and ruining since 1960, the degraded facades taken over by vegetation had generated a powerful image which was important to deal with. The beauty of the ruin's imperfection raises interest, questions and invites reflection on the past and the action of time and man in the city and on heritage buildings in general. It is not surprising that the imagery of the ruin, with its poetic and plastic potentialities, was explored by countless artists and architects: Piranesi, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Lúcio Costa (Museum of the Missions), Paulo Mendes da Rocha (Pinacoteca de São Paulo and Capela Brennand) and Ernani Freire (Parque das Ruínas), to name a few. In this case, the preservation of the ruin condition also turned the intervention into a manifesto because it is also the last façade with plaster pigmented with red sandstone powder. To let this specificity visible and to paralyze its degradation, meticulous restoration works have been carried out (cleaning, stabilization, consolidation, protection, etc). Also related to the ruins imagery, the Cassina houses an exuberant garden behind the main façade creating its very own microclimate. Whom access the building via the walkway crossing the void over the garden is reminded of Manaus intrinsic reason for being: the Amazon rainforest. This lush tropical garden, associated with glass, transparencies and reflections, mixes Cassina's ruin History with the Future of the Innovation House in a space associated with technology, virtuality and contemporaneity. Thought of as a four-columns-tower built in a empty shell, the prefabricated steel structural concept’s simplicity helped to build the Cassina Innovation House in only 7 months during the pandemic. Not only during the works, the prefabrication system allowed for very few workers on site allowing for social distancing from Covid-19 in hard-hit Manaus, but also the Cassina Innovation House now proposes large, generous, well ventilated, unconventional and de-densified open floor plans adapted to physical distancing requested in a (post-)pandemic society. Summarizing, the Cassina Innovation House, through the insertion of a tropical forest and an industrial steel structure within the consolidated ruins of a heritage house, can be considered as the synthesis of Manaus economic cycles: the rubber era, its decline, the Industrial District era and the new digital economy era. --