Intérieur du Studio de Photo imaginé par Marcio Kogan et MK27 à Sao Paulo. Urban culture Rio is a multifaceted city, impossible to encompass at first glance, not even the Corcovado towering above the bay with its two wide open arms. The rich and bourgeois Ipanema is fringed with favelas around its surrounding hills. The fact remains that this city is unanimously sexy. Fed by the diversity that flows in, Rio lives to the rhythm of its decadent palaces on Santa Teresa hill, its modernist architecture and tags that course round the walls like the blood of a rebellious artist. Occupied or abandoned, each urban chink seems to be a pretext for another inspired form of expression. With its verbal graffiti, solitary characters, colourful monsters, the city is turning into a huge open-air fresco. Just as unexpected, the outline of the Decameron design shop rises in storeys of colours, much like the fluorescent containers with which it has been made. The building was created by Sao Paulo architect Marcio Kogan and his team (Studio MK27) and contrasts with the pure lines that generally make up the private residences for which he is known: where colourful assembled structures dominate in an urban context and for this store selling inspired indoor-outdoor furniture, other minimalist flat tints generally characterise his other architectural creations. Omnipresent modernism rules in Brazil: a rich heritage of the past, it seems to peer – at once rigid, tender and paternalistic – over modern architects’ shoulders, involved in a “streamlined modernist” movement” of which Marcio Kogan is undoubtedly the leader. Much like his recently finalised Paraty House, suspended from the hill in the middle of luscious vegetation, the contours of two long horizontal frames in richly coloured concrete making for a weightless geometric installation. This light architecture seems to “hold up on its own”, as if its structure had deleted and the interstices rubbed out, leaving only the basics: two boxes, used as living spaces, jutting forward. At a time where everything is photoshopped, the building’s perfection remains quite disquieting. From the beach, the rooms built into the facade are discovered much like a comics trip storyboard: inside, everyday life looks like it has been stage managed or choreographed.
Tag mural dans les rues de Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro. © Marie Le Fort