ALBERT EINSTEIN EDUCATION AND RESEARCH CENTER
São Paulo, Brazil
by Isabel Duprat
A meeting in Boston, on the eve of Christmas 2016, had the purpose of presenting our initial proposal for the landscaping project for the Albert Einstein Education and Research Center building. A cool and beautiful Sunday afternoon welcomed us to the city. In the weeks leading up to the trip, we had immersed ourselves in the architectural design of Safdie Architects to assess how we could contribute effectively. The generous space destined to the landscaping project evidenced that the creative process and performance of the landscaper would have a fundamental and intrinsic role to the project as a whole.
Many drawings, even a green clay model, yes, of the same material for children to play, helped us to really understand the space. The 3D drawing is for us landscapers often not enough, at least not for me.
We felt that the garden space provided by the architecture needed to spread out and more soil. We then proposed a new spirit for the design of this place, a bigger and more organic garden. We had taken our studies with us, proposing an important change in the geometry of the atrium. In addition to the increasing of the area dedicated to vegetation, we created living spaces and walks so that this space would be a “place”, therefore, to be lived and enjoyed and not just a contemplation garden with an amphitheater. We conceived the project with the idea that the green areas were remnants of the place, where trees and palm trees would populate the slopes and the plateau, as if the building had been carved from this terrain and the vegetation that was there could be transformed into gardens permeating and surrounding the blocks, connecting interior and exterior to bring life to the building.
In the two days that followed the presentation, the landscaping project was assimilated. A lot of work together with Moshe and his team, drawings and more drawings, a new paper mockup, so that they could visualize our proposal and could study the architectural changes to adapt to our project. A good exchange and a fruitful result. In the end, happy, we left Boston.
But this was the beginning of an extensive and intense work for 5 and a half years until the completion of the execution, with a very important involvement of the landscaping project with the architectural project and complementary designers to make our project viable.
This multi-staged garden at the converging center of the building under a huge glass dome, under which all the school's activities would take place, would be enveloped by all the cyclical movements of architecture. Destined to be the heart of this building, this large garden would have the function of comfortably housing plants and people.
The feeling we get when we enter a glass greenhouse, of humidity and heat, would not be welcome here. Equalizing the environmental parameters of the well-being of men and plants in a closed environment, with only light and artificial ventilation, would be the big question. Reproducing elements of our tropical forest in this type of structure throughout the world privileges the conditions of temperature, humidity and light for the plants. In this case, coexistence with the humans who will be there for the purpose of studying medicine is the challenge.