Brazil in Focus: This Month in Architecture, Landscape, and Collective Practice

Across Brazil, architecture is still reshaping itself, slipping in and out of the usual boxes of profession, scale and place. This month’s selection brings you a handful of projects and practices that deliberately step outside the predictable, whether that means building together, listening to memory, or letting the land dictate the design.

Practices that broaden the agenda

Two firms caught our eye in the 2026 ArchDaily Next Practices Awards. Rio‑based AGENCIA TPBA flits between temporary installations, full‑blown buildings, urban studies and competition entries. Their work feels like a dialogue between the city’s pulse and the materiality of construction – a kind of see‑and‑do approach that refuses to settle on one format.

Further north, in Anápolis, Goiás, architect‑artist‑researcher Talles Lopes digs through archives and visual studies to unearth how Brazil’s peripheral landscapes have been represented. His investigations translate into speculative projects, research papers and built interventions that question the very idea of a fixed architectural identity.

Both practices, though wildly different in method, share a willingness to let research, speculation and construction intermingle, expanding architecture’s agency beyond a single professional script.

Collective construction in action – USINA

When you think of social housing in Brazil, the name USINA CTAH inevitably appears. For more than thirty years the group has championed self‑managed building, insisting that design, financing, construction and everyday life belong together. In a world where specialization often pulls these strands apart, USINA brings them back, turning the act of building itself into a communal classroom. Their work raises a provocative question: who really holds the knowledge when a neighborhood builds its own future?

Featured projects that respond to place and memory

In the aftermath of the 2019 dam collapse at Córrego do Feijão, MACh Architects teamed up with Connatural to create the Território‑Parque. The design stitches together a central plaza, a soccer field, an ecological park and a symbolic zone, all woven around water. Pools, irrigation canals and constructed wetlands echo the area’s hydrological history, while a sensory garden and a chapel honor the 272 lives lost. Existing elements – an adobe house, native vegetation, even the cemetery’s dry‑stone walls – are folded back into the new program, letting the landscape tell its own story.

Down in São Paulo, Andrade Morettin Arquitetos Associados delivered the Santa Cruz School Kindergarten. A generous courtyard sits at the heart of the 3,417 m² campus, acting both as a play arena and a buffer against the noisy Marginal Pinheiros expressway. Classrooms radiate from the courtyard, each opening onto private backyards that invite daylight and breezes. The building’s modular skeleton – a mix of mass timber, concrete, steel and drywall – allows the school to evolve as its pedagogy does.

Further north, perched on a hill near Chapada dos Veadeiros, Alan Chu designed the Mirante de São Jorge. Rather than bulldozing a new summit, Chu let the structure sit on stilts within an existing clearing, preserving drainage patterns and native flora. A 57‑meter‑wide circular ribbon, elevated eight meters off the ground, frames a central void where visitors can gather, watch sunsets and feel the wind through the surrounding trees. The minimalist wooden roof shelters the space while letting the landscape remain the star of the show.

On the radar

São Paulo’s iconic MASP has just opened a new subterranean corridor that links Lina Bo Bardi’s 1968 masterpiece with the recently added Pietro Maria B building. The passage not only eases visitor flow but also creates an underground public realm that hints at the city’s evolving relationship with its cultural institutions.

From collective self‑build initiatives to landscape‑centric interventions, Brazil’s architectural scene this month proves that design can be as fluid and layered as the country’s own history.