Shade is infrastructure
São Paulo's modernists understood that in this climate the primary public building is a roof. The institute's courtyard — a leftover between three lot lines — needed to work as lobby, stage and refuge, which is to say it needed shade with conviction.
The canopy is a single concrete plate on four columns, 45 centimetres deep at the columns and 9 at the free edge. The depth it keeps is honest: the plate carries half a metre of soil and a garden of philodendrons whose roots do the cooling the air conditioning no longer has to.
Under it
Programming under the canopy is deliberately loose. Wednesday is the book market, Friday evenings are film screenings against the blank neighbouring wall, and the rest of the week it is the neighbourhood's best waiting room. The institute counts users with a clicker at the gate: two thousand on a quiet week.