Campus / 2017
This project was designed and implemented by Hanazaki Pisagismo in 2017 to design a landscape for a university campus in Recife, Brazil.
This garden welcomes 15,000 students in a university located and hot region of Brazil. The challenge was to create an outdoor area to have a positive influence on the community, students, and faculty. The university offers affordable education to low-income students and wanted to provide a space with high aesthetic quality and improve the neighborhood.
Recife, one of the largest metropolitan areas in Brazil, is deeply linked to water. Not only for being on the warm and tropical coast of Northeastern Brazil, but also for having many rivers, small islands, countless bridges which granted the city its nickname of “Brazilian Venice”. The city is a cultural and educational hub, and on this context, the university was founded aiming an innovative approach to education which should reflect on its physical space. The main premise was to create interactive outdoor spaces and to promote an aesthetical experience where people would come together and build bridges to knowledge and one another.
The campus is located around a historical building, a former psychiatric hospital which was founded in the 1940s. After its deactivation in the early 2000s, the terrain was available for another type of occupation. The historical building was preserved and adapted to its new uses and was embraced by a new building comprising the university facilities and revitalizing its surroundings.
The outdoor spaces were meant to be a juxtaposition of the contemporary and the historical and it was designed to echo Recife’s geography, thus the importance of the water and pathways on this space of approximately 4500m². The water, along with a pergola and covered walkway, provides fundamental thermal comfort since the campus is located in one of the hottest regions of the country. The reflecting pool is strategically laid out through the project to link the different areas and to entice people to discover all its spaces. It has an infinity edge on which water delicately flows on and several islands with trees providing a surprising effect.
