Even in the modern industrial park, supersized utilitarian structures can create large, desolate swaths of development. On a dead-end street in the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais in southeast Brazil, Ateliê Wäls’ ribbon-like wood porte cochère stands out, beckoning passersby to the brewery’s new restaurant and taproom, both designed by the local firm Gustavo Penna Arquiteto & Associados (GPA&A). An addition to the company’s existing brewing facility, the project—which also included a wine cellar, shop, and outdoor space for food trucks—faced a pair of unusual challenges.
First, Ateliê Wäls is carved into a steep hillside, creating a 35-foot grade change from street level to the brewery entry. To the east, Rua Adelino Testi is level with the facility and provides vehicular access to the main warehouse. To the west, Rua Gabriela de Melo runs 16 feet above the roof of the building. For the porte cochère, located on the west side, GPA&A created a stair and elevator shaft to take visitors from street level down two stories to the reception area. A material palette of concrete, steel, and glass complements the surrounding industrial buildings.
The second challenge was to give the street-level volume curb appeal since the elevator shaft essentially has no façade, says GPA&A senior architect Oded Stahl. GPA&A conceived of the undulating steel-and-wood canopy curving from the restaurant roof over a sidewalk and vehicular drop-off area, reaching down to the ground, and then curling inward to form a long bench. “It’s like somebody opened a huge barrel and stretched it over” the entrance, he says. “By making this canopy, we enlarged the presence of the building on the street level.”
To design the canopy, the architects began with what Stahl calls “3D dreams”—sketches and detailed drawings that helped them explore scale, which they then translated into models in Trimble SketchUp and Autodesk AutoCAD. GPA&A worked with local structural engineering firm Misa Engenharia de Estruturas to minimize the canopy’s underlying steel frame, beveling its edges to create a thin profile. “The edge of it had to be quite fine,” Stahl says. “It could not look heavy or otherwise we were going to lose this effect of something wrapping, something flowing.”
The canopy rises 17 feet above street level, forming a tunnel that is 38.5 feet deep and, if it were unrolled and laid flat on the ground, 104 feet long. Wood slats clad its inward and outward faces, sandwiching the steel frame, a concealed sheet metal roof, and rain gutters, which channel water into a planted area below the canopy.
The steel frame comprises 200-millimeter-deep (7.9-inch-deep), 40-foot-long wide-flanged beams welded together to form a grid that ties into the elevator core. To create the “fine” edge that GPA&A envisioned, the steel beams running along the canopy’s longitudinal edges are just 4 inches deep. The transverse beams taper to meet them. Wood slats cap the sides, concealing the steel structure.
For durability, GPA&A specified cumaru, or Brazilian teak, for the 4-inch-wide, 0.75-inch-thick slats; when heat-treated to 6 percent humidity, the wood becomes highly insect resistant. The wood was sourced from the state of Rondônia, near Brazil’s western border, which is also one of the world’s most deforested regions; GPA&A ensured that the wood carried a Documento de Origem Florestal, or certificate of origin, which allows authorities to track the movement of lumber products across the country. Local manufacturer Gebauer milled the wood into the slats, which range in length from 6.5 feet to 19.5 feet long.
Pórtico Construções Metálicas in Rio Acima, 20 miles south of Belo Horizonte, prefabricated the steel frame, which made insitu construction go quickly, Stahl says. The construction crew first laid the sheet metal roof and gutters, then worked from the top down, adding the wood cladding to the canopy’s outward surface first.
The wood slats fasten invisibly to the steel structure via small steel knife plates spaced roughly every 2 feet. The connection allowed for a clean appearance devoid of screw holes, but was a challenge for construction workers, Stahl says. Each knife plate was welded on site, but with the structure just 6 inches deep, there was very little room for error, he says. “That was the headache on the site.”
Completed in June 2017, the porte cochère has helped showcase how wood can be used in a way that Stahl says is “very plastic and very precise.” GPA&A had never used wood in this fashion before. “The wood here was the king,” he says. “It was the material that spoke."
This story has been updated since first publication.
