expansion of butantan institute: butantan institute of innovation in biotechnology

Abstract

At the invitation of architect Eduardo de Almeida, the Butantan Institute's extension project emerged from a closed competition, whose object was the Biotechnology Innovation Institute. It was planned to be located in Vila Universitária in São Paulo, on the same site where the Paço das Artes was located until the beginning of 2016. Held in 2016, the competition emerged as a challenge to think of an architecture capable of supporting health and assistance. The architecture proposed for the expansion had to respond to the specificities of programs that require spaces safe enough to prevent the spread of viruses and bacteria handled in these types of programs, and above all to interact with Jorge Wilheim's (unfinished) project in 1970, conceived as a space for welcoming and supporting the cultural complex. The competition required a preliminary study for Phase 1, with the aim of installing the biotechnology institute's new laboratories and, at the same time, defining a mass plan for the complex as a whole, envisioning its construction in phases and, ultimately, giving it an architectural identity as a unified entity, establishing a physical connection between these new spaces .