City Acaraú is a proposed new town in the municipality of Bertioga, in the Baixada Santista metropolitan region of the State of São Paulo. Located northeast of the historic port city of Santos, the site borders the highway leading eastward to Rio de Janeiro. This is an area where substantial new growth is expected to serve Brazil’s expanding petroleum economy, but within the environmentally sensitive Mata Atlântica rainforest. The 1,580 ha site is thus uniquely situated, being one of the only two remaining parcels approved for development in a municipality that has already seen 90 percent of its territory permanently dedicated to conservation.

DPZ CoDesign envisioned the new settlement as a model of sustainability, designed to harmonize with the ethos of the existing Fazenda Acaraú wildlife habitat and woodland preservation program. The high density, mixed-use project provides a range of residential options, from large apartment blocks to single-family compounds, with a complement of retail, lodging, educational, civic and recreational facilities. Overlapping networks of streets and pathways serving pedestrians, joggers and cyclists, in addition to motorists, connect the uses in a fine-grained thoroughfare system. At approximately 500 ha, the City Acaraú development area proper occupies a third of the overall site, the other two-thirds of which shall remain as a natural preserve. The area that can be disturbed within the 500 ha zone amounts to a compact footprint of about 47 ha, largely shaped as an elongated strand of “villages” paralleling the highway. The most urban sector is framed by a pair of easements for a powerline and a gas pipe and features a main road that meanders and bifurcates, creating a necklace of housing clusters organized around different focal points: storm water retention ponds, stands of preserved forest, and smaller intimate greens. A suburban zone north of the power easement includes a series of “green harbor” enclaves, sensitively inserting lower-density housing and recreational uses high above the forest floor. With the possible addition of a school affiliated with the eco-preservation mission of the Fazenda, and a worker housing campus, the result begins to approach that of a model self-sustaining community.

Our job was to design the archetypal apartment block concept that would conform all of the organically shaped urban “villages”. These “extruded” structures can twist as necessary to enclose central open spaces of varying dimensions, as well as define the edges of sinuous roadways. The buildings range from four to seven stories high, are double-loaded to achieve the desired density, and feature deep continuous terraces along their perimeter, as well as regularly spaced window wells in the middle that penetrate through compact kitchen and bathroom cores. This allows for shaded yet airy, well-lit interiors with natural cross ventilation. There are one social and one service elevator, as well as one stairway, per every four apartments per floor plate. This arrangement constitutes the basic motif for the buildings, replicated as necessary to adjust to multiple configurations and orientations along their curvilinear geometry, meant to respect topography and tree clusters.

The Ground Floor has a rather continuous row of shops alternating with residential elevator lobbies that grant direct access from the street. An enclosed, continuous parking garage behind the former provides for a controlled environment for vehicle storage and resident entry into lobbies. The Second Floor features continuous pedestrian circulation via a central corridor that connects service elevator cores and stairways, allowing residents to move back and forth between buildings and down onto the street, access from which is electronically controlled to avoid intruders. Window wells above double down as light wells for this corridor, so it is always flooded with natural light during the daytime.

The uppermost floors provide an array of dwelling unit types, besides occasional two-story open terraces that traverse the buildings as covered open atria for neighbor socialization and solace. Louvered box structures with hidden screen mesh protect window wells from prying eyes and falling objects. Wooden, random brise-soleils along perimeter terrace edges prevent birds from flying onto them. That solves a recurrent problem in earlier developments in the area, which saw many birds kill themselves by flying onto glass doors. They also provide for effective sunlight protection that reduces thermal gain inside apartments. Finally, the roof houses communal terraces with sculptural ventilation stacks, planters, and solar photovoltaic panel mini-farms.