GOAA and Goma Oficina Slip a Steel Mezzanine into a São Paulo Ground Floor to Make a Shared Research Workspace

Ground floors of residential towers in São Paulo are rarely treated as architecture. They are leased, partitioned, shuttered and re-leased, and most of them end up as boxes with a roller door. With Common Shed (Galpão Comum), GOAA, Gusmão Otero Arquitetos Associados and Goma Oficina Colaborativa, with Beatriz Dias as lead architect, take one of these units in Santa Cecília and rebuild it as about 336 m² of shared space for a group that studies the city and the image of Latin American territory.

What interests us here is how little the project relies on a big gesture. Its main move is a lightweight steel mezzanine inserted under a generous existing ceiling, and that one decision does most of the work. It doubles the usable floor without touching the foundations, sorts the program into louder and quieter levels, and gives the interior a rhythm of low and high spaces. Frosted glass, off-the-shelf shelving and plain steel do the rest. The result is a modest renovation that is more spatially generous than its budget would suggest.

A Storefront That Stays Open

The street elevation is the project's public argument. Amber translucent glazing and a garage-style door take the place of the usual opaque shutter, and a commercial unit at the front is there to keep the facade active instead of turning it into a blank office front. When the door is up, the sidewalk and the hall become one space.

Inside, that openness carries through. An upright piano and a bright red standpipe sit in the entrance hall next to the frosted mezzanine volume. You read the space as a shared room before you read it as a workplace, which suits a collective whose subject is the city itself.

The Mezzanine as Organizing Device

The mezzanine uses the light metal framing you would find in any commercial fit-out, and the architects make no effort to hide it. White steel members sit over frosted glass partitions, and stacked timber boards and track lights make it clear that this is still a working shed. Building light was the practical choice, since it avoided reinforcing the existing foundation, and the honesty of the structure also becomes part of the look.

Circulation is where the insertion gets personality. A black rubber-studded ramp with white railings rises toward a studio where woven textiles hang over the guardrail. From the upper walkway, you look straight down onto the piano and the hall. The two levels stay in constant visual contact, so people upstairs never fully disappear from the group below.

Compression Under, Release Beyond

Beneath the mezzanine, the ceiling drops and the plan narrows into corridors. One runs between desks on one side and bookshelves on the other, framed by steel posts and frosted glass. Another is lined floor to ceiling with books and green cabinets under round ceiling lights. These are tight spaces, and they work because they feel like a library stack, not a leftover passage.

The compressed zones then open into double-height areas meant for debates, exhibitions and larger gatherings. This alternation between low and high is an old tactic, but it suits a program that has to hold focused individual work and collective discussion at the same time. The long studio, with its white column, sofa and frosted cabinet doors, sits between the two: domestic in furnishing, industrial in its bones.

Rooms With Degrees of Privacy

The brief asked for both open and closed meeting rooms, and the project handles the difference with material more than with walls. Ribbed frosted glass doors close off a meeting room with bentwood chairs and a daylit window, so it stays private without going dark. A lounge with black leather chairs under rows of fluorescent tubes keeps the concrete floor and bare lighting of the original shell.

We like that nothing here is precious. The furniture is mixed, the lighting is utilitarian, and the rooms look like they can be rearranged next week. For a collective that needs to hold many activities at once, that looseness is a feature.

A Courtyard at the Back

At the rear, louvered windows open onto a planted patio, and a steel sink and a leather chair sit right at the threshold. The outdoor area is not a showpiece. It gives a deep, single-aspect unit a second source of light and air and a place to step away from the desk.

At night, the covered courtyard becomes something closer to a neighborhood bar: wooden chairs, a red drum, potted plants and wall lamps against a green wall. With a shared pantry nearby, this is where the shed's social program actually happens, and it balances the street-facing commercial unit at the other end of the plan.

Why This Project Matters

São Paulo has thousands of ground-floor units like this one under residential towers, and most of them are dead frontage. Common Shed shows that a standard steel mezzanine, translucent glazing and a well-placed courtyard can turn one of them into a layered civic room without structural surgery. The strategy is cheap and repeatable, and it does not depend on a special building.

It also suggests a different model for coworking. Instead of the polished, branded workspace, GOAA and Goma Oficina Colaborativa deliver something closer to a workshop with a library inside: transparent to the street, honest about its structure, and organized around the idea that individual work and collective debate should happen within sight of each other. For a group researching the Latin American city, the building quietly practices what it studies.

Common Shed (Galpão Comum) by GOAA, Gusmão Otero Arquitetos Associados and Goma Oficina Colaborativa, lead architect Beatriz Dias. Santa Cecília, São Paulo, Brazil. Area: 336 m² (3,617 ft²). Year: 2020. Photography by Paula Monroy.

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