SENAC São Paulo and Estudio Guto Requena Wrap a 119 m² Lounge for Lingering in Red Fabric and Oval Light

Knowledge Arena is a 119 m² temporary interior in São Paulo, completed in 2026 and designed through a collaboration between SENAC São Paulo and Estudio Guto Requena. The SENAC side was not a corporate office. It was a team of students and faculty from the Architecture and Urbanism program at Centro Universitário Senac. They worked alongside one of Brazil's most recognisable design studios on a room meant for welcoming, lingering and exchange. The project frames itself around architecture, sustainability and education, and around how people, knowledge and space connect.

What interests us is how literally the brief has been built. The room isn't organised around a stage, a desk or a display wall. It's organised around a continuous U-shaped sofa that wraps a cluster of round tables and poufs. Above it hangs a ceiling of oval lights, and the walls are lined in deep red stretched fabric. The arena of the title is a conversational one. The architecture holds people in a loose ring and then softens every surface around them, so talking feels easier than leaving.

A Ring of Seating Instead of a Front of House

The sunken lounge is the project's central decision, and it works because it refuses hierarchy. A U-shaped sofa in dusty pink faces inward, purple poufs float in the middle, and nobody's seat is clearly the important one. That matters for a space tied to an educational institution. Classrooms usually point everyone toward a single speaker, and this room points everyone toward each other.

The oval ceiling lights repeat down the length of the lounge in a steady rhythm, and they do quiet planning work. They mark out gathering zones without walls, so the long room reads as a sequence of smaller conversations rather than one undifferentiated hall. In a footprint this small, that kind of soft subdivision is worth more than any partition.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.