It’s been a productive year for Carlo Ratti Associati, an Italian architectural firm known for blending man-made construction with natural environments. The company recently unveiled a sophisticated mountain shelter that will soon find its permanent location in the Italian Alps. Now, CRA has collaborated with American creative studio Höweler + Yoon and Italian steel construction company Cimolai on a new experiment. The result of their five-month effort is a 400-square-meter (4,306-sq-ft) floating plaza – AquaPraça.
A simplified prototype was first presented and tested in Venice before traveling all the way to Belém, Brazil, for the UN Climate Change Conference, COP30, where it became part of the Italian Pavilion. The shiny, white, diamond-shaped structure will now be anchored permanently in Guajará Bay in Belém as a gift to the community and a symbol of friendship between the two countries – Italy and Brazil. This project is also a metaphor for balance and sustainability, the creators say.
During the COP30 conference, AquaPraça was presented in its completed form and became one of the key venues, hosting symposia, screenings, and public talks on environmental change for nearly 200 people.
Carlo Ratti Associati
“The project was always conceived as a journey: a structure with many lives. From Venice to Belém as Italy’s pavilion for COP30, and will ultimately remain in the Amazon as permanent cultural infrastructure. This is the essence of circularity – the continual reuse and reinvention over time,” explains Carlo Ratti, co-founder of CRA. “With AquaPraça, we look to the future – exploring how to build with nature, not against it.”
Project leaders shared that the main challenge was completing the pavilion within the tight timeframe: the engineering and architectural teams had just five months to finalize design, complete construction, and integrate all the technological and sustainability features.
AquaPraça is quite spacious and features seating areas, gathering zones in the corners, and an open central perimeter that frames the water below. It is covered by a sloped wide roof, providing a perfect shelter from the hot Brazilian sun or sudden tropical rain.
Carlo Ratti Associati
Guajará Bay is a meeting point of the Amazon River and the Atlantic Ocean, where freshwater and saltwater merge to create a unique powerful ecosystem. But that’s not the main reason it was chosen as a permanent location for AquaPraça. In this area, water levels can shift by up to 4 meters (13 ft) each day, and this is where architecture and nature start truly interacting – just as the creators intended. The floating pavilion employs Archimedes’ principle and follows those shifts by rising and falling accordingly, allowing visitors to have a real, physical experience of the tidal rhythms.
“It’s a platform, both literal and figurative, for deepening our collective understanding and experience of sea level rise and the impacts of climate change on global cities and communities,” says J. Meejin Yoon, co-founder of Höweler + Yoon.
In the future, Aqua Praça will continue serving as an open-air public space for cultural and environment-related events, also reminding visitors of how we can adapt to the challenges of drastic climate change.
Source: Carlo Ratti Associati
