PUBLIC INSTITUTIONAL ARCHITECTURE: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE PROPOSAL OF SEMI-PUBLIC SPACES
public institutional architecture; compact city; urbanity; public space; building-city integration
The research investigates how Brazilian public institutional architecture has responded to the principles of the compact city and urbanity, seeking to understand to what extent such buildings, from their conception, can act as agents of urban space qualification. It is based on the assumption that public buildings, by articulating spaces of transition and coexistence, contribute to the expansion of the collective domain and the strengthening of urban life. The guiding hypothesis is that the recent production of this typology in Brazil has not consistently incorporated the principles that govern compact city and urbanity concepts. The study is structured in two stages: a theoretical-conceptual phase, grounded in a bibliographic review of authors such as Herman Hertzberger, Jan Gehl, Josep M. Montaner, Richard Rogers, and Carlos Alberto Maciel, who propose design strategies aimed at integrating the building with the city; and an empirical phase, focused on case studies of public institutional buildings constructed in Brazil between 2011 and 2020, analyzed through diagrammatic, syntactic, and textual approaches. The resulting diagnosis aims to establish a critical overview of recent institutional architectural production, assessing its adherence to spatial parameters that foster urbanity, and contributing to the theoretical debate on the social role of public architecture in the construction of more integrated and human cities.