Out Of Sight Sustainable Social Building by Luan Fontes is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2021 Silver A' Design Award in Sustainable Products, Projects and Green Design Competition Category.
SilverSustainable Product· 2021
Out Of Sight Sustainable Social Building
by Luan Fontes
Client: Luan Fontes
Silver A' Design Award Winner in Sustainable Product Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #118459The Design
About Out Of Sight Sustainable Social Building
Out Of Sight is a social building project designed for Friars Island in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The project uses forty two twenty foot shipping containers treated with thermal insulation, forming a built area of 620 square metres. The containers house a dance school that previously operated beside the neighbouring church and three emergency social homes for local residents. A steel structural system was chosen to keep the construction light, safe and quick to build. The design follows the existing topography and supports access to culture and decent housing.
The Recognition
About the Silver A' Design Award
Out Of Sight Sustainable Social Building is a Silver A' Design Award winner, an extraordinarily prestigious recognition granted to top-of-the-line, gorgeous, and impressive designs. Silver winners are tremendously brilliant and exceedingly creative works that illustrate the outstanding expertise, talent, and acuity of their designers. Out Of Sight Sustainable Social Building is expected to be a wonderful, showpiece work that is remarkably professional and profoundly innovative. This Silver A' Design Award-winning design is a highly notable, admired invention that benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Out Of Sight Sustainable Social Building is a vastly envied creation that evokes desires, introduces positive feelings, and sparks amazement and wonderment.
Where to Get It
Climate-Adaptive Architecture Design Services
We offer sustainable architecture consultation specializing in climate resilience and social impact. Our award-winning approach combines environmental responsibility with community needs, creating spaces that serve vulnerable populations while advancing sustainability. From emergency housing to adaptive reuse, we bring innovative solutions to complex challenges.
Learn MoreInterviews
Grand Interview
Your innovative approach to combining emergency social housing with a dance school in Out Of Sight Sustainable Social Building reflects deep community understanding - could you elaborate on how this dual-purpose concept emerged from the needs of Friars Island residents?
The dual-purpose concept emerged from a moment of contradiction observed on Friars Island. On one hand, families were facing housing precarity due to climate events and infrastructure fragility. On the other, the local dance school was one of the few remaining collective institutions actively transmitting culture, discipline, and belonging across generations. Rather than prioritizing one need over the other, the project reframed both as interdependent. Emergency housing without social infrastructure often becomes isolating and stigmatizing, while cultural spaces without housing security risk disappearing entirely. By integrating both programs, the building creates daily overlap between stability and expression, ensuring that emergency conditions do not suspend cultural life. This approach was informed by community conversations, informal site observations, and the understanding that resilience on the island is as much cultural and social as it is physical.
The use of 42 containers in Out Of Sight Sustainable Social Building creates a striking 620-square-meter space - what inspired your decision to utilize shipping containers as the primary building material for this sustainable social project?
The decision to use shipping containers was driven by a combination of logistical realism and architectural intent. Friars Island has limited access, constrained construction windows, and high vulnerability to material delays. Containers offered a globally standardized system that could be transported, stacked, and assembled quickly with predictable performance. Beyond pragmatics, their industrial origin allowed the project to deliberately contrast fragility and strength. The containers act as a protective shell for vulnerable populations, while their modular repetition establishes order and clarity. The choice was also ethical: using existing containers reduced material extraction and embodied carbon while enabling a level of structural efficiency that traditional construction methods on the island could not match within the same timeframe or budget.
How does Out Of Sight Sustainable Social Building's design specifically address the challenges of preserving the bucolic environment of Friars Island while providing essential infrastructure for the local community?
Preserving the bucolic environment of Friars Island required resisting the temptation to overbuild or aestheticize the landscape. The project responds by concentrating volume rather than dispersing it, maintaining large portions of open ground and existing vegetation untouched. The linear configuration reduces fragmentation of the site and allows natural drainage, wind paths, and views to remain intact. Height and massing were carefully calibrated to sit below dominant natural and historical landmarks. Rather than mimicking rural forms, the building adopts a restrained, infrastructural presence that avoids romanticization while remaining respectful. This approach ensures that the island’s character is not diluted by development but supported by discreet, essential architecture.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- The place chosen for the implantation was the Frades Island, in Rio de Janeiro. The project was thought during 6 months, with an estimated execution of 4 months. It was proposed the insertion of 42 conteneirs to meet 2 needs: a dance school that previously operated in spaces adjacent to the church and 3 emergency social housing, which would serve as temporary shelter for the residents, always having on mind the necessity of a fast and accessible construction, with materials of easy insertion.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- it was proposed the insertion of 42 conteneirs of 20 foot treated with thermal insulation, totaling a space built of 620 m to meet two needs: a dance school that previously operated in spaces adjacent to the church and three emergency social housing, which would serve as temporary shelter for the residents, always having on mind the necessity of a fast and accessible construction, with materials of easy insertion on the local.
- Tags
- #sustainable, #socialhousing, #socialdesign, #emergencyhouse, #danceschool
- Production Technology
- In order to achieve the objective of keeping the construction light, practical, safe and environmentally friendly, it was chosen to use steel as a constructive system. Thus, in order to reduce the construction and removal time of buildings, it is seen in the container structures a way to solve the most urgent problems of the residents totaling a space built of 620m.
- Design Challenge
- The biggest difficulty of the project was to combine the short period of time of conception and execution, the low budget and the difficult one reaches the place. Also the motivating challenge of designing a 100% sustainable building.
- Research
- Their project aims to respect the limits of the existing topography, tracing the axis of the street parallel to the neighboring building, a church dating from the 18th century, within the limits of the unified lots, taking advantage, above all, of the space in which it had been the stage of small tenements belonging to the local religious. The project as a whole, together with the political local movements, warns about the need for government and society care towards the remaining population of Ilha dos Frades, especially the right to access to culture and decent housing.
- Inspiration
- The lack of infrastructure, dissemination and planning, make it difficult to explore its potential for ecotourism and research. As a consequence, their entire social, political and economic base is deeply damaged. It is noted that the region has a clear need for requalification of the infrastructures present in the city, which respect the environment, as already mentioned, the creation of new equipment that regains the feeling of belonging of the population that gave life to that region.
- Project Duration
- The project had a conception time of 6 months and aims to be executed in 4 months. It is located in the northen area of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. Specifically, on Friars Island.
- Operation Flow
- The project, together with the political local movements, warns about the need for government/society care towards the remaining population of Frades Island, especially the right to access to culture and decent housing. It comes as a conversation topic the importance of the ancestral preservation, through the generations of families that since the 19th century have been there, whom thanks to the project would continue to inhabit the place and mitigate, therefore, the effects of gentrification.
- Team Members
- Luan Fontes.
Mariela Salgado - Image Credits
- Student: Luan Fontes.
Academic Advisor: Mariela Salgado.
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