Read in:
Dimensions of an Idea
Carla Juaçaba and Marina Oba in conversation
Groundwork, a three-part film and exhibition series presented at the CCA from May 2024 to September 2025, looks to new critical modes of engagement and shifting methodological approaches to understand architecture as an open process shaped by a multiplicity of stories and collaborators.
Speaking to Marina Oba about With an Acre, the third chapter in the Groundwork series, Carla Juaçaba describes her work with Flor de Café, a collective of smallhold farmers in Minas Gerais. Juaçaba is working with the collective’s founder Milena Rodrigues to conceive of a museum and community space that aims to support local coffee producers, merging agrotourism, education, and regenerative agriculture and reforestation. The pavilion, whose physical structure will leave a minimal trace on the earth, is a way to bring to light the interconnectedness of Brazilian history and coffee production, ultimately setting a vision for the future of the territory.
Filming of With an Acre, 2025. Photograph by Julian Moura-Busquets © Julian Moura-Busquets
- Marina Oba
- The motivation for this conversation is your participation in the CCA’s Groundwork project, together with Milena Rodrigues and Flor de Café. I had the pleasure of seeing an early preview of the documentary With an Acre that is part of the Groundwork series, and it is evident that your involvement with the project and the people is very strong. I want to start this conversation by asking how this type of collective engagement influences the project? Is the objective different when it involves not just an institution as a client, but an institution with such a horizontal hierarchy, one that is so concerned with participation?
- Carla Juaçaba
- I’ve had different experiences with different clients and situations, but I always think this is something I do for others. Architecture is not for oneself, but for others. I’ve felt this even more strongly in this case because Milena is an incredible person. She has worked with the farmers for years; I have not. She has been transformational in the lives of generations of farmers, who are now aware that they should have their own product instead of selling it like they used to, and that they should create their own value. She is thinking about the education of children, and she is also thinking about the museum. The museum is rooted in her idea of retelling the history of Brazil through the history of coffee, which is the story of the destruction of our forests, but it is also going to be a living museum about biodiversity.
She has a very strong environmental conscience. She has been working with Sebastião Salgado’s NGO, Instituto Terra, to recover forests in parallel with coffee farming, based on the understanding that there should be a balance between the needs of the forest and those of coffee farming. This should be made into law. They are dreaming of a future in which it is understood that, even though we need to plant, we need preservation just as much, to ensure the quality of the soil and of nature itself. So this project was born from her ideas, it’s a way to give shape to them. We have said this a few times, but it feels like giving a dimension to Milena’s dreams. It was very hard, as she is a big dreamer. She started off with a gigantic plan, as it was still imaginary. She was even thinking about a place for people to stay over, to sleep. Over time, we’ve found manageable dimensions. We started years ago, and then everything stopped with the pandemic. We both had children, there was the pandemic, and a bunch of devastating things happened, like a ruined harvest. Anyway, life went on and things happened as they needed to happen, but I think the project has grown stronger because of her.
Filming of With an Acre, 2025. Photograph by Julian Moura-Busquets © Julian Moura-Busquets
- MO
- I imagine that distance was also a challenge. It is challenging to work on a project that lasts for a lifetime, that extends through time, but that is also distant in terms of its territoriality. Is it different to work on a project from far away?
- CJ
- No, I no longer see that as a problem for any project. As long as you can visit, get to know the people and their wishes, get to know the place, get to know the builder, get to know everything. You don’t need to live next door to a project, and that also goes for the people working with me. My colleague Isabele lives in Rio, I’m here in Paris, and the work is over there. Things happen in slow motion in architecture. It takes years. Naturally, I want to be present when construction starts, but I’ve already met the builder, and he happens to be a very good engineer. That makes me feel like I am on firmer, more secure ground. I don’t think it is necessary to live close to work nowadays.
- MO
- In the end, distance can also help by broadening the ways in which we can interact with others.
- CJ
- It ends up being just as lively. I think we learned how to work remotely in the pandemic, and proved that it was possible—actually, this was the only positive lesson coming from the pandemic. That is what it comes down to. In the end, the project is always about the client, that’s why I’m there. But now there’s also an economic dimension to it. It’s one thing to work on a project benefiting from different types of support; it’s quite another to work on a project that doesn’t yet have any support in place. Regardless of who ends up supporting the construction, it’s never going to be someone in power. We designed this project to be modest in terms of cost and dimensions. It will be very cheap in the end.
- MO
- The documentary also shows this tension you mentioned about transitioning from the scope of your project to investigating how to make it happen. Milena is very involved. We can see that it has taken a long time. The process of making it feasible and trying to understand how it’s going to work takes time, but it’s always like this in architecture. Sometimes it may take a lifetime to make it viable. As an architect, how do you deal with this? Because architecture is a sequence of attempts at making projects viable, a series of failures and successes.
- CJ
- As an architect, I avoid having expectations about anything. If something is meant to happen, it will happen, otherwise it wasn’t meant to be. However, I think this project will materialize, as a lot of people want it to happen, and there is momentum behind it. Then there’s this beautiful thing that is being promoted: many women work in the coffee industry, and it raises the status of working women. There are many social causes being addressed as well, such as education. We are going to create a space for coffee tasting there, so it can become part of the agronomy tourism circuit. There is such a thing, so that will bring people there. But what will make the building feel alive are the other activities that will take place there. The building needs to be alive to work well. Without life, it won’t work.
Filming of With an Acre, 2025. Photograph by Julian Moura-Busquets © Julian Moura-Busquets
Filming of With an Acre, 2025. Photograph by Julian Moura-Busquets © Julian Moura-Busquets
- MO
- I think the documentary shows that very well and in a curious way, because it is not how we’re used to seeing architecture. The architectural object isn’t there. The architectural plans, the ways in which we usually represent architecture… we don’t see them. However, we see it happening in a different way, through the involvement of these people, almost like a meta-narrative that touches on various aspects of architecture without showing the results themselves. That is very interesting. If we were to think about your work, you do the same from within architecture. You bring in references from art, drama, and literature, and you use architecture to talk about them. So I wanted to ask you, which texts or art can we find in this project that aren’t shown in the documentary, but can still be understood in a certain way? What references have influenced the project?
- CJ
- There are always many things. The person who made me think the most about architecture was Peter Brook, a theatre director, because he was constantly thinking about space and the act of making, including how theatres themselves have changed, even inside his plays. One of his books is called The Empty Space, but there are several others, besides the plays themselves. His work in the theatre, the question of how he uses space and builds a language with very few elements, a language that is symbolic but not minimalist, has touched me deeply. These are very different things; minimalism can feel very empty, while Peter Brook’s language is full of meaning: he can combine two pieces of bamboo together and make them into a forest, or maybe a cross. I think that architecture as a discipline needs to be more interdisciplinary so it can return to itself. It should visit geography and then come back, visit drama and then come back. It needs to be more contaminated by other disciplines. I began to see my discipline in a different way. For instance, I’ve been trying to look at it through the eyes of a biologist, to understand how that perspective may interact with our work.
- MO
- And how did that begin? Was this something that was already present when you were in architecture school? Were you thinking about this because of your background as a student, or because of school?
- CJ
- Maybe so, because many of my teachers were also visual artists. It was all very messy, but at the end of the day you were allowed to experiment a lot. The school was already like that and maybe that was why I was able to fit in; maybe I would not have been able to adapt to a more traditional type of architecture school. After school I went to work with Gisela Magalhães, a member of the Niemeyer generation. At the time, she was doing exhibition design for museums in Brazil, rethinking the history of Brazil that was told in the museums and redoing their designs. I worked with that for many years, because I wasn’t really interested in architecture itself, or in the idea of the permanence of something. I think this is still with me, because many of my projects have been temporary: the Chapel at the Venice Biennale was dismantled, the Copacabana Pavilion was dismantled, some of the houses no longer exist… The building for the coffee project that is the subject of With an Acre is meant to last for many years, but it is somewhat fragile. It will only last if it is lived in and looked after, because it’s made of eucalyptus. In short, there’s something ephemeral about it.
Filming of With an Acre, 2025. Photograph by Julian Moura-Busquets © Julian Moura-Busquets
Filming of With an Acre, 2025. Photograph by Julian Moura-Busquets © Julian Moura-Busquets
- MO
- I followed your work at Mendrisio, and in one of the studios you propose, you reference Aílton Krenak’s notion of treading gently on the earth. This can also be seen in Flor de Café, and is reflected in its few points of support, or in the fact that it is a lightweight structure that requires little foundation work.
- CJ
- That’s true. The way it touches the ground, there are few connections between the foundations. Initially we planned to include several, but we discarded most of them (other than some complex elements) not because they looked good or bad, but because they would make construction more complex and therefore more expensive. We kept removing complex connections and making everything more economical. By economical I mean savings in terms of both costs and actions. When there are fewer actions involved, it becomes more economical.
- MO
- It brings together many things: there is the idea of the ephemeral, the economy of time and money, and the fact that it is reminiscent of scenography, where you need to install, uninstall, change, and transform things. Does this also impact the design tools that you use?
- CJ
- I became interested in texts written by biologists and geographers, the issues they address, and the fact that you need to think before designing or working on a plan. Figuring out the place and the context is a big part of the job. And they start from the ground up. Hence the point made by Krenak of treading gently on the ground. You’ve got to start by understanding the soil, where it comes from, how it was transformed, where the water comes from. Then, you start studying the land. We learn a lot through research. I have become more environmentally aware than I was before. For instance, biodiversity is not only about trees; it’s also about the soil. The work starts with the soil, the land, the environmental issues. It requires us to understand the need to invert the standard order, so that landscaping comes first, followed by architecture. I mean landscaping as an understanding of the water, of a plot of land, its biodiversity…
Deep down, everything is connected. It’s all there. We need to visit other disciplines to understand our surroundings so that this issue gains strength, even political strength, and becomes law. From one end of Minas Gerais to the other, there are thousands of green corridors uninterrupted by cultivated land. They generate humidity and biodiversity, and therefore lead to better crops. It’s interesting how everything is connected.
Filming of With an Acre, 2025. Photograph by Julian Moura-Busquets © Julian Moura-Busquets
- MO
- I think that architecture in rural areas has been growing stronger, but we have done very little work on it. There are few references to architectural work in rural areas.
- CJ
- You’re right. That’s interesting, because of course Milena is there in Minas Gerais planning this project, full of very beautiful dreams. But as you travel to Nepomuceno from the airport, you start to see so many needs, which are not basic, but are related to other wants and desires. This is an exercise that has to start in schools: if architecture schools left their urban focus aside and got out of their urban context for a while, they would see that a whole range of programs exist out there. It would be great for the students. It’s hard to leave the modernist mode of thinking, but I think that this younger generation is not accepting things as they are anymore. They are coming with different answers and different designs.
- MO
- There is also a sense of urgency that is arising today in a much stronger way. Going back to Krenak, he writes about the concept of ancestrality. His ideas are very architectural, and he writes about the importance of visualizing scenarios of other urbanities, or other possibilities of construction. He argues that the exercise should be to imagine another world, not think about the developments of this same world. This sounds to me like a potential architectural exercise and practice of imagining other worlds. But referring back to what you mentioned in the beginning, how do we set the dimensions of this dream, and how do we deal with the responsibility of dreaming feasible or possible dreams?
- CJ
- Exactly. I remember when I was interviewing to become a professor at Mendrisio, Anne Lacaton was a member of the jury. She asked: what is economy to you? I found the question very interesting, because economy is not about costs. Maybe it’s about a broad understanding of what economy means, something that goes beyond the limits of the word itself. What does economy of gestures, of actions, of materials, or of values mean? To this day, I still think about how broad that question is.
