CFQ — Espaço Q

Por estar localizado em uma avenida pública, o pavilhão foi tratado como arquitetura, e não como decoração. A ALGAZAL//CO foi responsável pelo projeto técnico, pela instalação e pela documentação — incluindo o memorial de segurança contra incêndio, que classificou a estrutura como temporária para reuniões públicas, considerando capacidade, distâncias de fuga, afastamento do edifício vizinho, acabamentos e extintores. A produção foi realizada em parceria com a Cenoldeias.

extintores01. The Challenge

Brazil's Federal Council of Chemistry wanted to take chemistry out of the laboratory and put it on the street. Not in a museum, not at a trade fair, but on Avenida Paulista — the most crowded, most photographed avenue in São Paulo, where nobody stops unless something makes them.

The occasion was National Chemist Day and the 150th anniversary of the periodic table. The site was number 1230, on the forecourt of Shopping Cidade São Paulo. The brief came through the agency B Marketing with a hard frame around it: a structure that had to be designed, approved, built, opened and taken down again inside a single month.

02. The Solution

A cube. Roughly 9.5 by 9.5 metres and 4.5 metres high — 100 m² standing on the avenue — framed in Q30 box truss, wrapped in canvas, with a white laminated floor and a backlit entrance mark that made it read from across the street before anyone could read the words. The colour came from bismuth, the element whose crystals iridesce: a real bismuth crystal sat at the entrance, with a holographic projection above it repeating the same crystal at impossible scale.

Inside, five themed stations — the body and its chemical reactions, green chemistry, the chemical industries, the professionals, and food and drink. Printed walls carrying the content, counters with glass domes for objects, screens on freestanding totems, an iPad station, a low stage for the daily science shows, vinyl cubes suspended on metal tubes, and twenty-five poufs for the people who decided to stay. An interactive periodic table replaced the symbols with everyday things: a banana for potassium, a lightbulb for argon, a fire extinguisher for bismuth. One entrance, one exit, never more than ten metres from the door.

Because it stood on a public avenue, the pavilion was treated as architecture, not decoration. ALGAZAL//CO signed the project and the execution, and produced the fire-safety memorial classifying it as a temporary public-assembly structure — capacity, escape distances, clearance from the neighbouring building, finishes, extinguishers. Production was delivered with CenoIdeias.

03. The Results

Assembled in five days, between 13 and 17 June 2019. Open to the public for twelve, from 19 to 30 June, ten in the morning to ten at night, free entry. Dismantled on 30 June, the day it closed.

20,520 people came through — roughly two a minute — among them 1,635 students from 27 public schools. The Ciência em Show group ran three full-capacity demonstrations a day on the small stage, and Iberê Thenório, of Manual do Mundo, spent a day inside with visitors.

For twelve days, a chemistry lesson stood on Avenida Paulista.

04. Press and resources

• Avenida Paulista recebe espaço interativo sobre conceitos da Química — Revista Galileu
• Mais de 20 mil pessoas visitaram o Espaço Q em São Paulo — CFQ
• Espaço Q é oportunidade para desmistificar os conceitos da Química — CFQ
• Espaço Q e Ciência em Show, uma experiência que deu “química” — CFQ
• Tabela periódica interativa ajuda a entender os elementos químicos — CFQ
• Química Verde presente no Espaço Q — CFQ
• Cubo gigante leva os conceitos da Química para a Avenida Paulista — Química.com.br
• Cubo de bismuto gigante na Paulista — Promoview
• Tabela periódica interativa do Espaço Q — online version

São Paulo, Brazil. 2019. For the CFQ/CRQ system.