boxes for working /
when he starts to develop institutional projects, flores keeps
presenting closed boxes, but this time discusses other concepts and deepens more sophisticated researches about materials and construction technologies, including solutions for saving energy that advance debates about sustainability that today are almost ordinary. the headquarters of companhia brasileira de metalur- gia e mineração (1984), built in são paulo, is a box with steel structure, supported on stilts, closed with a double glass skin, whose interstice is taken up by a garden that controls tempera- ture in such a way as to provide considerable energy savings. called to design the moreira salles building, headquarters of unibanco in poços de caldas, minas gerais, that should occupy the lot where the family had installed its first commercial venture, the architect ponders: “after becoming aware of the history and visiting the site i felt an inmense responsibility: it was not question of doing a bank but of doing a monument”. the classical formation of the modern architect does not allow for confusion between a building and a monument, when the three closed and piled boxes that make up the project are imposed on the landscape with their solidity dressed in granite and the challenging lightness of the big cantilevers.