Namoradeira

Ruy Ohtake and Etel Carmona, longtime friends, had always planned a collaboration focused on reissuing the architect’s iconic design pieces. In 2024, this collaboration came to fruition with ETEL during ABERTO3.

Ruy Ohtake’s early design creations were integrated into architectural contexts, where the needs of the projects guided the conception of the pieces. In these cases, concrete was often used, and despite its aesthetic alignment with brutalist projects, it had an inherent rigidity that imposed a fixed presence in the space.

The Namoradeira was one of Ruy Ohtake’s first works to transcend the demands of a specific architectural project. At this stage, Ruy began creating design pieces based on the properties of the materials he sought to explore rather than focusing exclusively on programmatic and site-specific issues typical of architectural projects. In 1996, these pieces were presented as a series at the Nara Roesler Gallery. At that time, Ruy started to explore the malleability of metal. Despite its weight, metal offers spatial flexibility and a lightness of form that other materials cannot provide. Thus, the piece was conceived as a unique 6 mm carbon steel creation, representing an exploratory exercise that had never been commercially produced before.

Ruy always had a special affection for the Namoradeira, an emblematic piece that dates back to the Brazilian colonial period and once held a prominent place in homes of that era. Before exploring metal, the architect had already developed several pieces in concrete.