Melo Alves by MNMA studio

Mariana Schmidt has spent over a decade creating rigorously simple architecture that speaks of sensation, from ephemeral to permanent. Since founding MNMA in 2015, she has incorporated the earthiness of landscapes into construction homes, and interiors. Her work spans a wide range of scales – from private houses to galleries, buildings, restaurants, and furniture.

Even the studio’s name, an abbreviation of the Portuguese word for “minimum,” signals a refusal of excess, privileging instead “the smallest grain of architecture.” Her vision is to offer spaces where people experience instinctive ease with their environment – the essence of feeling at home – where simplicity becomes art, poetry, and domestic archaeology. MNMA maintains its founding principle: environment and design as one. In this transdisciplinary process, architects and artists explore traditional craft and technology, reinventing forms where geometry, light, and material consolidate into lived spaces that carry collective memory.