MNMA, transdisciplinary studio.
From the ephemeral to the permanent.

Mariana Schmidt has spent over 10 years making rigorously simple architecture that speaks of sensation, from ephemeral to permanent. Since founding her studio, MNMA, in 2015, Mariana Schmidt has incorporated the earthiness of landscapes into constructions, homes, and interiors in her projects. Her body of work spans a broad range of scales and typologies, from private houses, galleries, buildings, restaurants, furniture. Even her company's name, an abbreviation of the Portuguese word for “minimum,” takes aim at a culture that values maximum scale and complexity, and she tries to privilege instead “the smallest grain of architecture”.

The vision of her work is a place where people experience an instinctive ease and affinity with a physical environment, which is the essence of feeling at home; something as simple simultaneously becomes a piece of art, poetry, and domestic archaeology. Since its creation in 2015, the studio has kept in practice its original approach: environment and design, together, without separation. It is in this transdisciplinary process that different professionals, from architects to visual artists, explore different perspectives, making our design process an exploration of traditional craftsmanship and technology.

We direct our thinking into a state of continual reinvention, allowing design to be the narrative for construction, which in turn consolidates our intentions into a consistent set of relationships, volumes, surfaces, proportions, geometry, and light. The project, be it a large-scale intervention, a building, a house, or a chair, becomes a vehicle for broad ideas about how we live, in order to understand how tangible experiences in contact with our collective memories become lived spaces.