24/7 Building

The 24/7 Building reimagines a single downtown tower as a round-the-clock generator of street life, answering a simple problem: the center of Curitiba, Brazil, empties and grows unsafe after dark because its uses and its people disappear at the end of the working day. Designed by Luiza Franceschi, the project sets out to return vitality and continuous, twenty-four-hour activity to the heart of the city by stacking different rhythms of life within one structure.

The tower reads as two buildings in one. From the fifth floor up to the twenty-third floor sit rental offices, where the principal activity unfolds Monday to Friday during commercial hours. Below that band, from the ground plane to the fourth floor, the program shifts to uses that stay open around the clock. The ground floor gathers restaurants, stores, an art gallery, bars and snack bars. The second floor holds a multiuse room and an auditorium, while the third floor is conceived as a flexible service floor, suggested here as a gym but open to almost any function. The fourth floor becomes the building lobby, with art exhibitions, a coffee shop and a bookstore. Escalators tie all of the 24/7 levels together, so visitors can move easily between the public floors.

Mixed use as a tool for urban vitality

This strategy draws on a well-established idea in urban design: that mixed-use development keeps places active by overlapping activities that peak at different times of day. Where a pure office block goes dark at six in the evening, a layered program of culture, retail and dining keeps eyes on the street long after the desks empty. The thinking echoes the writing of urbanists who argued that diversity of use is what makes a street feel safe and alive, rather than relying on policing alone.

For an office tower, the design challenge is to give the workday core its efficient stacked floors while crafting a generous public base that genuinely invites the city in. The 24/7 Building treats that base as the project’s true civic gift, a vertical extension of the sidewalk in Curitiba where someone can read, eat, watch a show or browse art at any hour. Franceschi’s proposal suggests that the cure for a deserted downtown may be less about adding security and more about giving people a reason to stay.