WindsonFonseca

I was always drawn to German design. The Bauhaus: the bent tubular chair with nothing to spare, the typeface drawn with ruler and compass, the form that never apologizes. I am pixel perfect by nature, so it pulled at me — I wanted to be Jony Ive. Except the people I admire are not the ones who followed a standard, they are the ones who built a path of their own.

And none of them ever walked the dunes of Caueira, in Sergipe. When I looked around, nothing near me had that order. Too much color, too much material, too much pattern. A cauldron. It took me a while to understand the cauldron had a name, and the name was Brazil.

Here we do not have the rigor of process. We have the force to make it happen. While someone weighs the best way to act, we already did it, already got it wrong, and are already on the second version. I only understood the worth of that once I left. I spent four years in Portugal, designing the Portuguese government's vehicle registration system and product for Worten. I delivered all of it — flawless grid, every component in place, nothing off-pattern. And it was correct the way anyone's work would be correct: I could not see myself in it as the author of that work, as a creative. It was from far away that I saw it up close. The people I took as my ruler waited for the perfect tool to begin. The Brazilian starts with the tool at hand. Imperfection is not a flaw, it is proof that someone was there. Error is not failure, it is research happening.

I needed to build my own. Casebre is the record of that process — a revisit to my fascination with the Bauhaus, now run through the materiality and the culture of this place. Not the Bauhaus of the manuals: the Bauhaus of the working-class house. The Brazilian working-class house is the casebre, and that is where the flourish stops being ornament and becomes identity. A table with a plain white cotton cloth will never warm the heart the way the one with flowers in questionable colors does. The first is correct. The second is human — it has the warm hug the first one does not know how to give.

With clients it is the same move. I bring the pixel perfect I learned to love and let it live with the raw material, the color out of place, the workaround that solves. I accept getting it wrong in order to find out, and I build what reflects us. In the end it was never about choosing a side. It is the balance between the rigor that refines and the workaround that creates. Casebre is that house.