Webinar | Spaces of Belonging: Hospitality & Community

What does it mean to design a space where people feel they belong? This question framed Architecture Hunter’s webinar, Spaces of Belonging: Hospitality & Community, bringing together Pablo Pérez Palacios, founder of PPAA, and Renata Furlanetto, Director at Studio MK27, for a conversation on architecture as a human act shaped by context, atmosphere, materiality, and time.

Opening the session, Pablo Pérez Palacios reflected on belonging as a central ambition of architecture. For PPAA, every project begins with the relationship between people and their environment, whether natural, urban, domestic, or collective. Drawing from landscapes, informal constructions, self-built structures, and everyday scenes of urban life, Pablo described architecture as something that emerges from climate, culture, use, and human behavior, rather than as an isolated object.

A key idea in his presentation was the value of the unbuilt. Patios, terraces, balconies, gardens, and empty spaces are often what gives architecture meaning. Through houses, hotels, pavilions, and community projects, Pablo showed how these spaces can create moments of encounter, intimacy, openness, and connection. In his view, hospitality is not limited to hotels. It is an attitude toward the user, expressed through privacy, light, ventilation, material choices, thresholds, and details that make a space feel rooted rather than generic.

Renata Furlanetto continued the conversation through the work of Studio MK27, focusing on Patina Maldives as a journey across scales, from masterplan to object design. She situated the studio’s approach within its Brazilian background, shaped by modernist influences, tropical landscapes, natural materials, and a continuous dialogue between interior and exterior. At Studio MK27, architecture, interiors, furniture, art, and atmosphere are understood as parts of the same narrative.

Designing an island in the Maldives required the studio to engage with beauty, fragility, infrastructure, local culture, and operational complexity. Renata described how the project created private resort experiences alongside shared spaces of encounter, including a village-like marina, restaurants, gardens, pathways, pools, and art installations. Behind the project’s apparent simplicity was an extensive technical process involving consultants, prefabricated systems, dry construction, energy, water, and waste strategies.

Together, Pablo and Renata offered two distinct yet complementary perspectives on belonging. In both practices, architecture is defined by its capacity to listen: to climate, culture, material, craft, users, and time. Hospitality becomes an invitation to arrive, stay, connect, and feel part of a place.

_article written by Daniela Moreira da Silva
_speaker 01: Pablo Pérez Palacios [Founder Of PPAA]
_speaker 02: Renata Furlanetto [Director At Studio MK27]