RHI Magnesita

The company has unparalleled geographic diversification, with more than 14,000 employees across 35 main production units and over 70 sales offices, serving more than 10,000 clients in nearly every country around the world, with approximately 2.7 billion euros in annual revenue.

RHI Magnesita invests more than any other competitor in production and delivers innovation every year through two R&D centers in Leoben (Austria) and Contagem (Brazil). The Contagem unit, with its laboratory and pilot plant dedicated to mineral processing studies, will now have a new building to house the headquarters office, with capacity for 640 employees across 4 floors totaling 2,572 m².

The design strategy of our project is quite simple yet imposing: a parallelepiped with a central void (garden), featuring more closed (protected) external façades and more open (transparent) internal ones.

From the outside, a large box (approximately 80 m long × 36 m wide × 15 m high) “floats” above a base ranging from 2.5 m to 5.3 m in height (built with refractory blocks produced by RHI itself). The volume is clad with metal panels, with floor-to-ceiling vertical openings (60 cm wide × 320 cm high) arranged rhythmically and staggered along each floor’s façade, providing privacy and shielding the interior from the harsh East-West solar exposure.

Inside, the workspaces open fully to the central void through floor-to-ceiling glass frames, closing the spans from column to column. In this void, lush landscaping—strategically interspersing small plazas, pathways, and outdoor seating areas—creates a sort of oasis with an extremely pleasant microclimate within the context of Contagem’s Industrial City.

Three staggered walkways (3.8 m wide × 16 m long) connect the East and West wings of the floors above the ground-floor garden as if they were bridges, forming outdoor decompression areas suspended above the central courtyard.

In the basement, there are 128 parking spaces, locker rooms, and bicycle racks, with access from the North façade. The ground floor, accessed from the West façade, has a ceiling height of 4.50 m and houses the reception, exhibition area, café, auditorium, meeting rooms, restrooms, and additional open-plan workspaces, with direct access to the internal courtyard. The upper floors have a ceiling height of 3.20 m and accommodate open-plan work areas in the East and West wings, interspersed with informal meeting and lounge spaces, while the formal meeting rooms are positioned in the North and South wings, in front of the vertical circulation cores, offering a pleasant view of the central garden.

Circulation flows are clear, the structure is modular, the spaces are flexible, and the materials are few, standardized, and industrial, with exposed installations and structure. Visual communication, lighting, furniture, and landscaping complement and integrate the spaces harmoniously and in a humanized way.

Finally, we highlight the use of refractories on the base façade surrounding the entire building, lifting the volume clad in metal panels, anchoring the building to the ground, and turning the Headquarters itself into a kind of “display” of RHI Magnesita’s products. This same strategy extends into the interior of the building, covering the floors of the reception, showroom, foyer, café, and central courtyard.