Raphael Wittmann trained as an architect at the Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie in São Paulo, where his final degree project centred on the Casa da Música — a choice that already pointed toward an architecture understood as sensory experience rather than image. After graduating in 2009, he extended his training with a postgraduate degree in business administration at FIA-USP, adding a strategic and managerial dimension that today also shapes the way he runs his practice.
His early professional years took him to the Museu da Casa Brasileira in São Paulo, where he coordinated the education team, to Chile for a collaborative architecture book project, and to the curatorial committee of the VI Ibero-American Architecture Biennial — experiences that built a broad perspective, equally attentive to the project and to its cultural and disciplinary context.
In 2013 he founded RAWI Arquitetura + Design in the Jardim Paulistano neighbourhood of São Paulo, where the studio has been based ever since. His practice is rooted in the tradition of São Paulo architectural thought and in the city’s brutalist legacy: an architecture in which the plastic force of structural volumes and the honest expression of materials organise space and produce that play of light and shadow that gives it character and density.
Over more than a decade, RAWI has developed over eighty residential and commercial projects across São Paulo and other Brazilian states, working at different scales — from new-build architecture to interior projects, from furniture design to broader territorial interventions. Concrete, steel, brick, stone, timber and glass are the studio’s habitual materials, handled with directness and without artifice.
Sustainability is part of the design process from the outset: material selection, waste management, photovoltaic energy, rainwater harvesting and natural ventilation are variables the studio integrates as part of a considered position on the relationship between architecture and its environment.
Wittmann understands form as the outcome of a process of listening, reflection and drawing. An architecture that takes shape through use, asserts itself in matter, and endures over time.