Description

The house designed by Angelo Bucci and his team Fernando de Mello Franco, Marta Moreira and Milton Braga in Ribeirão Preto is an interpretation of the courtyard typology that responds to the urban conditions of contemporary Brazilian suburbia. With some 700,000 inhabitants, Ribeirão Preto is a medium-size and relatively affluent city approximately 300 kilometres north-east of São Paulo where temperatures vary between 18°C (winter) and 30°C (summer). The private residence is extroverted and open, in particular because it is is elevated on columns and thus becomes highly visible from the street. Furthermore, the front of the house is fully glazed, which exposes the social areas to the public during the day and, also, at night.

The space underneath the house was treated as a landscape where three elevated gardens, each at a different height, demarcate the access and separate functional areas such as the garage, laundry and general storage. The only habitable volume on ground level is an en suite bedroom for employees located at the rear, below the private quarters. Such a configuration transforms the entrance to the house into a journey that requires people to walk under the living and dining room before going upstairs onto one of the elevated gardens in the courtyard from which it is possible to enter the house. Once inside, the hallway offers two options: on the right is the social area (at front) and to the left are the bedrooms (at the back). The kitchen is the connector between the two parts of the house. This way, the amount of circulation space is minimised and the kitchen can be used unobtrusively from either part of the residence.

At the back, the bathrooms form a cushion – visual as well as acoustic – between the courtyard and the bedrooms which open onto the rear garden. Thus, the volume containing the living and dining room is the only fully transparent part of the house. The immense glass panels slide on both sides of the volume permitting not only views through the living room but, also, cross ventilation on hot days. However, transparency does not preclude surprise; only by moving through the house can the qualities of its different spaces be experienced fully.

In order to free enough headroom for habitation underneath the house, the slender floor slabs and the roof hang from two deep concrete beams that protrude on top of the house. The concrete is exposed both in and outside the house. Only a few concrete elements are painted, the rest is left bare. The bi-chromatic colour palette facilitates spatial legibility and maximises contrast between the man-made elements and the exuberant vegetation that surrounds the house. It can be argued that some areas are over-exposed to the public and that privacy is sacrificed in order to emphasise the structural audacity. On the other hand, it can also be argued that what is lost in privacy is gained in luminosity and spatial fluidity. The house is outward-facing and distinctly exposed; the life of the residents is put on display.

 

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Originally published in: Felipe Hernández, Beyond Modernist Masters. Contemporary Architecture in Latin America, Birkhäuser, 2009.