Description

This artist’s home and studio stands in a landscape of coconut palms and tropical plants. Charles Correa was faced with an attractive task: he needed to respond only to the intense green, unhampered by building constraints. He designed a sculptural structure that presents the special feature of the programme to the outside world, that of integrating a studio as well as the living function. Apart from the main building itself, a guest house and two pavilions were to stand along a linear path. After a long approach through the trees the building is entered through a ‘Plaza’ scattered with coarse gravel, a kind of forecourt bounded by the main façade. This wall, a smooth, rendered surface in neutral white, contains the protruding entrance loggia, but above all a pergola-terrace that emerges on the top floor, with a ‘frame’ that connects up with the low walls on the site.

This is the external introduction to the north-facing studio space, which opens up wide with an upward-curving concrete shell. The roof shell and the pergola together produce the different ‘membranes’ of a space for creativity and relaxation on the top floor. The pergola structure seems to maintain the equilibrium of the shell’s dynamics like an elastic band. The living area on the ground floor is linked to the studio by an air space leading to the hall. Here the division into a ‘living house’ and a ‘sleeping house’ can be seen, a subdivision marked by a displacement in the body of the building. The main entrance leads straight into the living and dining area, facing the garden space through large apertures on both sides. The rear section then accommodates the bedrooms and bathrooms. The four areas, living, sleeping, working and relaxing to experience nature, are clearly zoned, but even so they are bound together as an integrated whole, existing in the green space, and coloured inside, but kept entirely white on the outside.

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Originally published in: Klaus-Peter Gast, Living Plans: New Concepts for Advanced Housing, Birkhäuser, 2005.