An austere concrete wall screens the transparent lower floor of this house in southern Brazil, while the overhanging upper storey is masked behind a layer of timber slats (photos by Leonardo Finotti + slideshow).
Designed by MAPA, an architecture collective based in Brazil and Uruguay, XAN House is a summer residence located near the beach in Xangrilá, a small town south of Porto Alegre.
The ground floor is dedicated to the family’s communal activities while the upstairs level contains bedrooms, and the architects chose to highlight this difference through the use of different external materials.
A single-storey concrete wall stretches across the site, from the north-west to the south-east, screening the ground floor from the street. Behind it, the rest of the walls feature floor-to-ceiling glazing that allows residents to open their living spaces out to the landscape.
“A summer house is a space full of freedom, a place to enjoy an outdoor life,” said the architect. “This fact conditioned the way the project was faced.”
The positioning of furniture divides the space up into different zones for cooking, dining, reading and relaxing. The ceiling overhead is exposed concrete, while the floor is covered with tiles that continue outside the walls.
Upstairs, large balconies extend the length of the floor, creating overhangs that shelter both the front entrance and a rear patio. One balcony belongs to the master bedroom and en suite, while the other sits alongside two smaller bedrooms.
Both balconies and rooms are surrounded by the timber screen, but sections of it fold open to reveal windows.
This reflective metal-clad box containing a restaurant rises like a periscope above a small shopping complex in São Paulo by French-Brazilian architecture office Triptyque (+ slideshow).
Triptyque was asked to create a building that incorporates three shops, a bar, an art gallery and a restaurant with a VIP room, and decided to locate the latter inside a cantilevered metal box called the Observatory.
“Located in a street where the buildings are next to each other, the Observatory is not a stage in addition, it is a building on a building, the city on the city,” said the architects. “It opens a new dimension of growth straddling the shopping complex and overlooking the Oscar Freire neighbourhood of São Paulo.”
The reflective top-floor structure appears to hover above the rest of the three-storey building and is supported by a series of columns that reach to the ground level.
Stainless steel panels covering the exterior of the Observatory create distorted reflections of the surrounding streetscape, which can be seen up close from the open terrace on the storey below.
At street level, customers enter three shops contained in narrow units arranged in a staggered formation that step back from the pavement of the Rua Oscar Freire.
The restaurant’s main space is housed on the first floor, with the kitchens above and a lift providing access to the VIP room at the top of the building. A ramp leads from the street down to the basement level, which houses parking and services for the building.
Triptyque based the multi-storey arrangement of the complex on the Spatial City theory developed in 1959 by Hungarian-born French architect Yona Friedman, who imagined inhabitable structures raised on piles to free up space below.
“It is an artificial topography composed of megacities above ground responding to the problem of rapid population growth in large urban areas in the world,” said the architects.
The architecture agency Triptyque was commissioned to design a complex in São Paulo with three shops, a restaurant, a bar and an art gallery. The shops should have access to the city while the restaurant had to be housed in the upper floors.
The complex was designed as a binary metal structure: a “ground” level that receives the shops, and a “space” level called “the Observatory” which houses the restaurant where the group of Franco- Brazilian restaurateurs Chez Group has created its new meeting place: Chez Oscar.
Located on a street where the buildings are next to each other, the observatory is not a stage in addition, it is a building on a building, the city on the city. It opens a new dimension of growth spanning the shopping complex and overlooking the Oscar Freire neighbourhood of São Paulo.
Massive and cubic volume, the observatory is balanced on an asymmetric structure which imparts kinetic and operates a disruption between the street level and spatial scale effect. Completely covered with stainless steel, reflections are distorted and blurred over time and tropical storms.
In this design, the architects of the agency Triptych were strongly inspired by the concept of the space city of Yona Friedman created in 1959. It is an artificial topography composed of mega cities aboveground responding to the problem of rapid population growth in large urban areas in the world. It draws a three-dimensional city that multiplies the original surface of the city with elevated planes, and thus created a new map of the territory.
The building The Observatory Oscar Freire grasps architecture as a dynamic form, between materiality and potentiality, open to users interaction as well as environmental conditions. It was inaugurated in October 2013.
Project : Freud/Oscar Freire Localisation : R. Oscar Freire 1128, 1134, 1138 e 1142, Jardins São Paulo Start of project (year): 2010 Delivery (year): 2012 Surface: 675 sqm Built surface: 1400 sqm
A square wall covered in plants announces the presence of this concrete housing block in São Paulo by Brazilian architecture studio TACOA (photos by Leonardo Finotti + slideshow).
Entitled Vila Aspicuelta, the terrace of eight compact houses sits perpendicular to the adjacent street, but its north-facing end wall provides a growing area for a variety of bushy plants and shrubs.
Rodrigo Cerviño Lopez and Fernando Falcon of TACOA chose to plan the building as a series of maisonettes rather than as a simple housing block, meaning that each residence would have more than one floor and its own private access.
“The eight houses that compose Vila Aphins challenge the logic of vertical buildings: the different units are disposed side by side horizontally, and function vertically,” said the architects.
The building is raised off the ground to create parking spaces at ground level. Eight separate concrete staircases lead up to each of the residences, creating a zigzagging volume along the western edge of the block.
The first floor of every house is a living area with a kitchen counter and enough space for a dining table.
A second row of staircases leads up to bedrooms and bathrooms on the next level up, while a third set of stairs ascends to private gardens on the roof.
Wooden screens cover a wall of windows in the bedroom and bathroom of each home, but fold back to reveal a row of balconies at the rear.
The east-facing orientation of these windows ensures that the houses are filled with sunlight in the mornings but are shaded during hot afternoons.
The eight houses that compose Vila Aphins challenge the logic of vertical buildings: the different units are disposed side by side horizontally, and function vertically.
The street continues through the villa, partially covered by the building, and gives access to the staircase of each individual unit. The parking lot, gardens and common areas are also placed on this street.
On the first floor of every house, one single area provides space for the kitchen, dining and living. The second floor was conceptualised as a private area, a bedroom with a balcony and garden and a bathroom. Finally, on the rooftop, an open air plaza is set, with individual spaces.
The eastern orientation of the villa enables the houses to enjoy sunny mornings, shady afternoons and crossed ventilation. The western facade hosts the access stairs of the houses and unifies all the units, providing the vila its wavy project identity.
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