The house with lungs

“The house has the space and volume to breathe the landscape in, and foster symbiotic relationships between humans and their surroundings.”

The house with lungs.The Architectural Review House18.03.24

Photography - Pedro Kok

Jaguariúna means ‘the river of the black jaguars’ in the Tupi language. Located an hour and a half’s drive from the urban jungle of São Paulo, this quiet town is surrounded by rolling hills of croplands and areas of forest, home to animals such as toucans and capuchin monkeys. Nearby is Holambra – a contraction of Holland, America and Brazil – a post-Second World War settlement of Catholic Dutch farmers that has become the largest producer of flowers and ornamental plants in Latin America. Tropical summers bring frequent rainstorms and high humidity, with peak temperatures of up to 35°C.

The clients, who owned a plot with a fazenda (farm house), commissioned Sao Paulo-based architects Andrade Morettin to redesign a home that has ‘better contact with nature’. Project architect Marcelo Morettin describes the original house as ‘big, but very closed off, where you couldn’t see the landscape’. Instead, he wanted to design a home where ‘even from the inside, you would feel you are outside at the same time’.

The original fazenda was a single-storey, red-brick structure with a eucalyptus-timber frame and a red-tile pitched roof that extended over a veranda on the south side. The porch overlooked the swimming pool below, with views extending further downhill into an array of trees. The old house was demolished; only the long retaining stone wall was kept to separate the expanded terrace from the garden’s steep drop.

The new RF Residence is a two-storey glass box nestled within a frame of glued laminated timber, or glulam. At the centre of the plan is a double-height living space that opens onto a dining area and kitchen to the east. To the south and west, the living space is wrapped by the L-shaped terrace; large glass panels encased in aluminium frames slide open to connect the two, allowing family meals and conversations to ignore boundaries between inside and outside.

The glulam frame extends out, topped by a light steel structure that holds a polycarbonate roof to provide shelter and shade on the terrace. Light filters down via the translucent polycarbonate, while the large sliding doors offer passive airflow, inviting air to circulate through the house and moderate high summer temperatures.

Andrade Morettin’s use of industrial materials and, in this particular house, the oversized glulam frame, confer the building with a sense of generosity and open-endedness. The house has the space and volume to breathe the landscape in, and foster symbiotic relationships between humans and their surroundings.