A living infrastructure

In the city of São Paulo, where contemporaneity is able to perform the most extraordinary urban contrasts, living can reveal an encouraging condition. In search of a place where this could be experienced, the idea of an elementary residence acquires the character of a happening. Such is the case with Terra e Tuma Arquitetos Associados' Maracanã House, a residence that decided to silently place itself in the western metropolitan meanders, in Maracanã street.

The surfaces that define the volume's geometry — opaque in grayish materiality, clear in glass surfaces or vibrant on the access mural — show their presence like a new event in the bucolic surroundings, where curious people wonder about this new construction. Its discordant geometry in relation to the traditional houses of the neighbourhood surprises by concealing all territorial definition, becoming an element and as a public event, and taking possession of the street, allowing it to be perceived. Through the occupation of the entirety of the available lot, the house shares its limits, internalising the surroundings and thus creating its unique place.

More than a space, the volume levels gradually from a path through which outside and inside are merged in a proper and continuous shape. The house discovers new possibilities in the limitations of the confined plot, with a complexity exceeding horizontal and vertical routes, leading invariably to a new spacial experience, and elucidating singularities of the neighbourhood's geography.

Being in the house of Maracanã street is being in the Lapa neighbourhood and live together with its peculiarities, in the expectation of discovering till where its spaces can lead us, while gazing over the neighbouring red roofs and overlooking the church façade that crowns the district, while the sunset illuminates São Paulo's horizon.

Entering the house doesn't mean to close off the city into a disconnected universe. The dwelling's entrance access has to be discovered behind the ceramic murals painted in compositions of black, white and red. Entering the house leads to the transposition of a succession of spaces, from narrow, to light-filled, to shaded, which leads the visitor constantly to new experiences.

One arrives to the house from the void, which allows an immediate perception of the living space and an identification of its functional sections : social spaces and services below, private spaces on the first floow. Like in city streets, the light between spaces illuminates every direction, through large glass openings set against the solidity of the concrete materiality that composes the house.

Which way does one arrive, pass, and go? Through the space, through the emptiness. Walking around and staying, that's how the house's extension is discovered. We can find ourselves immersed in its lower floor, defined by concrete surfaces, the gardens and the backyard, which shape the environment, or we can go through vertically until the gliding plan of the roof unveils the sky in a special instant leaving us as observers of the city.

The house is a living infrastructure. The pavement, configuring a succession of perspectives, is subtly protected by the presence of big glass frames. The handling of the technique and a minimal use of materials — in their essence, stones upon stones —, confirm that architecture can undress present temporary superficialities and elevate only the spacial essence.

Thus speaks the house's specific nature. Perhaps it is programmed, like most human intentions, but also unpredictable as any of them. The Maracanã house hangs in the lives of its residents: by gatherings owners and visitors, or by isolating moments that allow for silent retreats. Life also dwells in this house: in the encounters between individuals who perceive it as a fragment of space, or in magical discoveries of a sort of unrevealed territory — as in the cat that lurks between the angles of the building, or in the races of the children with their toys who inadvertently discover a new corner here and there.

The indefinite is opened up: after all, the house also speaks and lives. Its rigid walls transpire into the interior the rainwater that flows down its external surfaces; mixed shrubs grow in a natural fabric, covering the concrete's dryness; winds enter the space shaped by the movement of curtains; and finally, light, the great unveiler.

The shelter, the protection of the fundamental, understanding the nature that the house inhabits and the sense it assumes, for those who are witnesses. Nothing more is needed for the contemporaneous city living. Here is the fundamental residence, unique and revealed. Daniel Corsi