Living inside a wind tower, in Brazil

In São Miguel do Gostoso, in northeast Brazil, Atelier Matteo Arnone has designed a house that is both a space for ecstatic contemplation of the landscape and a passive machine for capturing the wind. The building stands out in the luxuriant natural setting by the ocean with its clear, essential geometry, composed of an immaculate single-storey parallelepiped base from which a towering trapezoidal brick-clad silhouette rises in the centre. On the ground floor, the base with its perfectly symmetrical layout is eroded into two patios (the access patio to the north, and the more intimate and reserved one, with a swimming pool, to the south), around which the four bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms stand at the corners. 

In the central nucleus, the kitchen, acting as the pivot of community life, visually connects to the peripheral spaces like a domestic panopticon and is connected to the upper levels by a spiral staircase and a hole of visual interconnection in a vertical direction: on the first floor there is a study, on the second the master bedroom and on the roof a bathtub for lyrically abandoning oneself to landscape contemplation.

The planivolumetric system, based on passive design techniques, is designed to capture natural ventilation flows and promote microclimatic well-being while minimising energy expenditure. From the east side, the wind enters the patios and filters into the bedrooms, directed by the curved shape of the walls which softens its impact. In the tower, air is collected at the bottom by the double layer of bricks of the ventilated façade and expelled through the chimney effect from the openings at the top, providing pleasant natural ventilation to the rooms on the various levels.