Casa Luna Llena
This very singular project confronted us to a cultural-social equation: we, Brazilians, São Paulo based architects, got a commission from an American couple living in New York to design a holiday house in José Ignacio, Uruguay.
Starting point was to research the local constructions with the intention to capture common, regional traces.
We found a strong contemporaneity, were unusual volumes slip into the landscape.
José Ignacio houses have José Ignacio style, even in the unpretentious architecture...
We were delighted with the legacy of Eladio Dieste (an Uruguayan engineer by formation, architect honoris causa) and his mastering of brickwork, a material highly popular and widely used in the past.
Our clients, Anne, French-American, determined, enthusiastic, beautiful, great cook, attentive and caring mother of Julian and Max (14 and 15), and Bill, her husband, provided great feedback during the design process.
In our short encounters she expressed her attraction to graphic motifs.
This particular interest led us to splash outdoor spaces with pergolas that, with the movement of the sun, would draw over the large walls an ever-changing graphic design in the form of light and shadow.
View of the pergola.
To the attentive mother who our client showed to be, observer of every movement, we provided a plan with minimum compartments, where the circulation through a walkway that runs along the house exposes their passers.
The architecture transits individual structural solutions with varied materials.
MetaI inserts support the walkway.
The large cantilever ring, that surrounds and connects internally the living room (the central area), to the suites upstairs.
Brick volumes define the four main functional areas that result as a kitchen, dining room and guests suites.
The enormous perpendicular volumes, designed towards the outside and with a single, very high coverage, define the living areas.
The rooms and balconies are linked by two axes, transverse and longitudinal.
The living room.
Detail of the fire place.
The master suite.
The kitchen is huge, a playground for her owner...
...and probably future treat for the family´s guests.
The dinnig room.
In the decision of the primary cladding, we chose to honor Eladio Dieste and dressed up the house with bricks, which accumulated in a large cube resulted antagonistic, a monolithic mosaic, homogenized by the monumental scale of the walls.
Detail of the exterior stairs.
The swimming pool.
The wooden pergolas and terraces that shape the facades explore the cantilevered solutions, except the large span of the west façade, defined by consoles, a more primitive technique.
The encounter of sky and prairie, blue against green, is seen through wide and tall openings directed to the outside, framing within this large voids the typical landscape of the Pampas.
