Pier House
Mamanguá Residence (Pier House) is a weekend residence for a young couple of sailors.
For the only 60 m2, the architects proposed two distinct interconnected volumes: one vertical, containing the bedroom, the kitchen and bathrooms –whitewashed, with doors and windows of wooden mashrabiya. The other block, horizontal, was done with wooden structure and closing metal tiles, and can be used both as a garage for the boat and as a living room for its residents.
Located in a plot of land that falls in the direction of the sea, with a surface that is predominantly covered by native vegetation, the construction was adapted to the existing clearings and plateaus and is characterized by a group of independent volumes articulated by a common pathway. The Pier House represents the first stage of placement. It’s the inhabited area that touches the sea, a central maritime infrastructure required to establish people in the site.
The building has two parts that are articulated and fit between the existing trees and rocks. The first part is vertical and uses the different levels of the site to equate circulation. The other part is horizontal and integrated with the sea, forming a wide and flexible space. These volumes have their counterpoint stressed by the building techniques used in each of them, which were chosen with the objective of meeting the demands of the program.
The social and “functional” space is wide and flexible. This programmatic fusion of the living area with the place to store the boat (which is used most part of the year) reduced considerably the size of the built area lessening the impact caused by the construction. The roof of this place is made with mobile latticework that promotes its connection with the surroundings in a natural and intrinsic way. This is due to the ramp that enters the sea and to the monumental landscape that enters the room. The design was based on simple elements, demanding as little technique as possible, in order to create a lightweight and opened structure that could be assembled by the builder artisan based on tailor-made pieces made of wood and metal/polymers.
