RUINED HOUSE
The ruined house is located on the outskirts of the city of Itupeva, 80km from São Paulo, in a farm from the 19th century. We were asked to renovate a colonial stone ruin and turn it into two residences for local residents.
But how to inhabit a ruin?
Before, we would say that it is an abandoned building, but from the moment we consider that it is taken over by other habitability, such as that of plants, we ask ourselves if we could not build starting from them, that is, with a design action that makes an architecture resurge with the ruin.
The presence of a century-old rubber tree with its aerial roots located right in front of the ruin, guided the construction of a central void, which functions as a patio between two autonomous houses.
To turn the ruin into a shelter, the action was to create the necessary conditions for a roof, taking advantage of the existing structure. Thus, we defined a stone wall height that would mark a horizontality and, based on that, we built a mooring strap. In this way, we consolidated the walls, making them a large base on which to rest a wooden roof with eucalyptus trees taken from the surrounding trees.
This duality between the weight of the stone and the lightness of the wood is also reinforced by the counterpoint between the opaque walls that divide and the roofs with openings that approximate. In other words, like a cloud over a mountain.
