Pavilion House / idsp arquitetos

Pavilion House / idsp arquitetos

+ 39

Text description provided by the architects. The site on which the project is implemented is characterized by the remarkable presence of a tree massif with vegetation of different sizes and varieties. Previously, it housed the party and social room of the allotment in which it is located, leaving some stones of this history as an inheritance, complemented and regrouped, reorganizing and preparing the territory to accommodate a new house. It has a slight slope to the northeast, towards a permanent preservation area that contains a lake, floodplain, and large native trees, contiguous to the site. The beauty of the site determined the project and the house developed itself in an intimate relationship with the topography and landscape.

In order to place the house at the height of the treetops, promoting daily contact with the flora and fauna present there, a stone podium was designed that guards a technical area and accommodates a small pool whose shape fits the corner of the lot and bears a certain resemblance to a weir present in the vicinity of the land. On top of this geometric, trapezoidal block, the upper, shapeless piece rests, slides, and bends like a megalithic formation, so present in our rural areas. In “Adjacent, Against, Upon”, Michael Heizer seems to have used this playful game. 

To the north, in the social area, the conventional structural logic is inverted in which reinforced concrete acts in compression and wood in traction, proposing slender glue-laminated wood (MLC) pillars as support for a “tent” of reinforced concrete, “stretched” in front of the green. The pillars, while emulating the verticality of the trunks of nearby trees, reproduce the elementary of the rural structures that originated the allotment. Its orderly and rigorous repetition is reminiscent of the Caryatids, now faceless and made of pine. To the west, it updates and subverts the ‘São Paulo’s porch’, replacing the chapel with a library, which invites the pleasure of reading and researching. To the east, in search of the light of the rising sun that comes filtered through the massive tree at the bottom of the lot, two tubes are launched, looking for it. At this moment, Jorge Oteiza’s “Laboratory of Tizas” and some of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Imaginary Beings” come to mind.

The work seeks to fit in like a prosthesis in the landscape: it fits into the void left by the trees. It makes naturally but doesn’t try to mimic the complexity of nature. Geometrize it. On an ambiguous scale, the small and fragmented building is perhaps more than a refuge and perhaps less than what is expected of a house, taking on a ‘pavilion’ character – a covered space surrounded by extensions – like those that (still) exist in the surroundings of the cities of São Paulo.

Designed shortly after the re-reading of Drummond’s “O Constante Dialogo”, it captures the atmosphere of the poem, in a kind of ‘materic translation’, in an exercise of direct communication with the context, nature, cultural heritage, and ancestry, while at the same time beckoning to the future. A pavilion-house to learn from the flight of the birds, the wind in the leaves, and the “movement” of the sun, moon, and stars. A work in constant dialogue, in times when it is increasingly necessary.

“The Constant Dialogue”
There are so many dialogues.
Dialogue with the beloved one

                   the similar
                   the different
                   the indifferent
                   the opposite
                   the opponent
                   the deaf-mute
                   the possessed
                   the irrational
                   the vegetable
                   the mineral
                   the nameless

dialogue with yourself
                   with the night
                   the stars
                   The dead
                   the ideas
                   the dream
                   the past
                   the more than future

Choose your dialogue
                           and
your best word
                         or
your best silence.

Even in the silence and with the silence
we dialogue.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, in ‘Discurso de Primavera e algumas sombras ‘ (1977)