WILD LOVE
ROGUE KNOWLEDGE
HANDCRAFTED
Between one space and another there is always a third one
People think this house took too long to get done. 7 years in the making. Some philosophers of holistic and exoteric sciences still believe it is impossible to have a baby in less than 9 months (well, they are still working out some other ways). A house, if it is to be really designed bit by bit, room by room, window by window, corner by corner… passionately designed in every detail to the point it becomes a work of art in itself (if architecture were to be one day acknowledged as art, at all) has to be built in, at least, 29 years minimum. Ara’s São Paulo urban villa was done in record timing. We are still amazed by how fast it was done. This is an object akin to Curzio Malaparte’s dictum: “A house like me”. This "me" here is this mysterious character in between the one who designs and the one who asks for the designer. They are both the two sides of the Janus-faced art of collaborative design (we would go as far as to say that there were multiple others in between, many more authors, from distant ghostly apparitions of past modernist masters to everyday family members – too much opinionated figures).
At a certain point, we decided to draw a house around a copy of the American bar designed by Loos a hundred years ago (or shall we just re-build Niemeyer’s Maison du Bal instead of Loos’ bar?). After this Steiner-septennium, the bar vanished from the invisible, never to be found empty centered, but left the whole castle built around it. It sounds like a method, but it wasn’t followed like a path traced beforehand by old masters. One sees this house today and cannot trace back to which clear reference, to which clear school or to which clear source it was wrought out of. It looks sometimes as if we lost control and let a palimpsest get in charge. Copy-Paste is no easy game to play, but some scholars believe there’s no other way for architecture to work itself out. Some avant-gardists are trying non-referential or parametric approaches. We opted for a literary based technique of getting to do more complex when the problem required simplicity and to go ultra-simple when the matter was of utmost complexity. No, this is not an ironical mea-culpa, this is just brutal honesty. We work like this. Go brutal, go honest (which means irony and mea-culpa all the way and at every step of the way).
To put it in another way: we went for a path in-between Plan libre and Raumplan. This is 21st century, isn’t it? Some passersby believed the house was the ugliest one in a street famous for having other masterpieces in it. Abelardo de Souza, Tito Lívio, Marcio Kogan, to name a few. They are just wrong, full stop. This is a beautiful house like no other. A lost paradise. This is not us saying it, but Vogue magazine couldn’t control its anxiety and published the house twice in less than 6 months, overseas. The house is the sexiest designed object to live in that you will ever see. The contrast of bare concrete walls and structure, wooden details and some black and white architectural ornaments with the colorful taste of Sabrina and Ara for interior design, fittings and furniture made it a vintage blend true to its epoch. Cliché: the cornerstone ethos of our time.