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Architects: FGMF
- Area: 485 m²
- Year: 2020
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Photographs:Israel Gollino e Fran Parente
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Lead Architects: Fernando Forte, Lourenço Gimenes, Rodrigo Marcondes Ferraz
Text description provided by the architects. The Casa Subtração is located in the high-end residential condominium Quinta da Baroneza, in Bragança Paulista, just 90 kilometers from the city of São Paulo. The residence, designed for a couple and their teenage son, was strategically implanted on a square lot, taking advantage of the slightly sloping topography and offering a generous view. The concern of the FGMF architects in preserving the visual led to the decision to excavate the ground in the central area, thus creating an underground with an illuminated courtyard, garage, and garden at street level, raising the house about the ground.
When approaching this project, the architects decided to challenge the prevailing logic in their work, derived from the São Paulo school from which they originate, the structural conception as the creator of space. Therefore, they opted for a strategy uncommon to FGMF's works: starting from the theoretical conception of two elevated exposed concrete planes, occupying the entire possible portion of the land, respecting setbacks and other applicable regulations in the location. With these dimensions, they studied various occupation diagrams of the house, with social areas, intimate areas, leisure areas, and services, until finding the organization that seemed most suitable.
From this "occupation" between planes, they studied various cutouts in the upper and lower plane, creating walkways, voids where underground gardens cross the construction, and light openings, but always preserving the limits of the original planes - hence the name subtraction that baptizes the residence, as it was a work of suppression, of cutting out the planes. After this spatial and aesthetic conception, the structure was launched, in a non-regular way, creating a non-Cartesian support, although efficient. With this fine organization, most of the environments integrate with external terraces, providing an intimate connection with the surrounding nature. The rooms and bathrooms, in turn, are like small white boxes fitted between the slabs, offering a striking contrast.
The pronounced horizontality of the project is skillfully balanced by strategically positioned voids in the horizontal planes, designed in a mismatched way and associated with the stairs. These voids not only provide multiple views, but also encourage visual contact among the people in the house, whether in the living room, in the pool, or in the garage garden, where the local vegetation grows and occupies part of the voids. The office emphasizes that the challenge was to make a conventional program assume an appearance far from the ordinary, and the result is a synthetic house, with a compact internal area to the expansive external area.
Constructed with cast-in-place reinforced concrete, the residence features polished concrete finishes on the floor and white-painted masonry, giving it a modernist and minimalist aesthetic at the same time. The pool, strategically positioned on the first slab, is the only element that breaks the rigidity of the edges of the organizing planes of the party, and reflects light softly, like a break in the predominance of exposed concrete, adding a touch of serenity to the environment. The landscaping, considered by the architects as an essential element of architecture, is integrated from the beginning, complementing and structuring the internal and external spaces.
